“It
came to pass in those days, when Moses was grown, that he went out to his
brethren and looked at their burdens. And he saw an Egyptian beating a
Hebrew, one of his brethren. So Moses looked this way and that way, and
when he saw no one he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. And
when Moses went out the second day, two Hebrew men were fighting, and Moses
said to the one who did the wrong, ‘Why are you striking your
companion?’” Exodus 2:11-13 NKJV
We
do not know how Moses came to know of the Hebrews as his “brethren”.
Recall Moses had been found in the river during the time in which the Pharaoh
had ordered all Hebrew male children to be killed. What possessed the
Pharaoh’s daughter to defy her father by taking in the child is anyone’s guess,
but a one writer emphasizes the word “saw”. She “saw” the child weeping
and “had compassion”. Moses “saw” the Egyptian task master beating a
Hebrew, so Moses looked about to “see” if he was being watched. Yet when
he returned a second day and tried to break up a fight between two Hebrews, he
discovered he had been “seen”. Clearly something was being “seen” beyond
the moment.
What
we do often has a lot to do with what we see; that is, how we perceive a
particular thing or person. Usually a snap judgment is rendered, and we
respond according to how we process our perceptions. So how we process
and respond to what we see or perceive depends entirely upon how we are
conditioned to perceive. For instance, we see a homeless person wandering
about, looking through dumpsters for food and other items, but how do we
process what we have seen? Are we moved with compassion enough to respond
accordingly, or are we filled with disdain for this “lazy” person who obviously
brought his misery upon himself - without knowing anything at all about this
person and his circumstances?
We
are all raised in different environments by different persons, and we become a
reflection of what we are taught and how we are conditioned to perceive the world
around us. If we never read or discuss the Scriptures, if we depend only
on a priest, a pastor, or a rabbi to tell us what the Scriptures mean (if we
bother with this at all), we will always come up short in our capacity to fully
process the world which surrounds us. We will respond only according to
how we’ve been conditioned and influenced to respond.
So
we are challenged by The Word to see the world through a whole different set of
lenses. We are compelled by the Spirit not merely to “see” something but
to process what we see in accordance with what is written in the Scriptures for
us to know. We are compelled by our religion to see more broadly and to
think more deeply, to grow beyond how we are conditioned – because if we cannot
look upon others with any sense of compassion, we cannot fully appreciate the
compassion with which our Lord has looked upon us. Oh, we might be able
to sing “Jesus loves ME, this I know …”, but can we appreciate the Holy
Lens through which this Love challenges us to look? How others are looked
upon from Above? If not, we know nothing worth knowing.
Let
today be that Holy Day in which we learn to process what we see according to
The Word. Let us discover what we’ve been missing all along.
Blessings,
Michael
No comments:
Post a Comment