Nearsighted and Blind

For his 60th birthday a 'friend' gave
my husband these glasses to test out
what vision is like the more we age. 

Scripture:

^{2 Peter 1:5} For this very reason, you must make every effort to support your faith with goodness, and goodness with knowledge, ⁶ and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with endurance, and endurance with godliness, ⁷ and godliness with mutual affection, and mutual affection with love. ⁸ For if these things are yours and are increasing among you, they keep you from being ineffective and unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. ⁹ For anyone who lacks these things is nearsighted and blind, and is forgetful of the cleansing of past sins. ¹⁰ Therefore, brothers and sisters, be all the more eager to confirm your call and election, for if you do this, you will never stumble. ¹¹ For in this way, entry into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ will be richly provided for you.

Observation:

This section is filled with a narrative on the virtues. The virtues were practices that were encouraged by the Greeks to help people know how to live. Interestingly, Peter has taken the Greek virtues and has surrounded them within Christian language and understanding of faith, hope and love. These virtues are sandwiched between the foundation of faith and culminate in love. In the Greek it tells you to have philadelphoi and agape. These are two specific terms relating to holy love for those who are a part of the church and then God’s holy love. The apex is our understanding of holiness — love of neighbor and love of God. 

God’s call for humanity is to live into this kind of holy life and if this is lacking, then the individual is nearsighted and blind. One might wonder how you can be both nearsighted and blind but the words give us an understanding of the spiritual life. To be nearsighted is to be myopic, which means that you can only see things that are close up. You fail to see or to understand the context and therefore, essentially you are blind to the truths of God. You cannot see beyond yourself and the blindness will lead you to judge others — for you forget that you yourself have had a sinful past 

Bearing all of this in mind, a person is to keep their eyes on the Lord and live into the holy life. Only in this way can we continuously live in the eternal kingdom. Jesus Christ has richly sacrificed everything to make this possible, but you must keep your eyes fixed on him and not only the issues that you hold close. 

Application:

The entire aim of this passage is for God’s people to become fruitful disciples. God’s children are to be growing in grace, building virtue upon virtue. This growth has to take us to a firm understanding of holy love. The Venerable Bede writes the following: 

The only context in which godliness has any meaning is that of brotherly love. You cannot win people to Christ merely by arguing them into the kingdom. It is necessary to practice godliness by prayer and good works. Charity here means the love of God, because we cannot love God without loving our neighbor, nor can we love our neighbor without loving God. The love of God is greater than the love of our neighbor, which is why we have to practice it with all our heart, mind and strength. (On 2 Peter) 

Unfortunately, the obstacle to all of this is — us! It is our own self-centeredness that constantly becomes a hindrance to becoming all that God wants us to be. I think that’s what Peter meant by saying we were nearsighted. Another definition of myopic is “lacking imagination, foresight, or intellectual insight.” (Google English Dictionary of Oxford Languages) When we fail to live into loving God and loving neighbor we reveal our nearsightedness. 

I am nearsighted and have to wear glasses. I can see well enough to go without my glasses when I’m working on the computer but I’ve also discovered that I miss out on a lot that is happening around me. I can be so focused on what I can see that I fail to see that which I cannot. I have to find my glasses and its then that I discover all kinds of things about my environment. Interestingly, my house looks really clean when I don’t have my glasses on — but the instant I’m wearing them, I can see what needs to be cleaned up. I think Peter wants the Christians to put on their glasses and keep their own house clean before becoming judgmental of others. 

If we don’t put our glasses on, we may as well be blind. That would be true for me if it came to driving. While I can see okay at a distance, I can’t see clearly. So - so eyesight is not good enough to drive a car — it’s dangerous because we can easily hit things that we do not see. So - so Christian eyesight is not okay — it’s dangerous because we can destroy things that we do not see. 

Our faith is to be seen in the way we love. Peter gives us a terrific roadmap on how to get there. This Christian life requires spiritual discipline and action on the part of the believer. Herb McGonigle, outstanding Wesley scholar helps us understand how this fits together:

While John Wesley was strongly convinced that service to one’s neighbor, especially the poor, was a duty laid on every Christian, he was equally convinced that such a life of service is the outcome of genuine Christian experience. Increasingly he described true faith in the words of Paul as ‘the faith that works by love.’ Through the decades of argument and misunderstanding about his doctrine of Christian perfection, he never retreated from his core conviction about the doctrine; in height and depth it is nothing less and nothing more than the love of God and neighbor. In this way John Wesley’s life-long practical care and concern for the poor was a demonstration of this particular understanding of Christian holiness for which he said God had raised up the people called Methodist. (More Than Conquerors, 120)

Faith that works through love can be neither nearsighted, nor blind. Faith is the great foundation of the virtues that will lead us to holy love. This is the description of the holy life to which we are all called.

Prayer:

Lord, open my eyes that I may see the way that you see and live in your love. Amen.