River

The other day as I was in downtown Cleveland I overheard one well-dressed gentlemen ask two others, "Is that the Cleveland River?"  One of the others said, "No, the Cuyahoga."  The first one laughed and said, "Oh, that's the one that caught fire a while back, isn't it?"  They went on from there to talk about the toxicity of various rivers they had known.


Actually, it was in 1969 that the Cuyahoga River caught fire - over forty years ago.  Since then it's been cleaned up, a center of commerce and recreation in downtown Cleveland, and there's even a National Park upstream.  It's a beautiful river now.


And it's a shame that when people from outside the Cleveland area hear the name "Cuyahoga River" they automatically think of its darker days, the lowest point in its history.  They can't seem to move past that and say, "Wow, what a beautiful river!"  They're so focused on the past, what it used to be.


But that's how we all are, I think.  We're so focused on what used to be that we don't look at the present.  I think particularly of some of the Bible characters, whom we name by their original infirmities - "the Gadarene demoniac," "the man born blind," "the ten lepers," and others - as if nothing significant happened to them since they first appear in the Gospel stories.  Yet Jesus met them in their distresses and healed them, every one, so now those labels no longer apply.  Now they are "the Gadarene whom Jesus exorcised," "the man to whom Jesus gave his sight," "the ten men whom Jesus cleansed" and so on.  They praised Him for what He had done, and their lives were changed forever.


Except in the minds of the people around them, and in ours.  The people around them still wanted them to be a demoniac, a blind man, and lepers, and to deal with them in the old ways.  How often do we want to deal with the forgiven, the restored, and the healed as they used to be?  How often do we still hold their sin against them, and our resentments and fears and disgusts, too?


Yet what does Jesus now hold against them?  Only the scars in His hands, I think, as He embraces them with His love.  He can no longer see what they were, only what they have become - beautiful and precious to Him.  If we don't see that beauty that He gives them, but only their sin from long ago; if we see only the demoniac, the blind man, the leper, or the river that caught fire, we're just as ignorant of the love of Jesus as the well-dressed stranger who only knows one bit of the story.