for the cause of Christ. His reputation was intact and his respect level with the students had risen with each word that left his scholarly tongue. Tony smirked smugly, knowing that he had proved that Jesus saw not just one, but many prostitutes in His day. However, the tables were quickly turned and Tony was left speechless when the student replied, “Dr. Campolo, you see a prostitute in those Bible passages you just read. The people who were with Jesus in the Scriptures you shared also saw Jesus hanging out with prostitutes. To you and them, all you see are whores. But do you really think Jesus saw them that way? Do you think Jesus saw them as whores or two-bit prostitutes? When Jesus looked into the eyes of a prostitute, do you really think He saw a prostitute or did He see a beautiful child of God?”
Ouch! This student was not only bold, he was right and Tony knew it. It was true. Jesus never saw prostitutes, He only saw children of God. Jesus, walking on the streets of our cities today, does not see bums, winos, hookers, drug addicts or gangbangers. He sees His created children, His brothers and sisters, His lost sheep. He sees God’s beauty marks all over each hurting, marginalized or so-called successful person His eyes come across. Love sees things differently.
The Jewish mystics teach us well about this concept of sight that is only made available through love. There is a story1 they tell to describe the glory of God. These mystics viewed God’s shekina (Hebrew for glory) as the wife of God. They taught that at creation, God and his shekina were united in close harmony. All of creation beamed with the shekina glory of God. However, after the Fall of mankind, when sin entered the world, His shekina was disturbed. God was separated from it and it was imprisoned inside the fallen creation. The question then is: How does God reunite with his shekina? The answer of the mystics is that shekina is freed through the deeds of the righteous. Righteous people are God’s instruments that can release and free the shekina imprisoned in creation by their virtuous acts.
In other words, God’s glory, His shekina, is all around us, entrapped in every created and living thing. Our lives then become an exciting adventure of freeing up God’s glory through our acts of kindness. In this way, love sees things differently. This is why I cannot help but see shekina all around me as I walk the streets of the communities in which we work, neighbourhoods that others have labelled dark and dangerous. I see God’s wonderful glory present, just waiting to burst out all around me. God’s shekina is on the streets of your city too, if you choose to look at it with the eyes of Jesus—with eyes of love. It is present in the form of a homeless youth who begs for spare change. It is active in the hands of the crack addict who places a quarter in his cup. It manifests itself in the businessman’s smile as he places a $20 bill in the same beggar’s cup. It is heard in the voice of the beggar who responds by saying, “Thank you for your kindness.”
The wisdom of Proverbs teaches us some very interesting truths about the importance of seeing. In Proverbs 11:27, we read: “He who seeks good finds goodwill, but evil comes to him who searches for it” (NIV).
The lesson here is simple and yet profound. Goodness and evil are empowered according to how much they are sought out and desired. If you seek out goodness, you will find it and in return will receive it in ongoing abundance in your life. The opposite is also true. If all you seek is evil, then evil is what you will find—it will increase. The more evil we speak about, the more evil we tend to see we will eventually emulate. In the neighbourhoods where we are active, the lie of evil is so strong that many young people actually tend to believe that evil is good and good is evil. Goodness has become archaic and unpractical, and the code of the streets is that if you are not evil, then someone will take advantage of you. The only way to survive is to be more evil than the next person. Thus the old saying “Only the good die young” becomes a reality. This problem multiplies quickly in our society when you consider the influence of the media via print, television and radio that seeks evil to broadcast. If it is true that evil sells papers, then we are in big trouble. Evil has great PR, and it results in people being afraid and feeling hopeless. When this happens, life becomes a game of self-survival by all means necessary and selfishness is the epitome of evil.
The solution to this mess is to have proper eyesight. The Church must be involved in our city, seeing God’s shekina that just waits to be loosed from the shackles of evil. The Church must have Jesus’ eyes to see it. It must also understand it is uniquely gifted for this endeavour. The writer of Proverbs continues to give us more insight on this topic of goodness and evil:
“With his mouth the godless destroys his neighbour but through knowledge the righteous escape. Through the blessing of the upright a city is exalted, but by the mouth of the wicked it is destroyed. A man who lacks judgement derides his neighbour, but a man of understanding holds his tongue.” (Proverbs 11:9,11,12, NIV)
These verses of wisdom tell us that the social, moral and spiritual health of our cities and neighbourhoods is based on what the upright, in comparison to the godless, are doing. More directly, the welfare of our cities rests on how the upright see the city. God is present all around us and with true godly understanding one can see His presence in the ’hood. God’s shekina is there.
It always breaks my heart when I hear of another shooting in my city. It especially hurts when I hear Christians deride the neighbourhood where the shooting took place by saying things like “What do you expect from that place? I would never go there. It is a ghetto, an awful community.” Whenever I hear these types of comments from Christians, I cannot help but think of the verse from Proverbs we just read.
Think of what people say about the tough neighbourhoods in your city. Is it any wonder they remain hotspots of evil? Parts of our cities are dangerous simply because they lack our blessing because Christians have abandoned them. And this is to our shame. We hear of the evil that occurs there and we either flee those communities directly (I know of one community in my city that has had over 20 churches shut down and leave within 20 years—the true plight of the inner-city Church), or else we target them as hit-and-run ministry projects. Hit them with a prayer walk or one-day event and then run away as far as possible. Instead, what we need to do is stay in the community, work with the community, and have long-term, practical, relationally-based ministry in the community. When this happens, you see the many good and God things present there, and you cannot help but bless the city.
Notes
1 M. Frost and A. Hirsch, The Shaping of Things to Come—Innovation and Mission for the 21st-Century Church, Hendrickson Publishers, Peabody, Massachusetts, 2003, p.128.
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“Our part is not knowing, but looking, and touching, and loving.”
– Unknown
3. How God Shows Up
Patrick lived in a government housing community that would be labelled the projects or the ’hood. Only a few years ago this neighbourhood was branded a violent community in which drug-related turf wars were common. It was so bad that the community centre located in the neighbourhood used to gauge the success of its programs in accordance with the number of murders that occurred in the community. If there were just a few during the year, it reckoned that it was a successful year. However, if that wasn’t the case, the centre would then have to re-evaluate the effectiveness of its programs. In the previous five years, there hadn’t been one murder, and the reasons for this successful statistic could be accredited to two sources.
First, there was Kwendie, a tough-as-nails African-Canadian youth worker who had put in many years, tears and love into the lives of the youth of Warden Woods. She was both a mother and father figure for the teens in the community and she never had a problem physically confronting the youth when they were out of line. Though small, she is large in heart, and because of this she could confront the toughest young men in the community with confidence, knowing that they would back down under her brooding glare. She was the embodiment of tough love, a proven advocate for her boys in the ’hood. She had gained the right to speak into the lives of the young men in her community simply because she had proven herself a veteran youth worker, willing to tough it out even in the worst of circumstances. When the youth were little children she was always there watching out for them. Now that they had grown into young