Essay: Jesus with Eyes Wide Open

Abraham Lincoln and my granddaughter Emma have gotten me curious about Jesus. I mean, about Jesus’s curiosity.

It started when I was reading the review of a new biography which noted that Lincoln’s closest friends and associates

“recalled him as a man of boundless curiosity for whom ‘life was a school.’ ”

That reminded me of Emma.  She’s just turning four, and she’s always been filled with an inexhaustible desire to take in and understand — to touch and feel and experience — this world she’s found herself born into.   

When she was two, we were at the park one day, she and I, and she was riding on a swing, an activity she delighted in.  And, from her perch on the moving swing, she spent the time looking all around her: Over at the street nearby where she’d note every truck passing by.  Over at the slide and the older kids who were climbing, hanging and sliding there. Through the buildings along one street where she could see glimpses of elevated trains on their way toward or away from Chicago’s Loop. At every doggie — “goggie” — she could spot. 

Emma was taking it all in and relishing the fun of putting together all these pieces of life into patterns and arrangements to help her comprehend how this connects with that, how these are like those, and so on.  And, more important, her own place in this place called Earth.

Curiosity of the saints and of Jesus

Curiosity, it seems to me, is a hallmark of humanity. Even so, I’ve known some people who weren’t very curious, people who were going through life with blinders on.  That strikes me as a narrow way of living.

When I think of the saints, official and unofficial, I have the sense that they were as open to the fullness of life as Emma has always been, as Lincoln was — Francis of Assisi, Dorothy Day, Martin de Porres, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Theresa of Avila, Therese of Lisieux, to name a few. They woke up every day with fresh eyes, eyes hungry for the world God created — and for the people in this world, all the people, old and young, poor and rich.

I’m no mystic, but I try to be as open to life as I can be.  And that’s how I picture Jesus.

Remember the story in Luke’s gospel about how, when Jesus was 12, his family visited the Temple in Jerusalem? When Joseph and Mary headed back to Nazareth, the boy, unknown to them, stayed behind and spent at least three days with the teachers there, sitting in their midst, “listening to them and asking them questions.”

I think this story (Luke 2: 41-52) is usually used to show that Jesus knew a lot already at that age, and I’m sure there’s something to that.  But, for me, it’s more a story of the boy’s curiosity.  He was, like Lincoln, hungry for “every morsel of human existence.”

Wondering about mustard seeds

Or think about that parable Jesus tells about the mustard seed (Matthew: 13: 31-32).  As I picture it, he’s sitting there and maybe holding one of those tiny, tiny seeds when he says, “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that a person took and sowed in a field.  It is the smallest of seeds, yet when full-grown it is the largest of plants.”

How does Jesus know about mustard seeds?  He’s a carpenter after all, not a farmer.  And how does he know what happens, as he relates in another parable, when seeds are sown on different sorts of soils? 

It’s got to be his curiosity.  I imagine him listening to farmers grousing about trying to plant seeds in rocky ground.  I imagine him, at some time well before he told this parable, pondering a mustard seed in his hand and marveling — enjoying the thrill of realizing — that it explodes, in the slow motion of nature, into a huge tree.

He’s open to revelation from the smallest of God’s creation.  And to people of all sorts, even those who were outcasts in his Jewish culture.

“Even the dogs”

There’s the story in Mark’s gospel about a Gentile mother who goes to ask Jesus to cast a demon out of her daughter (Mark 7:24–30). At first, Jesus responds in a rather cold and even insulting manner:

“Let the children [the Jewish people] be satisfied first, for it is not good to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.”

It’s something of a slap in the face to her, but, with what Bible scholar Wendy Cotter calls “sweet wit,” the mother says,

“Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”

This catches the attention of Jesus, not just her riposte, but even more the justice of her petition.  Jesus hears her. Not just the sounds of her words but the validity of what she has said.

And he changes his mind. He tells her: “For this saying, you may go — the demon has left your daughter.”

A human being who had to learn

This openness of heart and openness of mind that Jesus exhibits is a key element of curiosity.  My granddaughter will never learn anything if she isn’t open to learning. 

Jesus was a human being who had to learn about life, just as Emma is learning.  And, even as an adult, he kept this openness to learning, this profound curiosity — even to the point, in this case, of acknowledging that he had been wrong in his initial dismissal of the mother.

Picture Jesus as the wedding feast at Cana.  I see a young single guy in his early 30s intensely interested in all that he sees and hears and smells. He takes in the feel of the party, its rhythm, the mood of the people who are dancing, the emotions on the faces of those men and women along the wall.

He is alive to all that is around him, including, with a nudge from his mother, the dwindling wine supply.  He is intensely alive.  As curious about everything as, well, a newborn baby.

Or think of Jesus on the cross.  Amid all his suffering and dejection and the knowledge of his approaching death, he looks out from that vantage and sees his mother and the other women and John the beloved disciple there.  He looks out at the faces of those in the crowd, some bitter, some pained, many just watching a show.

Even in dying, Jesus is intensely alive, intensely observant of what is happening around him.  What’s the point of becoming human if not to be fully present to all that life brings, even death?

Jesus, it seems to me, walked through life with his eyes wide open and faced his death with the same wide eyes. 

As his follower, I’m called to the same intense engagement with the world and its people, called to share the curiosity of Christ.

Patrick T. Reardon

6.6.23

A shorter version of this essay originally appeared in National Catholic Reporter on 5.13.23.