Look or See

A Woman in a Hospital Corridor

Here is a scene, made up but familiar. A woman stands in a hospital corridor in Lagos holding an X ray up to the fluorescent light. The doctor has already spoken to her and gone to his next patient. Her sister has called twice and she hasn’t picked up. She keeps holding the film, though she can’t read it, and what she’s really doing is something the plastic can’t help with. She is deciding what she believes about her own life.

Everyone who passes that corridor can look at the same grey rectangle. Only she has to decide what she sees in it.

I think this is the oldest argument in Scripture, and it has very little to do with eyesight. From the garden, where a woman looked at fruit and didn’t see the death inside it, to a hill outside Jerusalem, where soldiers looked at a dying man and didn’t see the Judge of the earth, the Bible keeps making one uncomfortable claim. Two people can stand in the same spot, take in the same facts through the same eyes, and walk away having met two different realities.

It helps to remember how ordinary eyes work. They gather light and send signals to the brain, and the brain turns the signals into a picture. Two people with perfect vision can be handed the same picture and read it differently, because what they bring to it differs. A farmer and a surveyor look at the same field and see two things. Nobody calls either of them a liar.

Looking belongs to biology. Seeing is something God has to give. And a good part of the Christian faith rests on the conviction that he cares more about the second than the first.

Picture another scene, equally made up. A lecturer in a Nigerian university puts a slide on the screen, one photograph of a sunrise over a river. A student in the third row writes down the time of day. The student beside her writes down a question about who made the river. The slide is the same and the room is the same. Something happens between the eye and the mind that the projector doesn’t control.

Two Verbs and a Wide Gap

Looking is cheap. It costs a working eye and nothing else. A man can look at a bank statement, a result sheet, a wedding ring, a burning bush or a cross and register only data. Looking answers one question, which is what is physically in front of me.

Seeing costs more, because it asks what the thing means, and meaning is never neutral. It makes a claim on whoever receives it. Perhaps that’s why the Bible so rarely asks its characters what they are looking at. Again and again it asks them what they see.

The young Jeremiah, trembling under a job he never applied for, gets exactly that question.

“And the word of the Lord came to me, saying, ‘Jeremiah, what do you see?’ And I said, ‘I see an almond branch.’ Then the Lord said to me, ‘You have seen well, for I am watching over my word to perform it.’”

— Jeremiah 1:11 to 12 (ESV)

An almond branch is nothing special. It is one of the first trees to flower in the year, ordinary enough that a boy could pass a hundred of them on the way to the well. But in Hebrew the word for almond sounds almost exactly like the word for watching, and that connection can’t be seen. It can only be given. The question wasn’t about eyesight at all. God was finding out whether the young man could receive a meaning the branch could never produce on its own.

The prophets keep working this way. Amos is shown a plumb line and a basket of summer fruit, and each one is explained to him. Zechariah sees lampstands and flying scrolls and has an angel beside him to say what they are. None of them was praised for sharp eyes. They were commended, or corrected, for what they did with the thing once it was in front of them.

People Who Stood in the Same Place

Scripture keeps an almost embarrassing record of people who stood directly in front of the truth and missed it.

Balaam, a prophet by trade, was riding along when his donkey stopped dead and refused to move. He beat the animal three times, sure it was being stubborn. In the road stood an angel of the Lord with a drawn sword, and the donkey could see him and the professional could not. The story is in Numbers 22, and I’m always grateful that the writer tells it without apology. A donkey outperformed a prophet that day, and Scripture uses the joke to make a serious point about credentials and sight.

Then there were the twelve scouts sent into Canaan. All twelve crossed the same river and walked the same hills. All twelve stood under the same walls and carried home the same enormous cluster of grapes. Ten came back talking about giants. Two, Joshua and Caleb, came back talking about a land that God had already given. The facts were identical. The reports weren’t, because ten men read the evidence through their fear and two read it through the character of God. Faith, on this telling, doesn’t deny hard facts. It refuses to let hard facts have the last word over a promise.

