The Look

Psalm 102 • Psalm 107: 1-32
Jer. 31:27-34 • Eph. 5:1-20 • Matt. 9:9-17

A good bit of the time Jesus can be pretty garrulous, but not when he calls the disciples. In today's gospel he walks by Matthew's tax collector booth (I picture something like Lucy's booth in Peanuts, with a sign: "The tax collector is IN") and says to Matthew "Follow me." And Matthew does. Earlier he had walked along the shore of Galilee and had done pretty much the same with Simon Peter, Andrew, James and John. He tells the first two he will make them fishers of men, but that's it. 

Why did they go with him? I doubt that the gospel writers left out a more extensive conversation, so there must have been some unspoken communication, a crackling in the air between the caller and the called. Who among us would not want to have been there to witness it-to feel it, whatever it was?

During a recent tough time I was practicing lectio divina with the day's reading. It was the one about the Samaritan woman at the well, and I tried to imagine myself into her place. In that passage there is plenty of back and forth--living water, the woman's past, etc.--but when I went there, there was almost none. The woman asks Jesus what he wants, and Jesus simply looks at her. It is a look I have tried but failed to describe. It is above all one of knowing. Knowing who I am in the sense of all I have done and left undone, all the sins and gifts and pains and fears and longings, but also a knowing far beyond that, a knowing of who I am at an unfathomable level. The look is not remotely threatening but rather is utterly disarming and profoundly inviting.

See? I've failed again to describe it. But I understand better why the woman's life took a radically new trajectory (an interesting story; check it out) and I have a strong feeling that it was that look that Matthew, Simon Peter, Andrew, James and John got when they dropped everything and followed Jesus into their own new lives. 

How would Jesus look at you and what would it mean to you?

Written by Elliott West

Elliott teaches history at the University of Arkansas.  He has been a member of St. Paul's for more than twenty-five years.