Grace Sees

Grace sees and refuses to blink. For one woman, grace happened as she knelt in dirt at the feet of Jesus. More out of shame than humility, her collapse was less intention than reflex.  Not far from the two of them, mob stares inflicted greater pain to her than did the threat of the rocks they grasped in angry hands.  It was not so much the words they used that was the vocabulary of that awful moment, it was the abject absence of dignity. Perhaps the lowest act of inhumanity is simply to withhold dignity.  Sticks and stones may break my bones, but inhumanity may destroy me. No doubt this woman had entered and lingered in adulthood without being recognized as valuable. Passed from one to the other, she was never held by someone as sacred, only held in the process of being used. She'd grown accustomed to the shame, but refused to be comfortable with the same.  That's when she heard of this healing teacher. Not just a teacher who healed, but someone who restored even as he inspired; someone who returned all that had been taken.  She fought her fears. Could this be one more more instance of something that seemed too good to be true? She had heard those lines before, promises of love, lying eyes behind the flattery.  Or was this man different?  Was the healing teacher sent from God? Was it possible that he was God himself? So, she cast herself before him, not so much that she had nothing to lose, but that she was willing to gamble on this one chance to win. She knew what it was like to lose. Her life had been a succession of losing choices, losing relationships, losing moments.  A life lost in quicksand of regret. So, she rolled the dice on one opportunity to be real, her one chance to be herself rather than the object that others had recreated in their own image and for their own pleasure.

No one knows for sure what Jesus stopped to write in the dirt on that awful awesome day. Many speculate he scrawled a litany of sins that the accusers were forced to recognize as their own. Others propose that Jesus used a finger to indent a scripture in the sand. I choose to believe he did something entirely different and something more meaningful to her than anyone could have imagined -- he wrote her name. And in so doing, he gave back to her her heart. Here is one thing each of us can do for the outcast.  Irregardless of cause and effect, the one gift we hold at the ready for every human being is to ascribe worth, acknowledging human value through eye contact, spoken word, calling someone by name. To be Jesus is more often than not, simply to say with our eyes "I see you, and you matter."