Anyone who knows the rules of the street knows that by establishing eye contact one opens himself up to a host of problems. If the eyes meet you can expect:
“Hey man, ya got a smoke?”
“How about a beer?”
“Have ya got spare change?”
“Hey, man. You straight?” and the list of requests goes on..
What happens here is that once people establish eye contact, then the two people become human to each other.
Proverbs says that the pupils are the windows to a man’s soul. In this way we enter into a world that is open, raw and vulnerable.
The strict rules of the streets are that you are not, absolutely not to look into another’s eyes.
If we don’t meet them head-on, then we can label our fellow man as a bum, any of racial slurs, a dead beat, good for nothing….actually any limiting term is good as long as we debase the other person we see as a nuisance or even possible opponent.
In this sense, we actually do NOT want to come face to face. We wish to avoid and elude as we justify, rationalize that our time and money is worth more elsewhere, usually on our own desires.
This identical street rule applies also to God. As long as God was put away someplace in Heaven on His throne, man did not establish eye contact.
The rule breaker of this street law was Jesus. Jesus not only dwelled on this earth but also engaged with common, ordinary people.
The truth of the matter is that Jesus acknowledged all of the people, the crowds, the groups and lost individuals that you and I avoid.
Jesus met his tender, forgiving eyes with all that he encountered, instructing us to do the same.
By following this witness, this was to be the gospel, the mechanism by which others would be introduced to God on this earth.
Insomuch we have all the intellect, the words: we fail in action.
There are a myriad of reasons why we fail to face our fellow man, but on the whole it is because of fear. As a people we are afraid of other people who are different from us, and feel we lack the ability to have anything in common. Too, we loathe the dirt, the filth or smell of those who might be downtrodden, and consider ourselves above them.
The consequence is that ‘God’ walks by them-when you are the messenger. You then are that messenger sent by God to focus on their eyes into their hearts. And when we fail this simple task, God gets relegated back as he was before the advent of Christ and to most will not exist at all.
Hard Times Ministries 