First Tuesday in Advent

Isaiah 11:1-10; Psalm 72:1-8; Luke 10:21-24

When the seventy return with reports of miracles, Jesus exclaims: “Blessed are the eyes that see what you see!  For I tell you that many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it.”  It is a blessing to see and hear signs of God at work.

And yet Isaiah promises a Messiah who will “not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear” (Isaiah 11:3).  Rather, judgment will flow from righteousness and equity.  It seems that what the Messiah needs is within rather than without.

Jesus rejoices that his disciples have seen and performed miracles, that they have seen what God can do.  But the deeper joy is to know ourselves in union with God, to know that “your names are written in heaven” (Luke 10:20).  The deeper promise is to find that part of us that knows God, knows the truth, knows love; and, finding it, to live from there.

This does not mean abandoning the world or retreating to private refuge.  Knowing God means seeing all that we are capable to doing to one another without losing sight of God.  We use our eyes and ears, but the reign of God works in the spaces in between and beneath what we see and hear in that way.  

I expect that when the seventy performed those miracles, many witnesses did not see miracles.  They explained them away as coincidence, or they denied or ignored them, because seeing them would complicate their lives.  Seeing as the seventy saw means letting the world be messy, bigger than my understanding.  It means hoping in the face of persistent reasons to despair, standing in the light of Christ without denying the reality of sin and death.  We do not see only through our eyes, we do not hear only through our ears; we see and hear through the stand we take and the choices we make about what is real and what matters.

What do you see and hear today?