And there was a man at the Jordan, watching a crowd gather to see a carpenter’s son from Galilee wade into the river. Most of that crowd saw Mary’s boy. John saw something else, and said so aloud, calling him the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29). Nothing about the scene had changed. Only the perception had.

What God Looks At

This isn’t a human theory about how to read ambiguous signs. It starts with God. When Samuel went to anoint Israel’s next king, he took one look at Eliab, the eldest and tallest of Jesse’s sons, and assumed the search was over.

“But the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.’”

— 1 Samuel 16:7 (ESV)

Man looks and God sees. A great deal of the Bible reads like commentary on that contrast. In the opening scene of Job, the accuser appears before God with a report built entirely on what can be observed. Job is prosperous, Job is protected, there’s a hedge around his house. God’s testimony about Job rests on something the accuser’s report never touched, a man who fears God and turns from evil.

Anyone who has sat through a Nigerian church service knows the warning in its everyday form. A preacher says, often with a smile, that a big testimony isn’t automatically a sign of God’s favour, and that a well polished exterior can sit beside a heart that has quietly wandered. The congregation says amen, and then looks at the man in the front row with the best suit. Even the amens need the question God asked Samuel.

Two Answers From Nigerian Soil

Chinua Achebe’s novel Arrow of God is set among the Igbo people at the point where British power is arriving. Its chief priest, Ezeulu, sends one of his sons to the missionaries to learn what they know. His reasoning is summed up in a saying that Nigerian readers recognise at once.

“The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well you do not stand in one place.”

— Achebe, Arrow of God (1964)

Whatever one makes of Ezeulu’s plan (it goes badly wrong, and the son becomes a zealot who wants to kill a sacred python), the saying itself is sound. A single fixed viewpoint gives a partial picture, and a partial picture taken for the whole is a kind of blindness that looks like certainty. Nobody needed a Western classroom to arrive at it. It’s African wisdom in its own right, and it sits close to what Scripture says about looking from one angle and calling it seeing.

Achebe’s world also never treated the unseen as a side issue. In Things Fall Apart he writes that “The land of the living was not far removed from the domain of the ancestors.” Many nineteenth century missionaries heard that kind of talk and decided it was superstition to be corrected. Yet the Bible they carried has a heavenly council in Job, rulers contending over nations in Daniel, and a war in Ephesians fought against powers in the heavenly places. On this one point the African instinct that the visible world is thin was closer to the pages of Scripture than the tidy rationalism that arrived with some of the missionaries.

Then there is the other side of the same history. In 1821 a Yoruba boy called Ajayi was captured and sold, and a British naval patrol intercepted the ship that was carrying him and put him ashore in Sierra Leone. He was baptised in 1825 with the name Samuel Crowther, and in 1864 he was consecrated a bishop, the first African bishop in the Church of England (Dictionary of African Christian Biography, n.d.; EBSCO, n.d.). He translated the Bible and liturgies into Yoruba, and he led a mission on the Niger staffed largely by Africans. Later, younger European missionaries challenged that arrangement and took control of his diocese. His society reprimanded him, and most of his African pastors were dismissed.

Look at what the evidence was. Crowther’s learning, his translations and his office were all in plain sight. The people who removed him were looking straight at them. They could see an African with a bishop’s authority, and some of them could not see a brother in Christ. Looking, again, was cheaper than seeing. Prejudice works the way spiritual blindness always works in the Bible, by letting a person stand in front of overwhelming evidence and stay unconvinced.

I owe honesty to the other side too. The same warmth toward the unseen that gives African Christianity much of its life can be bent into something the old believers would hardly recognise. Prayer, once a costly wrestling before a holy God, is sold by the sachet. A handkerchief soaked in oil is offered like a subscription. A private jet is called a sign. None of that is African wisdom. It is a counterfeit that borrows African dress, and it confuses looking prosperous with seeing God.

