Called to look

the sight that saves

Jun 17, 2026

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-5:05

In Acts 3, Peter and John have a remarkable encounter with a beggar who was lame from birth. He sat every day at the gate called Beautiful, carried there by others, asking money from those passing by. Every day he was seen but not seen. Every day he lived in hope of a few pennies tossed in his direction, or perhaps the leftovers from someone’s lunch, who knows? On the periphery of society, he was a man whose hopes rose no higher than the depths of a passer-by’s pocket.

But this day would be different.

He’s aware of people passing, among whom are Peter and John on their way up to the temple, but he didn’t really see them for who they might be. To him these are just two more men who might possibly take pity on him and throw him a few coins. But these are men whose lives have been reclaimed by the grace of God in his Son, the one whom they know and follow as Jesus the Messiah. They have more to offer him than he could ever have imagined possible. And by the end of their encounter his account has been immeasurably enriched.

It’s a familiar story to many I’m sure. I’d like to pick up on one particular detail. When the man asked Peter and John for money, Luke tells us that “Peter said, ‘Look at us,’ so the man gave them his attention.” He imagined they were asking him to look at them because they had coins to toss in his direction, but this was to be far, far different.

So why did Peter call for the man’s attention?

This beggar is asking for impersonal help. He’s used to being treated by others as less than a fully human being — a problem to solve, a blemish to erase, a cause without celebrity. But he is about to discover that God never sees us through those lenses, not ever. We are people made in his likeness and, just as Peter and John looked straight at him, so the Lord looks on us without refraction or distortion, but with complete coherence and limitless compassion.

The eye-to-eye contact initiated by Peter is the truly beautiful gate through which mercy is going to be extended to this helpless man. It won’t come as an impersonal favour from someone who barely notices he is there, with a coin tossed in the vague direction of a pleading voice. The help he is going to receive will be deliberate and a disclosure of divine goodness, channelled through the direct line of sight.

The whole Bible being addressed to us demands our attention — that we would look and look until the tears dry and our eyes clear. When the LORD compels our gaze, it is not so he can tell us to depart in judgement but to be welcomed by the grace that arrives like the silence between waves, a moment of acute mercy within the movement and momentum of life. We look to him and find his gaze meets ours, his look silencing the clamour of our shame, answering the deepest longings of our hearts to be seen and known, to be held and healed.

John tells us the risen Jesus has eyes that blaze like fire, but those flames are not to consume our being but to purge the dross.1 Other times, his eyes were brim-full of tears, sharing our pain,2 as discovered in story by a boy named Digory:

Up till then he had been looking at the Lion’s great feet and the huge claws on them; now, in his despair, he looked up at its face. What he saw surprised him as much as anything in his whole life. For the tawny face was bent down near his own and (wonder of wonders) great shining tears stood in the Lion’s eyes.3

This is the look that unites us to God in depths of love and kindness, the look that is like a beam along which travels the light of life, the healing for our despairing souls. He looks upon us and calls us to return his gaze. We need not fear doing so.