I have a delightful book by Chinese painter and essayist, Chiang Yee, entitled The Silent Traveler in London. It was written in 1938 while the Japanese were raping their way through Manchuria, and the Germans were pulling off the Aunschluss.  It was a scary time to be Chinese or British, but the book is about none of that.  Chiang Yee doesn’t read headlines, or lean closer to the wireless to hear the latest from the BBC. HE writes about what a quiet man with opened eyes might see in London.  He sees swans in Kew Gardens, bookshops on Charing Cross Road, moonlight on Hampstead Heath, and fog.  He loves the changing colors and textures of London’s famous fog.

He recounts being taken by a friend to the top of the tower of Westminster Abbey to view the city. When they get to the top all they can see is fog. He couldn’t have been more happy.  He waits for the fog to roll in again (it isn’t a long wait) to get the same view.  The lift operator doesn’t want him to waste his money on a worthless view. “Don’t waste your shilling on nothing,” he advises. “That nothing is exactly what I want to see,” Yee replies.  It is the same fog – worthless to the tired Londoner, heaven to a Chinese ink-brush artist.

I have the book because it was given to me in a discarded box by a guy back in Ohio.  His wife’s great-uncle had been a Presbyterian minister, and somehow this guy came into possession of his library. The guy discarding the boxes of books was a self-taught Biblical languages type on a crusade to rehabilitate the image of the KJV, so the subset of books he deemed of value was awfully small.  He unceremoniously dumped three large boxes of books onto my office floor and said: “There may be a few here you would want, but most of it is just junk.”  It was a treasure trove of books out of print, books I’d been looking for for ages, books I’d never heard of but are favorites now. Chiang Yee’s book itself was not unlike the London fog he wrote about and painted – nothing to one, something quite special to someone else.

When Jesus finally discussed the death of his cousin, John the Baptist, he began by asking the crowd “What did you go out to see? A reed shaken by the wind? A man dressed in soft clothing? A prophet?” (Luke 7.24ff). He asks them three times not what they saw, but what they went out to see.  This makes all the difference.  Jesus tells them who actually was there – the greatest man yet to live, but not so great a man as the least in the kingdom. Jesus addresses their perceptions of Him as well.  They see what they want to see.  John the Baptist was an ascetic, and they say he had a demon.  Jesus is social and outgoing and they call him a glutton and drunkard. They are as fickle and prejudiced as children.  The missed the significance of John because they were looking for something else.  They are doing the same to Jesus.

Albert Schweitzer’s famous book The Historical Jesus concludes that when scholars try to reconstruct the historical Jesus, Jesus always ends up reflecting the values of the scholar. It is supposed to be the other way around.  If we go to the gospels to find a rabbi, a healer, a social reformer, a friend, a hero, a prophet, a shepherd, an educator, a wise man, or a sacrificial lamb we will surely find him.  But will we be satisfied to find only what we went looking for in the first place?

“Who are you looking for?” Jesus asks.

“Whoever is there, whoever you are” we answer – or at least we should.