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Generous Eyes And New Wine:
Perspective From
Luke 4-6
by Major
Terence Hale
I have a friend who in his very early
40’s lost his eyesight and became fully blind. Since that
accident his life has become about learning to live within new
parameters and beginning to interpret and interact with the
world in whole new ways. I have only connected with him since
he has been blind, so I don’t really know what life was like
for him before his accident, but I am always impressed when we
meet up and he tells me how life continues to evolve for him
and what new opportunities and challenges have presented
themselves as he continues to learn to live as vision impaired
person. That being said, in every conversation, without fail
we land on a topic that causes him to reflect on what it was
life when he was fully sighted and in some way lament losing
his vision. Every time we chat or go for a coffee, I am
reminded that sight is a great gift that shouldn’t be taken
for granted.
That is part of the reason that I find
Jesus’ words in Matthew 6:22-23 so intriguing. Jesus said,
“The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy,
your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are
unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then
the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!”
The idea of healthy and unhealthy eyes, which in the Greek
translate as generous and stingy eyes has been, pardon the
pun, eye opening for me. Doesn’t that idea make you want to go
full on after eyes that see your reality in a generous way,
filling your life with the light of possibility and promise.
The stingy alternative just doesn’t seem appealing.
I want us to take the Generous vs.
Stingy paradigm and apply it as a filter on Luke 5-6. Taking
time to consider this passage there is conveniently a theme of
seeing and not seeing. We have groups of people, some seeing
the glory of God amongst them (generous) and others not
seeing, and outright missing it (stingy).
Generous
First up we have Peter who features
heavily in this passage. As we meet Peter, we get a sense that
he has fledgling generous eyesight, he is growing into it. We
read that Peter has been around Jesus, had Him as a guest in
his home, saw Him do amazing things, and even heal his
Mother-in-Law (Luke 4:39). But it wasn’t until he ‘saw’ the
miraculous catch of fish (Luke 5:8) that he also sees the
holiness of Jesus. What if this is showing us how the eyes of
our hearts are fused to the priorities of our hearts? (I don’t
know what that says about Peter’s relationship with his
Mother-in-Law, but we won’t go down that rabbit hole.) Our
priorities, passions, concerns, and fears, serve like blinders
to our soul, making our eyes stingy, and can cause us to miss
the glory, grace, holiness, and love of God moving around us.
Despite this negative possibility there
is a seed of good in that reality. First, if it is true that
misplaced priorities and passion act as blinders to the
movement of God around us, the opposite can also be true. When
our priorities are right aligned, when we embrace
generous eyes, we can then see God’s glory when no one else
can, or when negative circumstances are ranging around us.
Secondly, there is hope. As with Peter,
Jesus in His love and grace keeps working to get our attention
even when are not paying attention to Him at all. Peter went
from simply seeing the miracle in Luke 4 to seeing Jesus
through the miracle in Luke 5. In our lives and ministry, what
do we want to see more the miracle or the miracle maker? We
see in the miraculous catch of fish that seeing Jesus in the
miracle melts away our misplaced priorities. As a fisherman
Peter undoubtedly been concerned about the catch of fish and
the income it would bring, but after he ‘saw’ Jesus, and
received a new priority from Jesus, to become a fisher of men,
he simply walked away from the catch. This is the gift of
generous eyes. As we will see shortly stingy and weak eyes
require us to squint and focus on the small details causing us
to miss the beauty of the broad strokes God is painting in our
lives.
With all of this in mined we see some
other vision issues. Luke 5:29 tells us that after Jesus had
healed the paralytic who was lowered through roof by his
friends, and more importantly forgiven him of his sins,
“Everyone was amazed and gave praise to God. They were filled
with awe and said, “We have seen remarkable things today.”"
If we hold to the principle that our
eyes are fused to our hearts, what does this say about the
priorities of these people? What were they looking and longing
for? They were clearly people with generous eyes, looking
expectantly for a move of God. Generous eyes are marked with
expectancy. Are our lives and ministry marked with the same?
Perhaps the question for us is “What have we seen?” Let’s do a
quick inventory check. Think back over the past week, seven
days should do it. Can you say with the people from Luke 5, “I
have seen remarkable things?” If not, why not, is it because
God is not doing remarkable things, of course not! He is the
Living God, creator, and sustainer of all things, He only does
remarkable things. So, what might be the issue? Are we even
paying attention? Generous eyes will see the remarkable where
others miss it. In our lives and ministry, in our leadership
and worship, in our corps and denomination we need the vantage
point of expectancy that generous eyes bring.
