Seeing Beyond Scarcity: The Church as an Eye-Clinic (Advent I: II Kings 6:8-23)

PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC - The fresco of Annunciation by Petr Maixner (1872) Photograph by Renáta Sedmáková.

Our eyes are trained by the culture around us. Without being aware of it, we are schooled in a certain form of perception of reality. The force of such eye-training is characteristically the imposition of an ideology that we are invited to accept as reality. Such ideology that passes for reality transmits the particular hopes, fears, and interests of a culture that aims to protect its status, privilege, and advantage. Thus, in the words of the show tune,

We have to be taught to hate,

by the time we are seven or eight.

We have to be inducted into the interests of certain social arrangements. I can remember, in a small rural Missouri town in the sixth grade, our teacher taught us that “colored people like to live in unpainted houses” and “they are offended if not called by their first names” instead of a formal title. I believe our teacher taught us this because it was the “truth” she had inhaled in her own childhood. The ideology that so governs us is our ready assumption that the life-goods in the world are scarce. We must be vigilant to get our share, and we must live in fear of not having our fair share. The outcome is a readiness to see others as competitors for such scarce goods.

We can see the operation and force of such ideology in the narrative of II Kings 6:8-23. In this narrative, the Syrian army arrives at the house of Elisha noisily and with great clatter. The servant of Elisha hears the disturbance and peeks out the window. He is completely frightened and bewildered. He does not know what to do in his fear. He has been trained to see—with realism!—the threat posed by military presence, as he cries out to Elisha:

Alas, Master! What shall we do? (v. 15).

In contrast to his servant, Elisha is undisturbed and unafraid. He reassures his servant: “Do not be afraid.”
And then he adds this remarkable statement:

There are more with us than there are with them (v. 16).

We will outnumber them! His servant is confused; after all, he can count. He can count only two of them, while he sees the countless throng of soldiers, horses, and chariots of the Syrian king. He is floored by the peculiar arithmetic of his master.  But before he can say anything, Elisha prays for his servant:

Please open his eyes that he may see (v. 17).

The servant thought he could see well enough. It turned out, however, that his eyesight was hampered and limited. His eyes had been trained to focus on and see only the threat of military hardware and manpower, but he could not see beyond this. He could not see outside of his ideological nature to view an alternative reality.

The prayer of the prophet is answered immediately:

The mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire around Elisha (v. 17).

The servant now sees what his training had not permitted him to see. He sees that his world is fully occupied and staffed by horses and chariots of support and security. He notices that these horses and chariots are peculiarly marked by “fire all around.” These are no ordinary horses or chariots. Rather they are the peculiar gift of God’s good holiness that revises observed reality. The servant sees that the world around him is filled with supportive resources that he had not even suspected heretofore. He has been emancipated from the skewed vision of ideology to see the world differently as a place of immense resources.

The narrative does not linger. While Elisha is occupied with “eye management,” he completes his prayer for fresh sight by praying blindness on the threatening Syrians. Elisha wants the troops to be rendered helpless so that they would no longer constitute a threat. But Elisha, manager of eyes, is not yet finished. Now, in verse 20, he prays that the Syrians may yet again be permitted to see, after they had been taken helpless into Israel’s capital city, Samaria. With their eyesight restored, the Syrians recognized they were in the capital city of the enemy, a very dangerous place in which to be captive. This danger is given voice by the unnamed king in Samaria who wants to kill the enemy. After all, the enemy has been rendered helpless. Killing them is a logical next step in the process of fearfulness. Elisha, to the contrary, is decisive; he forbids his king from killing them. He rightly claims that the enemies belong to him, not to the king, and he is free to determine their future. The king imagines that he knows the logical next step according to the ideology of war and victory. But Elisha steps out of that fearful ideology. He invites his king, against the king’s own inclination, to step outside his ideology of fear, in order to act differently. The alternative offered by Elisha is indeed a radical surprise:

So he prepared for them a great feast; after they ate and drank, he sent them on their way, 

and they went to their master (v. 23).

The prophet seems to anticipate the advocacy of the apostle:

Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” No, if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good (Romans 12:19-21).

Feed your enemy! Give them something to drink! Break the vicious cycles of retaliation and vengeance. Open a way to the future that is beyond the endless spiral of violence. The outcome of the generosity of Elisha and his generous action is that there was peace between long-standing enemies:

And the Arameans no longer came raiding in the land of Israel (II Kings 6:24).

If the nameless king in Samaria had had his way and killed the enemies, he would have evoked yet another cycle of violence and vengeance. But the prophet knows better. He knows better, because he sees better. He sees better because he is not captive to the dominant ideology of the normal state, namely, keep retaliating, keep getting even, keep paying back.  New eyes evoke new possibilities. We are never told of the reaction of the king to this new emergent. Perhaps he embraced the new possibility. Perhaps he is too inured to his ideology to trust his own new eyes. Perhaps he prefers to linger in the old patterns of payback and violence. But there is always the chance with new eyes that are open to new possibility. That newness does the emancipatory work of exposing ideologies that preclude our best potential for new ways in the world.

From this narrative, we are invited to revisit the Advent-birth narrative yet again. The old tired eyes of Roman authorities and Jewish priestly leaders might have seen the Jesus movement, from its outset, as nothing more than the restless stirring of the rabble that wanted only to disturb the well-ordered society over which they presided. Those several leaders, Roman and Jewish, at their distance and quite economically removed, could not have known about the stars and the singing angels and the awed shepherds that were well beyond their field of vision.  They could not have known that this unknown baby born in a barn was about to upend their order of privilege. They could only have known that the peasants, like the ones from Nazareth, just keep having sex and producing babies that become a great inconvenience for the ordered economy. For all their good reasons, they could dismiss anything that happened in Bethlehem as scarcely worth serious notice.

The Advent-Christmas drama requires a cast of characters who are to “see what we see!” Thus Mary and Joseph and Elizabeth, and nameless shepherds and singing angels, and donkeys and sheep with perceptive eyes saw differently. They saw the compelling intrusion of the God of the Gospel into the closed world of top-down imperialism. It is no wonder that mother Mary, in her opening anthem, could anticipate that her baby would be a disrupter of Roman order and Jewish privilege (Luke 1:52-53). She could imagine the emergence of a new economy that provided generously for the poor. But only special eyes could see all of that!

So now, in our Advent and Christmas season, we are apt to miss the force of this intrusion. We are likely to reduce the birth to a sweet romantic tale about a vulnerable baby, without anticipating the dangerous adult he would become. We easily let this new baby be disconnected from the economic crisis faced by the shepherds. We are likely to engage in our own orgy of materialism and self-indulgence without noticing that this birth is the entry into a narrative of self-giving for the sake of the world. It turns out, in the perceptive field of Elisha, his servant, and the cast of characters present at Bethlehem, that the world is filled with abundant resources that permit the kind of generosity that transforms enemies into banquet partners.

The church may be haunted in this season by a quite fresh discernment that our best ideologies should be questioned and placed in jeopardy. We may act in solidarity with Amahl who says urgently to his mother, “Do you see what I see?” What we see is a new world of abundance that may overwhelm our scarcity and fear. The ideology of scarcity is alive and well among us; it governs our dominant economic culture. It defines our hesitation about neighborliness. And now we have this counter-notion: The ideology is not true! Look again—with attentive eyes! Imagine that the church is a great eye-clinic in which we have our vision restored, able to see that the world is governed by the goodness of God and not by our parsimonious fearfulness.