Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they will see God.
Matthew 5:8
What we see reveals what we are inside. To the pure all things are pure and it is the pure in heart who are promised to see God. Maybe we don’t see God active around us because we are not acting purely ourselves? If purity is an inside job, then our actions will reflect that. Conversely when our actions are impure, our sinful nature is revealed.
How often is the light from the inside blurred because we have acted impurely outwardly? Christ is veiled when we fail. It is vitally important for us to fight for the Light to shine from within us and this is best done when our actions do not throw shade on Christ.
We must start treating others purely from a purity viewpoint. We cannot look at others any other way. If we look at people with impurity in our hearts, we will treat them as such. Looking at one another as brothers and sisters in Christ and treating everyone as they are children of God will reveal that we ourselves are pure in heart.
How is your heart?
How do you look at and treat others? With contempt? With lust? With envy? With bitterness? With purity?
What do your actions reveal about how you view God?
Jesus himself models the point that you are making.
Luke 7:36-50: Simon the Pharisee, an authority figure in the Jewish community, has Jesus over for dinner. A woman known publicly to be a sinner arrives to anoint Jesus’s feet. Foot-washing was done as a matter of course in a socially solid home by the lowest servant, but in fact Simon *did not* have his servant wash Jesus’s feet. Frankly, that oversight was insulting to Jesus according to the standards of the day, even moreso because the rituals of hospitality were among the most important obligations upon a host. Simon’s supposed to be the honorable one, but it is the sinner who fulfills the duty of hospitality–washing Jesus’s feet with her own tears, drying his feet with her hair, anointing his feet so lavishly as to be described as wasteful.
Simon looks on in horror. “If this man were a prophet, he would know who is touching him and what kind of woman she is.” In terms of Jewish religious purity laws, her touch itself would make Jesus ritually impure, in contrast with her act of washing.
Nothing was right about this situation. Jesus should have been washed by his host’s servant. This woman was entirely unsuitable to touch a prophet. And possibly most scandalous: an itinerant prophet from backwoods Galilee had no business forgiving anyone’s sin. By the social and religious standards of his time and place, Jesus was the wrong guy, she was the wrong girl, the act was the wrong thing done by the wrong person. But Jesus does not look with the same eyes that Simon does. Jesus looks with the eyes of purity, and he sees what her actions truly reflect.
Sometimes it’s not the “right person” who does the right thing. But whether the right person or not, it can be the pure thing. Socially, that night at Simon’s was a disaster. But to this day that night echoes in the halls of eternity: an act of love by the wrong person for the wrong man is held up to us as an ideal of love.
Never make the perfect the enemy of the good. Look with eyes of purity rather than the eyes of the world.