Stingy
These are important questions because
there is a hard lesson to learn from the example of the
Pharisees and religious leaders. The bottom line is that we
can see that they in fact cannot see. They had stingy eyes.
They question the forgiveness and healing of a man on two
occasions (Luke 5:21 and 6:7), they complain about Jesus’
dinner companions (Luke 5:29-32), and they challenge Jesus’
religious practices (Luke 5:33 and 6:2). Jesus’ challenge to
them was correct, “If the light within you is darkness, how
great is that darkness.” (Matthew 6:23) Even when the
Pharisees decide to concentrate and look closely it is only
for the point of finding fault (Luke 6:7). What does this say
about their motivations and priorities? Would we have been
much different? We should remember the saying, “Good is the
enemy of best.” Stingy eyes are concerned with maintaining the
status quo. Weak eyes are comfortable with good but weak
faith.
These examples of generous and stingy
eyes are summed up in Jesus’ illustration of new and old wine
skins at the end of Luke chapter 5. The Pharisees have been
narrowing their stingy eyes as the narrative progresses
through the chapter and move from life altering, Kingdom level
stuff, like the forgiveness of sins (5:17-26), to medium size
concerns like relationships and dinner companions (5:27-32),
to finite and relative inconsequential concerns of religious
ritual (5:33). It is as if their spiritual eyesight is
deteriorating the harder they strain to focus on the wrong
things. Their eyesight is so bad, and they must lean in so
close to have any sense of visual clarity, that they unable to
see the bigger picture of God’s salvific activity. This is a
good reminder for us, it is a sure sign that our eyes are
growing stingy and dark if our concern is drifting from big
Kingdom matters to small religious ones.
It is at this point, when the Pharisees
appear to have completely lost the plot, that Jesus offers the
parable of the wineskins (5:34-39) to try and help them, and
by extension us, reset our vision parameters. Jesus reminds us
that new wine needs to wine skins, a flexible and adaptable
container for a dynamic and growing reality. If we try and put
the new wine, the new Kingdom reality Jesus is ushering in,
into the old wineskin parameters or paradigms of yesterday’s
blessings and frozen assessments and understandings of how God
operates, it simply won’t work. The blessings of God will
spill out of our broken religious container, and we will be
left wondering why we come up empty and still thirsty each
time we go for a drink.
Call To Decision
This part of the parable we likely know
very well but it is the last line from Jesus that has always
stood out for me and gives a final warning about stingy and
weak eyes. Jesus says in verse 39, “And no one after drinking
old wine wants the new, for they say, ‘The old is better.’”
What Jesus is warning about here is that given the free choice
we will default into choosing the old wine. We are effectively
addicted to the old wine. I will openly confess that I know
nothing from personal experience about wine of any sort.
(Except for that one time I think I accidently drank real wine
at an Anglican communion service, but that is a whole other
story.) But common wisdom says that the older and more aged
the wine the better the taste and quality, this is what Jesus
is appealing to at this point. Just like people would choose
old wine over the new, so if left to our own devices and
submitting to a mindset informed by stingy eyesight, we will
choose the comfort of the old and familiar over the new and
unknown. As much as we like idea of fragrant new wine bursting
out and changing the spiritual landscape in our lives,
families, communities, and corps we must embrace the point of
view of generous eyes or we will return to the old, sometimes
without even noticing, spilling all the potential of the new
wine on the ground.
Old or New; Generous or Stingy? An
honest answer is needed. So, one last point, generous eyes are
not truly comfortable because they are eyes wide open shedding
light every facet of our lives, requiring of us a brutal
honesty that is inescapable but at the same time brings
dynamic Kingdom living. Bottom line is that we can’t cheat on
this one, the Holy Spirit is already nudging us in the
direction we need to move. Let’s lean into it with EYES WIDE
OPEN!
Consider this prayer today…
Again, Jesus, I ask for the generous
eyes you talked about. I am tried of the stifled short
sightedness of stingy eyes that seek to only serve my
preference and maintain my comforts. Help me to see and
perceive the Father’s Kingdom around me, with a depth only
possible through the work of the Holy Spirit in my life.
Jesus, I want new wine skins for the new wine of Holy vision,
the fruit that comes from seeking to see from your
perspective. Give me grace to not be content, or to be enticed
back to the comfort of the old wine, but instead to step
expectantly into the thrilling discomfort of fully embracing
the new. Eyes wide open Jesus, eyes wide open! Amen!
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