Behold

by Joel Bates

​I had been standing in the dirt spotting for over half an hour and my patience was running thin.  So was everyone else’s.  I think I would have given up if not for the pleading gravity in the adolescent girl’s eyes.  She was thin and plain with shoulder length brown hair, quiet but determined.  I could tell she wanted to make it, wanted to succeed, to cross over from failure to victor.  All she had to do was take a few measly steps across a ten foot log.  It was not just a log, but a swinging horizontal telephone pole designed to be difficult on purpose for even the most well-balanced individuals.  The girl was not well balanced, but what she lacked in agility she made up for in heart.  We all wanted to see her succeed.  

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I had watched and spotted with my hands out, palms up, thumbs in ready along with everybody else in her group to catch her if she took an errant step off the pole that dangled just a foot above the ground.  When her eyes beaded with tears, I knew it was time to employ some facilitative assistance.  I didn’t steady her by the arm or hold the log from swaying.  I gave her more powerful help when I simply told her to “look” at the platform across the way, to the place where she was trying to get. 

​She threw me a questioning glance.  I held two fingers to my eyes and gestured toward the destination.  She locked onto the target, and began her umpteenth tight-rope style walk across the log.  She didn’t look down or around from side to side but straight ahead.  As her youth group and I watched with held breath, we nearly forgot to spot her along the way, because to our amazement she was making it.  Suddenly to an uproarious cheer she reached the far side of the swinging log, grasped with all her might around a supporting tree and heaved with tears of joy.  Later that day as I led a group discussion I asked her what had made the difference.  “When I lifted my gaze and looked ahead, I made it,” she said as understanding began to dawn on her. ​

​To simply “look,” is more powerful an action than we realize.  It works to help us steady our focus to cross a wobbling log, but it also has deeply spiritual implications as well.  The concept of looking is a strong metaphor in scripture.  Matthew 6:22 tells us the eye is the lamp of the body.  In Psalm 121 the psalmist says, “I lift up my eyes to the mountains—where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth."  Hebrews 12:2 tells us to “Fix our eyes on Jesus.”  In John 1:46, Nathaniel expresses skepticism about Jesus being the Messiah, and Philip responds, "Come and see," inviting him to meet Jesus.  Using our eyes to look is a theme found all over in scripture, but the other night as I sat with my family reading the word for advent, tears welled up in mine as I pondered a familiar "looking" passage.

It’s the commonest of Christmas scripture passages, one we hear read over nativity scenes and hear pronounced at every church Christmas pageant heralded by front-toothless eight-year-old's in ill-fitting white robes.  It’s so little a word that some bible translations don’t even use it—the word “behold.”  Sounds old fashion, highfalutin, and peculiar enough to gloss over, but it took my breath away when I read it. 

It’s the scene with the angels in the fields lighting up the night sky and scaring the bejezus out of some woebegone shepherds.  An angel says, “Do not be afraid.  Behold.  I bring you good tidings of great joy”  (Lk 2:10).  We know what’s coming next in the story and usually my mind rushes ahead to the stable, a couple of newly wedded fools who have agreed to attempt to raise the messiah and a swaddled baby king laying in a mule’s feed trough.  But we need to suspend our heart and mind for a moment on what the angel is saying because his instructions for the shepherds is a command for us as well.  “Fear not, but Behold.” 

​In this particular biblical passage the word “behold,” is rendered in the greek from the word ido, meaning to see.  However, according to Strong’s Concordance, the angel delivers it in “second person, singular imperative, middle voice.”  Whew, that’s a mouthful, but what’s the significance.  It’s like the angel says, “Hey you!  Yeah you!  See here!  Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”  The angel is commanding or maybe inviting, but he's also participating with the shepherds in seeing, experiencing and beholding what is taking place—the inauguration of the salvation of the world.  It’s as if the angels themselves just found out and are bursting to tell someone.  

The best way I can describe it is that it’s like the time I was hiking in the Grand Canyon with friends and we’d been hiking so long that I was wearily staring down at the hard-packed trail—one tired foot in front of the other—when suddenly I bumped into the person in front of me because they had abruptly stopped.  “Hey?  What give’s?” I was about to say, when they grasped my forearm and wordlessly drew my attention aloft to the sheer cliffs of the canyon wall, towering over us and glowing gold in the late day sun.  A crescent moon hung above the cliffs dotted by stars in a deep purple sky.  All of us just stood there silent, forgetting our aching legs and empty bellies and the miles ahead, just silently marveling at the sight, drinking in the view, being utterly present in the majesty of that moment--beholding. 

​You may be wobbling along off balance and needing to look.  You may be floundering in the midst of the Holiday season, overwhelmed and needing to fix your eyes on something joyful.  You may be simply trudging along, eyes down, leaning into the work of life and needing to lift your gaze.  Whatever the looking and seeing you are in need of, join the angelic messenger, the shepherds, Mary and Joseph and the rest of creation as you come alongside the manger, and do more than just look for the hundredth time at a helpless baby wrapped in swaddling clothes; take a moment to behold the savior.  

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For to us a child is born, to us a son is given…
 Isaiah 9:6