Just Look

A long time ago, when I lived in Japan, I had a dream that has stayed with me. In this dream, I was in my 6th grade classroom (the most difficult students of my six classes), and in the front of the classroom, Jesus hung on his cross. But my attention was drawn to the Blessed Virgin Mary. At first, I was observing her being present to Jesus on the cross. She was so deep in empathy with him, and so full of understanding of what His act there meant, and also so aware of the need of the people around her. Then she caught my gaze, watching her, and beckoned me to enter in to her experience and make it my own. I don't know that she spoke in the dream, but what was communicated to me strongly was the plea "Just look. Just look at Him." Somehow, looking at Jesus on the cross was key for me and for everyone else present. Mary seemed to keep this gaze perpetually in her heart, even when her attention was fixed on me or the others. What was most striking was the point in the dream where we both turned our attention to the other people in the room, which included some of my students and several other random people I either knew or didn't know. They were all chatting with each other or engaged in something and it was extremely difficult to get their attention. They were completely oblivious to Jesus, who hung immediately before them. I remember the type of anguish this caused Mary. She did not force anyone, but she was very sad and searched with an insistent heart for someone who would break free and look at Jesus.

It has been at least 30 years since I had this dream, and I have meditated on what it teaches me regularly. What it speaks to me these days harkens back to Moses and the bronze serpent and John 3:14-15, where this is directly compared to Jesus on the cross. In the account in Numbers, the Israelites' faith in God's goodness was not developed at all; they hardly had faith in Moses who had led them out of Egypt. They objected to their freedom from slavery if it meant dying of starvation, thirst, and discomfort. Can you blame them? Even the slavery we know can feel safer than the freedom we are on the way to, but aren't yet embracing. Then they had another crisis: people were being killed by venomous snakes, and they are jerked back into the present moment by their need for safety. They turn to Moses for help, and remember that he has this mysterious access to God who he says freed them from slavery. Ask God to take this crisis away, they say. God's answer to Moses is to make a bronze serpent and hang it on a pole, and if they look at it, they will be healed. 

The serpent was their crisis. It was what was harming them. It was their death. It was their reality. God has Moses tell them to look at it, for healing. 

And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life. (John 3:14-15)

What does one see looking up at Jesus on the cross? On the literal level, we see a bloody, crushed, humiliated, agonizing man. A human being, just like us, who is immersed in a human experience of immense suffering. Spiritually, we see more than this. We see salvation, the Savior of the world entering into our human experience, not out of his crisis of sin, but out of an outpouring of love and the desire to be-with. 

And the response of the fully graced one, the response of the Church, is to say: Look! He entered your pain for you! Now, you, enter your pain for you! Meet Him there, and receive freedom and healing from it!!

The task of receiving our salvation is not to parrot some religious formula prayer to "make Christ our savior." We are called rather to recognize the crisis of our hearts, what is harming us, what is killing us. Look. Just look. At Him. It's all present there; He's gone before us to get there. God doesn't create a magic world where there is no suffering. When you look at humanity, you can realize that our freedom demands a capacity to choose badly. Jesus' choice was to enter it. The Father didn't have bloodlust in allowing His Son to die; the Son had the yearning of love to not leave us alone in our pain, but to meet us there to free us and to open up the path for His supernatural life to live in us, to return us not only to our true selves, but to divinize us.

And then, what is more, the fruit of the tree of life, the cross, is the Eucharist. Again, we don't just experience a ritual eating of a wafer; we feast on His act of handing over Himself as the very path for supernatural life to enter us, which it does through the faith that receives Him, daily if we want (in many places in the world). Daily, this supernatural transformation can be activated, and we look again, with today's burden, today's need, today's mission. We need this daily food; we are commanded to it at least weekly, in celebration of the resurrection, because Good Friday was not the end, it was the catalyst. Our suffering, our pain, our harm is not our end; let it be the catalyst which forms our purpose, our innermost self, our mission in this world, to turn and draw others to JUST LOOK. 

Just look, have faith, be healed.