GREAT THINGS ENTERPRISE
CLAUDE BLACK
Mark 8:19
Seeing but not Seeing
“Where is it?” I asked Alice when she told me to be sure to bring the calendar as we prepared to leave for an appointment. “It’s on the counter,” she answered. So I looked on the counter, but there was no calendar there. “Are you sure?” I asked her. “I didn’t see a calendar.” As if she were leading a horse to water, I followed her back to the counter. There, in the center of the counter, was the calendar, but it was folded. I was accustomed to seeing it open so that the whole month was visible, not folded like a notebook—an instance of seeing but not seeing.
On December 7, 1941, radar operators watched their screens and saw blips on the radar. They conveyed the information to a lieutenant, who dismissed the radar data as the approach of a scheduled flight of U.S. Army B-17 bombers arriving from California. They saw the blips and yet didn’t perceive the approach of enemy aircraft. In another case, engineers had photographic and physical evidence of damage to the solid rocket booster O-rings on some previous flights, but they didn’t perceive the danger until January 28, 1986, when the O-rings failed on the Challenger Space Shuttle—a tragic example of seeing but not seeing.
On a boat trip across the Sea of Galilee, Jesus warned his disciples about the leaven of the Pharisees, but they didn’t grasp the meaning of his warning. So he helped them see what they were not seeing. “‘When I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many baskets full of fragments did you take up?’ They said to him, ‘Twelve.’” (Mark 8:19) The disciples were there. They saw the five loaves and a few small fish expand to feed five thousand. They gathered up twelve baskets full of fragments—after five loaves and a few small fish fed five thousand or more people, and they gathered twelve baskets of fragments—and they still didn’t seem to grasp the essential significance of the event. “Think,” Jesus was telling them, “think about what you saw but didn’t see.”
We ought not to be too hard on the disciples; after all, it is not uncommon for people to visually observe or experience something but fail to perceive or understand its significance—what some writers call “selective perception.” A common prayer of mine is, “Father, open my eyes that I might see.”
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