Dan Cruver on 'Seeing Jesus' and the Global Orphan Crisis

I came across the article below at Zach Nielson's blog. This was originally posted at Together for Adoption by Dan Cruver. I rejoice in this kind of thinking and agree wholeheartedly.


"Seeing Much More than Statistics"

We’ve all seen the statistics. There are more than 143,000,000 orphaned and vulnerable children in our world. I remind myself of that number every day.

All of us agree that we need more than statistics to awaken the church to address the global orphan crisis. We rightly say, “We need to see faces, images of these easily forgotten children. If the church is to be mobilized to care for these children, we must seem them as much more than statistics. We must see them as living, breathing image bearers.”

But I’m convinced we would also all agree that we need to see more than actual pictures and video clips of the orphaned and vulnerable children of our world, as important as those images are. If the church is to be fully mobilized to address the global orphan crisis, what we most need to see is not simply the face of an orphan but the face of Jesus.

We are all very familiar with these words of Jesus: “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me . . . Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’ (Matthew 25:35-40).
Jesus’ words tell us that when we look into the face of the orphan or the face of the sick and oppressed, we are to see more than their faces. We are to see his.

But as critically important as it is for us to see the face of Jesus when we look into the face of an orphan, if Jesus’ face is all we see, we have not looked nearly carefully enough.

Jesus spoke the words of Matthew 25 just two days before he was “delivered up to be crucified” (see Matthew 26:1-2). When Jesus made the profound statement that we give him drink when we give water to the thirsty, he was about to thirst like no man has ever thirst before or since (John 19:28).

When Jesus said, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me,” he was soon to become the outcast of all outcasts (Hebrews 13:12). Jesus was crucified among “strangers, the afflicted, and prisoners, who live outside the mainstream of urban life” (Craig Koester, Hebrews, 571).

When Jesus said,“I was naked and you clothed me,” he knew that he would first have to be left to die in nakedness at the cross before those words could become a reality for us.

The only way Jesus could say, “as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me,” is if he first suffered an unquenchable thirst, an unsatisfiable hunger, an unspeakable forsakenness at the cross for us. Jesus suffered these things so that he could deliver us from our self-satisfied, self-focused, self-indulgent, orphan-neglecting, needy-ignoring lives.

Only when we see the crucified and risen face of Jesus in the Gospel will we be fully mobilized to address the global orphan crisis.

Yes, when we look into the face of an orphan, we need to see Jesus. But before we look into the face of an orphan, we need to be melted by the face of the crucified and risen Jesus as displayed for us in the Gospel. Only then will we really be able to move beyond statistics to care for the children they represent.