Turn Your Eyes
Jean-Francois Millet, The Angelus, 1857
Want to change your life? Want to find hope even in the midst of the suffering you are going through, the suffering you also witness daily throughout the world. I have a plan, actually not mine but St. Paul’s. It may sound a little naïve at first, disconnected from real world stuff, but think on this with me for a minute.
Here’s the plan:
12 Put on, then, garments that suit God’s chosen and beloved people: compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience. 13 Be tolerant with one another and forgiving, if any of you has cause for complaint: you must forgive as the Lord forgave you. 14 Finally, to bind everything together and complete the whole, there must be love. 15 Let Christ’s peace be arbiter in your decisions, the peace to which you were called as members of a single body. Always be thankful. 16 Let the gospel of Christ dwell among you in all its richness; teach and instruct one another with all the wisdom it gives you. With psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, sing from the heart in gratitude to God. 17 Let every word and action, everything you do, be in the name of the Lord Jesus, and give thanks through him to God the Father. Colossians 3:12-17
N. T. Wright calls this one of the most significant statements on character formation ever written. But what, we may ask in our day, does character formation have to do with finding hope in our suffering? And how could it have anything to do with our desire to change our hurting world?
I remember speaking to a group of student leaders about how we might go about becoming people like this. Can you imagine, I asked them, how our lives, and even our world, might change if we could make progress living up to our calling as God’s people?
In the discussion, one bright, young woman raised her hand and asked: “I get it, Dr. Eaton, this is the way I want to live too, but I am applying for med school right now, and I am told it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, that I will have to promote myself with all my strength, or I will get run over, pushed to the margins. I may have to give up my aspirations to become a doctor.”
This set me on my heals a bit, at least sent me back for more thinking. Her question is real world stuff. Whatever I was proposing must speak into a real world. There is a world out there that doesn’t give a wit about these ideals. In fact we have created a culture that pushes hard to focus everything on ourselves, our own achievement, our self-sufficiency.
As I look at this list—compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, forgiveness, and most of all love—I find an emptying out of those powerful ego-needs. I sense that Paul knows that pursuing these goals will turn our lives upside down. Idealistic though it seems this morning with all its turmoil, Paul proposes changing our lives, our families, our communities, our organizations, our churches, yes, changing the world, by becoming these transformed people.
As I read more deeply here, I notice this is not another self-help list, another to-do list. Paul is not banking on us changing ourselves by trying harder. The key to the whole thing is letting “the gospel of Christ dwell among you in all its richness.” I was reminded, simple though it seems, of that hymn I sang as a child and growing up:
Turn your eyes upon Jesus
Look full in his wonderful face
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim
In the light of his glory and grace
Is turning our eyes upon Jesus a plan? Will it help to transform us into this kind of character we so need and long for? And could transformation of our persons, our character, actually address the suffering we feel so strongly right now? Is it really that powerful?
I have come to believe it is. Live as if Christ is in you every minute of the day, Paul would say. There you will find compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, all wrapped by love. As we invite Jesus to come closer, each day, we pray that God will give us strength to put on the garments of God’s chosen children. If we do this, we just might change things, our own suffering, and the suffering of our world.