Luke 10:21 - 24
At that time Jesus, full of joy through the Holy Spirit, said, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this was your good pleasure.
“All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows who the Son is except the Father, and no one knows who the Father is except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.”
Then he turned to his disciples and said privately, “Blessed are the eyes that see what you see. For I tell you that many prophets and kings wanted to see what you see but did not see it, and to hear what you hear but did not hear it.”
You'll notice that today's passage from Luke is full of the language of seeing and hearing, hiddenness and revealing. These words represent an underground current that runs through the Gospels. It is a current that is especially strong during Advent.
For all of us there are things hidden. The basic condition of our humanity is that we don't see what is real. We live in illusion. We don't see what is most true about ourselves, others, the world, and most of all about God.
Furthermore, since this condition of un-seeing and un-hearing is fundamentally a part of our condition as humans, it is completely unfair to chastise persons for not seeing what they cannot see. Yet, so much of traditional religious expression holds people over a barrel for not knowing what they don't know or for not seeing what they are not able to see.
So if chastisement for not seeing and not knowing is out of bounds, what should be our posture?
The prophets of old may not have seen the fullness of God, according to Jesus' words, but they spoke what they did see. And beyond speaking what they saw and proclaiming the experience of God they had, these prophets pointed to a time when the incompleteness of seeing and knowing would be fulfilled.
They spoke with confidence and faith about what they knew and experienced of God. But there was also a humility about the prophets. They did not know what they did not know; however, they knew that they did not know. It makes all the difference.
Strange as it may seem, the beginning place of seeing is to acknowledge that you don't see. The beginning place of knowledge and wisdom is to confess that you don't know.
During Advent we confess that we live in darkness. Like the Hebrew Prophets, we testify to what we have experienced of God. We also acknowledge that we don't see totally. The illusion with which we live darkens our sight, clouding both our seeing and our knowing.
The light embodied by Jesus illumines our lives, enables our seeing, enlivens our knowing.
This is how Thomas Merton speaks of seeing and knowing in the spiritual life:
In the spiritual life there are no tricks and no short cuts. . . . One cannot begin to face the real difficulties of the life of prayer and meditation unless one is first perfectly content to be a beginner and really experience oneself as one who knows little or nothing, and has a desperate need to learn the bare rudiments. Those who think they "know" from the beginning never, in fact, come to know anything. . . .
We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners, all our life.
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