In His Name Devotionals
THE TEAR FROM GOD’S EYE
In His Name Devotionals
THE TEAR FROM GOD’S EYE
One of the wonderful things about art is its subtle ambiguities—the smile of the Mona Lisa; a poet’s turn of phrase; the haunting refrain of a piece of music; or a stunning visual metaphor in a movie. It is precisely the ambiguity of these words, sounds, and sights that creates multiple interpretations.
Toward the end of Mel Gibson’s THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST there is a scene that caught one man completely off-guard. He later wrote: “Since I had read the book before going to see the movie, I knew the story line. The central characters were identifiable. Even the subtler references to persons and events not detailed in the movie were easy to pick up. But one jolted me.
“With Jesus lifted up on the cross, there is a distant and strange new camera angle. It is not a panorama of the hillside. It is not the crowd through Jesus’ eyes. It is a glimpse from what I first thought was outer space! It seemed that we were looking in on Earth from Mars or the moon. I was disoriented and raced in my mind to figure out what was happening.
“Then it appeared that something other than a line of sight was closing in on the scene at Golgotha. The camera was focusing, but it was following something. It is a crystal sphere of some sort, I thought. No, it is the first drop of a rainstorm that is about to pelt the ground. It was neither!
“It was a single tear—falling from millions of miles away, landing at the base of the cross—initiating a shudder on Planet Earth that rattled temple and courtroom, marketplace and home, the living and the dead. It was a tear from the eye of God Almighty—seeing and caring and grieving from His throne.”
“I have no idea if my interpretation is the director’s intent. You may have seen the very same moment in the film and viewed it altogether differently. But my take on it is right—for me.”
Having been reared to despise ambiguity, some seek and defend the single correct way to interpret everything. In the scientific model of their generation, there was a formula that generated the right outcome. In their religious world, there was one true reading of every text that eliminated every other. But is that really so?
It is not simply art that is filled with enigmatic phrases and metaphors. Life itself is a series of snapshots set in a narrative for which God alone has total context. Some in our culture have put themselves in His place to see and read, interpret and conclude, judge and pronounce. Perhaps some of us have not thought enough about the humility appropriate to our station as frail mortals.
Is it off the mark to imagine such as that giving birth to a tear in God’s eye?
