Losing Face, Losing Touch [justin]

She waits outside the dinning hall for him, slightly anxious, checking her anniversary watch every thirty seconds. Tonight he is being honored for fifteen years of faithful work, even though now he is ten minutes late. A man startles her from behind as she fiddles with her watch again. “Sorry I’m late. The barbershop was packed and the tailor had to make some adjustments on the new suit before I left.” She jerks back, shaking her head and he can see in her eyes that she doesn’t know him at the moment. The change of style, anxiousness and unfamiliarity of her surroundings have aided in her loss of sight. “Honey… it’s me…” he takes her left hand and cups it between his two and massaging slightly, “…your husband.” It takes a moment for the touch to secure her, but after their wedding bands click together, she knows him again with a sigh of relief. This hasn’t been the first time the severity of her face blindness has shown up – it won’t be the last. He kisses her and places his arm around her back. “Come on, Love. Follow me.”

The technical name for face blindness is prosopagnosia, which comes from the Greek word for face (prosopon) and the medical term for recognition impairment (agnosia). It’s a condition in which a person has severe difficulty pulling together various aspects of a face and placing them together into a memorable facial identity. This condition is more than the normal occurrence we all experience of forgetting somebody we have briefly met once or twice. For those suffering from face blindness, it can be troublesome to recognize the people they are closest too, including their own children, their own spouse, even their own self.

In his writing, the sometimes popular theologian, John Calvin, said that “Nearly all the wisdom which we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.” These two pillars, knowing God and knowing self, can be glorious and fulfilling as we wrestle with faith and doubt. On the other hand, they are the most complicating, disillusioned, and maddening necessities to pursue. When redemption sparks in a fallen being, it is confusing on so many levels.

There are moments and seasons (even years) when we forget the face of God and coupled with that, ourselves. “Man never achieves a clear knowledge of himself unless he has first looked upon God’s face, and then descends.” (Calvin) The symptoms are assorted and as diverse as we are as individuals.

For some of us cynicism and acedia are spiritual gifts–jaded the new joy. Other’s share with Israel in their wilderness complaint asking to be placed back into the old life of bondage because this freedom and trust craze is harder than anticipated. Thoughts of heaven are awkward because most don’t know how to interact with God unless asking for forgiveness; somewhere along the line we got stuck in a cycle of psuedo-repentance. Tozer says on this, "To say that we have not sinned when we have is to be false to the fact; to insist that we have sinned when we have not is to be false to ourselves." The list goes on… we have all experienced (and will experience) something of the sort. We are often stricken with a type of spiritual prosopagnosia.

Those who experience face blindness need another distinguishing characteristic of a person so that they can remember them. For us as God’s people, and in essence for the world, it is Christ’s wounds that heal us back into remembrance.

I’ve read the text many times before, including Jesus’ encounter with Thomas, but it didn’t hit me until I saw the visual in The Passion of the Christ. During the last few seconds of the film, Gibson shows Jesus’ resurrection. The mind-blowing detail is that Jesus–in His perfect, risen, glorified, walking-thru walls body–still had His wounds. If you think about this in any fashion, it is absolutely astounding. It is as though they were always part of the “true” Him, only revealed to us after His resurrection.

His wounds are His signet that displays Him as friend and King; His wounds are His non-verbal authority that speaks to us in truth and love saying we belong to Him; His wounds are His eternal wedding ring to His bride, which is the Church. His hands alone reveal so much about His character. The prophet Isaiah even says our names are engraved/tattooed/inscribed on His palms.

If the hands and wounds of Jesus are of vital importance to our relationship with Him, to actually knowing God’s countenance, what happens when we lose touch with them?

Society in general is losing touch; it is almost like a digital gnosticism in denying the physical. Emails with spell checkers are replacing hand written letters with their scribbled out art. CD’s are going all digital, leaving you with nothing to lie on your chest as you lay on your bed soaking in new music for the first time. The internet allows us to connect with those on the other side of the world, but we don’t know our neighbors names who are on the other side of the fence. Wives know their way around IM lists and keyboards more than they do their own husbands. Just because the personal assistant has become digital does not mean unfaithfulness has evaporated. Husbands turn on their PDAs and know their way around them better than… well, you get my drift. Some of these might seem like small things and technology is a great convenience, but I can’t help but know that something is missing in this digital age.

Christ’s wounds are an incarnational reality that are always waiting for us to come. Doubting Thomas touched Jesus and declared, “My Lord and my God!” Then Jesus told him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” It is through faith that we can touch His wounds and receive healing from our face blindness. There is no magic formula, only His wounds that beckon us to remember, to know, to lead us into recognizing the face of God again.

Two friends walk down a dirt road together, exchanging conversation, exchanging periods of silence and contemplation. A man they do not recognize approaches them, asking why their faces are so long with grief. They are stunned that the man does not know what has been going on and explain to him the death of Jesus the Nazarene, how they themselves hoped in Him for deliverance but how the religious leaders crucified Him and how, just now on the third day, they are more confused at reports of His tomb being empty. The man, somehow both meek and bold, takes a shot at their ignorance. “Why have you not believed in the scriptures that the Messiah must first suffer before He could be glorified?” He then went through all the scriptures, well into the evening, pointing out the Messiah to them. As the sun was setting, the friends asked the man to stay for dinner. They sat down and in a moment everything changed. As they communed together, as they broke bread together, the bread that is Christ’s body… with hearts burning within, their eyes were opened and the two friends recognized the man as Jesus Himself.