Who Is God? Learning to See as Jesus Sees

A table set for many, symbolizing Jesus dining with sinners

There is a line in Morning Prayer that can catch in the throat if we let it linger: “You are no God who loves evil; no sinner is your guest” (Psalm 5:4).

On the surface, it can sound like exclusion. A boundary drawn. A line between who belongs and who does not. And yet… Jesus spends much of his life doing something startling. He becomes the guest of "sinners". He eats with "them", listens to "them", laughs with "them", prays with "them," and is ultimately criticized for it.

Again and again, Jesus disrupts inherited ideas of holiness, belonging, and worthiness. Not to dismiss the Psalms, but to fulfill them. Not to lower the bar of holiness, but to reveal what holiness looks like when it takes flesh.

Perhaps this is part of why Jesus came: to heal our sight.

“I Want to See.”

In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus encounters a blind man sitting by the roadside. Bartimaeus calls out, is silenced by the crowd, and recklessly calls out again. Jesus stops. He does not assume. He asks: “What do you want me to do for you?” Bartimaeus answers with disarming simplicity: “Master, I want to see” (Mark 10:51).

Today, this is not only a story about physical healing. It is a story about inner sight. How many of our images of God, of sinners, of ourselves are shaped by partial vision? How often do we rely on inherited ideas rather than lived encounter? Jesus does not come to reinforce our spiritual categories. He comes to restore vision - His vision that dwells within us.

When Challenge Is the Doorway to Love

There is something important to notice about the way Jesus heals. Before sight is restored, Bartimaeus must cry out. Before healing comes exposure. Before love is felt, there is often discomfort. This is not cruelty. It is honesty.

God’s love does not bypass what is wounded, false, or constricted within us. Love moves through it. And often, the first way we encounter God’s love is not as consolation, but as a challenge. A challenge that asks us to look again. Challenge that unsettles what we thought we knew. A challenge that invites us to release images of God that no longer give life. This is not love withheld. It is love at work. Take a look at all that is said in Mark's Gospel about Bartimaeus, and see that this healing is offered to him alone, as well as to the many onlookers. Jesus heals within us and within all who are willing to see.

Jesus challenges not to shame, but to free. He presses against rigid categories, inherited assumptions, and hardened boundaries because they limit our capacity to receive love fully. The challenge is the gateway. Love is what waits on the other side.

If something in this reflection feels unsettling, that does not mean God is absent. It may mean God is very near; perhaps you are standing in the crowd looking on at the healing happening within Bartimaeus - make no mistake, that healing is for you too.

The God Who Asks Deeper Questions

This longing to be seen, to see clearly, echoes in the poem The Invitation by Oriah Mountain Dreamer. The poem does not ask what we believe or how we appear. Instead, it asks questions that bypass the surface and go straight to the heart:

Can you sit with pain without trying to fix it?

Can you stand in the fire and not shrink back?

Can you source your life from what is deepest within you?

These are not questions of performance. They are invitations into truth. They echo the way Jesus encounters people. He does not begin with correction. He begins with presence. He does not ask for credentials. He asks for honesty.

Learning Love from the Inside

Another voice that gently illuminates this journey comes from Helen Keller, perhaps a modern-day Bartimaeus, in her reflection, The Day I Discovered the Meaning of Love. As a child, she tries to understand love by associating it with things she can touch or feel: warmth, sweetness, sunlight. But love continues to elude definition. Finally, she realizes that love cannot be grasped as an object. It is known by how it moves through us, how it connects us, how it awakens life within.

This is how God is known. Not as an idea to master or as a concept to contain, but as a presence encountered from the inside that slowly illuminates the world outside, so that we might see through God's eyes.

Breaking Open the Circle

When Jesus eats with sinners, heals the blind, and welcomes those pushed to the margins, he is not contradicting holiness. He is revealing God’s heart. The barriers that keep us from God are often not external. They live within us and manifest as:

• rigid images of who belongs

• fear disguised as righteousness

• ideas we cling to because they feel safe

  
  

Jesus loosens these gently, persistently. He invites us to see people not as categories, but as beloved. To see ourselves not as problems to fix, but as places where God longs to dwell. This is the mercy that feels reckless because it refuses to be controlled. This is the God who longs to be known.

An Invitation to Prayer

Let this be less about answers and more about awareness.

• Where might your image of God be too small?

• Who have you unconsciously kept outside the circle of belonging?

• What do you most long to see differently?

• If Jesus were to ask you today, “What do you want me to do for you?”  how would you answer?

Place a hand on your heart.

Breathe.

Ask simply for sight.

From the garden within me to the garden within you, where God awaits,

Kimi