The Disciple Who Saw Only Defeat

The sharpest example in the Gospels is Simon Peter, who loved Jesus more visibly than any of the others and still got the difference between looking and seeing exactly backwards.

Jesus had just told his disciples plainly that he was going to Jerusalem to suffer and die. Peter took him aside and told him it must never happen (Matthew 16:22). To Peter the cross meant defeat, and he said so out of love. Jesus, in the same conversation, saw the redemption of the world folded inside the same instrument. His reply was sharp because the stakes of misperception were so high; he told Peter his mind was set on the things of men and not of God (Matthew 16:23).

Peter had devotion to spare. What he lacked was sight, and he had company. Two disciples would later walk to Emmaus describing the week’s events in complete despair to a stranger who was the risen Christ, and they didn’t know him until he broke bread. Mary Magdalene stood outside an empty tomb weeping, and took the Lord for the gardener. Neither group was lazy or dishonest. Their grief had already told them what the world looked like, and the world had to say it twice before they listened.

Most of us have mistaken a closed door for an ending. We’ve read a delayed visa, a failed interview or a long silence as God’s last word, when it was the hinge on which the next thing turned. I can’t promise it always is. But Peter’s story warns us how confidently a loving person can be wrong about what he’s looking at. And Jesus’ response to Peter holds out a hope as well as a rebuke, because the man he called a hindrance on Monday became the man who preached on the day of Pentecost. Sight can be given to the slowest of us.

One Hill and Several Verdicts

Which brings us back to the hill outside Jerusalem, the hardest test of the whole argument.

Thousands of people looked at the crucifixion of Jesus. Soldiers looked, and so did religious leaders and passersby, and his mother. The conclusions they drew from one public scene went in every direction. Some saw a criminal getting overdue justice, and some a failed revolutionary. One of the two men crucified beside him, in the middle of his own agony, saw a King and asked to be remembered when his kingdom came. And a Roman centurion, a man paid to execute rebels without sentiment, looked at the same body.

“And when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, ‘Truly this man was the Son of God!’”

— Mark 15:39 (ESV)

The evidence was the same for everyone standing there. The perceptions weren’t. I think that’s the most important fact an honest apologist has to reckon with, and it leads to an uncomfortable conclusion. We tend to say that we understood the cross and then believed. The Gospels tell it the other way. The ones who believed had been given sight before belief had a chance to form.

Why Evidence Alone Has Never Been Enough

A lot of apologetics, including some I’ve admired, proceeds as if unbelief were a shortage of information. One more argument, one more archaeological find, one more neat proof, and the sceptic will tip over into faith. Scripture is more sobering. Jesus raised Lazarus in front of a crowd, and the religious leaders who heard about it began to plot his death. Paul gives the diagnosis in plain terms, saying that the god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers so that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ (2 Corinthians 4:4).

C. S. Lewis, who spent his life defending the reasonableness of Christianity, knew that reasonableness is not the same as sight. Of his own faith he wrote that he believed in Christianity “as I believe that the Sun has risen”, and gave his reason in a second clause, that it was “not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else” (Lewis, 1949). Christianity, in his picture, isn’t one more object lit by a torch. It is the light the other objects are seen by. Evidence matters, and nobody here is arguing otherwise. But evidence needs an eye that can receive it, and that eye isn’t made by effort. It is opened by grace.

This changes what apologetics is for. When your cousin in Ibadan shrugs at the best argument you have, or a colleague at work listens politely and goes home unmoved, your work isn’t finished at the argument. It continues as intercession. You stand beside them and ask God to do what he did for Elisha’s frightened servant, who looked out at an army surrounding the city and saw only doom.

“Then Elisha prayed and said, ‘O Lord, please open his eyes that he may see.’ So the Lord opened the eyes of the young man, and he saw, and behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha.”

— 2 Kings 6:17 (ESV)

The horses and chariots had been there all along. What changed was what the servant could perceive. Elisha, notice, didn’t ask for the army to arrive. He asked for the servant to see the one that was already there, and the difference between those two requests is most of the Christian life.

