Blind, Now I See

“And the LORD said to Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall LOOK AT it and live.” So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would LOOK AT the serpent of bronze and live.”
Numbers 21:8-9

Many people of my generation and older grew up watching the classic TV series Little House on the Prairie. Compared to the content our children are subjected to, these episodes thick with morality as well as intense situations. “What scary, horrible, no-good-thing is going to happen in Walnut Grove this episode, Dad?” my kids ask half-jokingly, half-seriously. Will it be a gang of outlaws? Scarlet fever? Fire? Tornado? A still birth?” Every disaster short of an alien invasion has hit that southern Minnesota towns so far.

My kids and I have been slowly working our way through the series which aired from 1974 to 1983, and this past week we got to perhaps the most traumatic episode of all, still burned in my memory from childhood. Can you think of it?

Mary Ingalls goes blind.

It is intense, gripping drama.

The tragic loss of the light in her eyes is heightened by the natural brightness of actor Melissa Sue Anderson’s ocean blue eyes. (A childhood crush of mine? Perhaps.)

As the episode unfolds, Mary is sent away to a school for the blind to learn how to function and adjust to her new life. She falls in love with her instructor, Adam Kendall, who is also blind (but she does not yet know it). In a moving scene, Mary is anxious as she prepares to leave the safe confines of the school and return to a sightless world that now feels like “a huge, dark place filled with hidden obstacles, strange sounds, and voices coming from faceless people.”

Turning to Adam she laments, “And you…I’ve never even seen you.”

“Well, then look at me,” he responds, taking Mary’s hands and placing them on his face and letting her explore his features. He then surprises Mary, revealing his blindness as he asks, “What do you look like, Mary?” Realizing he is also blind, she places his hands on her face as tears flow down her cheeks. It’s a deeply moving scene. Two blind people looking intently at the other and beholding their beauty with a deeper kind of sight. Me and my kids wiped our own tears together watching it, which happens nearly episode.

This raises the topic of a deeper kind of spiritual sight, of looking with the eyes of faith at the object of greatest delight, of beholding God in all his saving power and majesty. Just as a sickness takes Mary’s sight, opening up the opportunity to see in a deeper way, so there’s poisonous snakes in the Israelite camp, providing an opportunity to look up and behold God’s healing power. It’s a strange story, Moses lifting up a bronze snake on a pole and all who LOOK at it can be saved.

While many lessons can be drawn from this story, as well as what Jesus does with it in John 3, I just want to ponder one question today: Are we LOOKING up and trying to SEE a God-bathed reality in the deepest and truest sense? Or are we too distracted by our natural sightedness? Too preoccupied with all the outward sights and sounds bombarding us daily to peer into the hidden depths of spiritual beauty?

Only in losing her natural sight, did Mary learn to see her beloved in a new kind of way: listening to his voice, moving toward his warm breath, reaching out, touching, feeling his features, imagining his form, marveling at his invisible beauty, and smiling as a tear runs down our cheek. Like Adam, God moves in and out of the shadows of our busy lives, saying, “Well, look at me.” We’ll give him a quick nod, a short prayer, an hour of devotion, but then we let him slip out of view.

But in Christ, God took on human flesh and longs to take our hands in his, place them on his cheek, and says, “No, really look at me.” With more than your eyes. With the eyes of faith. With the deep ache of your soul. With the hands of your heart, groping and grasping for the one truly solid thing. John invites us to this deeper, fuller, all-senses kind of seeing that will enable us to live faithfully in a world where the serpent still slithers about trying to poison our lives:

^“From the very first day, we were there, taking it all in—we HEARD it with our own ears, SAW it with our own eyes, TOUCHED it with our own hands. The Word of Life appeared right before our eyes; we saw it happen! And now we’re telling you in most sober prose that what we witnessed was, incredibly, this: The infinite Life of God himself took shape before us” (1 John 1:1-2).