We have seen strange things today.
This is what the scribes and pharisees said, after they saw Jesus forgiving the sins of some, and healing others. It also says the crowds were filled with awe and they glorified God. And yet, their concluding sentence was that they had seen strange things that day.
Thinking that the scribes and pharisees were always very devout and wary of Jesus, there’s something about this response that grabs me. After seeing Jesus forgive the sins of some, the scribes and pharisees were aghast, since only God can forgive sins. That is the response I would have expected.
Jesus responds that since they didn’t think he had authority from God for the forgiveness bit, he followed up by causing a lame man to walk. After seeing this healing, amazement seized all of them, they glorified God, and commented that they’d seen strange things.
So despite my impression that they're portrayed as the perennial opponents of Christ, the scribes and pharisees saw this healing, and glorified God. From this, I’m reminded that no one is as one-dimensional as our simplistic brains ascribe. Heroes have short-comings and bad guys aren’t exclusively bad.
More than that, I’m thinking about their sentence, “we’ve seen strange things today”. Strange things is such a great way to describe things we see that we can’t categorize, or that don’t fit in our previously conceived boxes.
I’m seeing a lot of that these days. My sick family member frequently does or says ‘strange things’, telling us about phone conversations they’re having at the moment, but absent any phone. Or conversations with famous people. Or the multitude of conversations going on in their head all the time. In my understanding of ‘normal’, these are all strange. Every day, I’m amazed by the strange things I’ve seen. And yet, strange isn’t bad.
Strange is how we describe something that’s not our norm. A strange hair cut in Ohio might be normal in Oregon. This morning, I’m thinking about how referring to something as strange says more about the observer than the observation. Strange means the observer hasn’t observed this. Or it doesn’t fit. Or it’s not what they’d describe as normal. For the scribes and pharisees to describe Jesus’ actions as strange says more about the scribes and pharisees and their limited world, than it does about what Jesus was doing. Today, I want to observe things I experience without that judgment of strange or normal, of just experiencing what is.
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