Seeing with the Eyes of Faith

Although every new human life is an incomparable marvel worthy of God’s praise, Joseph and Mary had more reason to marvel than any other set of parents in the history of the world. This child born to Mary was already revealed as special. Angels had visited both Joseph and Mary separately, the conception itself was a once-in-a-lifetime divine miracle, and shepherds had been summoned on the very night of the birth after having witnessed incredible evidence in the Bethlehem sky.

Imagine these parents watching Simeon holding their defenseless, helpless, and utterly dependent son and hearing even more magnificent things prophesied over him. Even though Mary and Joseph knew this child was special, I am sure it still struck them each new time to consider that a world-changing promise could be planned for someone who at that moment was as weak and vulnerable as any other newborn.

When Jesus as a young boy later got separated from his family on the way back from Jerusalem, and as any parent today might be able to testify, Joseph and Mary scolded Jesus probably out of a panicked concern that He might have lost their needed parental protection forever. Parents are accustomed to thinking of themselves as the saviors of their children, not the other way around. It is also difficult for parents to ever stop being parents and to adjust to their children as grown, fully capable adults. How much more would that be the case of being the parents and relatives of Jesus the Messiah.

We know that Jesus’s family later struggled to accept that the boy who grew up in the same way as every other male they knew was not losing his sanity in claiming divine authority for himself (Mark 6:4). Even seeing was not always believing. It is difficult for anyone to see past their natural expectations about other people, especially members of their own family.

Long before this, cloaked in Mary’s squirming newborn only eight days old, whose eyes could barely open and who could do little more than cry, sleep, eat, and expel was the supernal promise of a new future and a better world for all mankind. To believe that a whole nation’s future—nay, the whole world—could be written in the destiny of a single child may have been Israel’s messianic hope but it would require the spiritual eyes of faith to see Him.

The advent season forces us to ponder from so many angles how the glory of God is veiled in what seems common, ordinary, or easily dismissed. This is a lesson we are constantly relearning, because we are always prone to see without really seeing, to stop at what our senses can see and not to understand with the soul and the eyes of faith.  

Prayer

Father, too often I believe only what I can see with my physical eyes, whether about people or circumstances. The truth of Your Son’s incarnation and coming from heaven in true human form—even as a squirrely newborn—reminds me never to rely only on what I perceive is possible and probable, but that with You all things are possible and potential.

Give me the spiritual eyes to have faith beyond what is immediately seen and to look for and see Your extraordinary glory veiled even in what seems ordinary. I humbly confess the limitations of my own power and knowledge, but I glorify You for Your limitless strength and wisdom.

Amen.