What God Sees Before It Exists

There’s one more layer, and it belongs to how God himself speaks. Paul says of the God of Abraham that he calls into existence the things that do not exist (Romans 4:17). Nobody should hear in that a licence to manifest wealth by repeating a sentence. It describes a God whose sight already reaches the end of the story. He called Abraham the father of many nations while Abraham was still childless. He greeted Gideon, hiding in a winepress to thresh wheat for fear of raiders, as a mighty man of valour (Judges 6:11 to 12). God’s declarations aren’t wishful thinking in religious dress. They are the ordinary speech of someone who can already see how it ends.

An Invitation to Ask for Sight

So here is the question God has been asking since a young man stood before an almond branch he didn’t yet understand. He has never asked what you are looking at. He asks what you see.

When you look at your weakness, do you see only weakness, or the strength Paul says is made perfect there? When you look at the diagnosis, the delayed visa, the failed interview and the empty account, do you see only absence? Faith doesn’t ask you to lie about the X ray. It asks you not to hand the X ray the final word. The world looks at a grave and calls it the full stop. The church looks at the same grave and reads a comma, because on the third day that grave became the loudest witness in history to the difference between looking and seeing.

Go back for a moment to the woman in the corridor. I can’t tell you what she saw in that film, and I can’t tell you what she decided. I can tell you what the Bible would ask her, gently, as the Lord asked Jeremiah. What the doctor has said, which she must take seriously, and also who is watching over her while she holds it. Faith won’t change the shadow on the plastic. It may change who is standing beside her in the corridor.

I’d like to suggest something small. Take the psalmist’s prayer and make it yours for a week, in the words you’d actually use. Open my eyes. Not the ones in my face, the ones behind them. Pray it over the one situation you’ve already decided you understand. And then pray it for one particular person who has heard every argument and still can’t see. You may find that the answer comes more slowly than you’d like. The servant at Dothan didn’t see the chariots until somebody asked.

References

Biblical References

Psalm 119:18 (ESV). The epigraph and the closing prayer, asking God to give sight.
Jeremiah 1:11 to 12 (ESV). God’s question, “what do you see”, and the almond branch, the opening pattern of the argument.
1 Samuel 16:7 (ESV). The contrast between how man looks and how the Lord looks, used as the root of the whole argument.
Mark 15:39 (ESV). The centurion at the cross, one witness among many on the same hill.
2 Kings 6:17 (ESV). Elisha’s prayer for his servant, the model for intercession as apologetics.
Numbers 22; Judges 6:11 to 12; John 1:29; Matthew 16:22 to 23; 2 Corinthians 4:4; Romans 4:17. Referred to without direct quotation, for Balaam’s donkey, John at the Jordan, Peter’s rebuke of Jesus, the blinding of unbelievers, and God calling things into being. Also referred to in passing: Numbers 13; Amos 7 and 8; Zechariah 4 and 5; Job 1; Luke 24; John 11 and 20; Acts 2; 2 Kings 6:13.

Other Sources

Achebe, C. (1958). Things fall apart. William Heinemann. (Quoted from chapter 13, confirmed at https://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/engl_258/Lecture%20Notes/key_quotes.htm)
Achebe, C. (1964). Arrow of God. William Heinemann. (Quotation confirmed through the EBSCO Research Starters entry below.)
Dictionary of African Christian Biography. (n.d.). Crowther, Samuel Ajayi. https://dacb.org/stories/nigeria/crowther1-samuel/
EBSCO. (n.d.). Arrow of God by Chinua Achebe. EBSCO Research Starters. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/literature-and-writing/arrow-god-chinua-achebe
EBSCO. (n.d.). Samuel Ajayi Crowther. EBSCO Research Starters. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/samuel-ajayi-crowther/
Lewis, C. S. (1949). Is theology poetry? In The weight of glory and other addresses. Macmillan. (Address delivered 1944.)

Translation Notices

Scripture quotations are from the ESV Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version), copyright 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.