Moses Mendelssohn, the grandfather of the well-known German composer Felix Mendelssohn, was a renowned Jewish philosopher. He was also far from handsome. Along with being short of stature, he had a severe hunchback.

It’s said that one day he visited a merchant in Hamburg who had a lovely daughter named Frumtje. Moses fell hopelessly in love with her, but Frumtje was repulsed by his appearance. She simply couldn’t bring herself to look upon him, whether to protect her eyes or his feelings.

When it came time for him to leave, Moses gathered his courage and climbed the stairs to her room to take one last opportunity to speak with her. She was a vision of heavenly beauty but caused him deep sadness by her refusal to look at him. After several attempts at conversation, Moses shyly asked, Do you believe marriages are made in heaven?

Frumtje was stirred by some deep memory. She reached out and gave Mendelssohn her hand and later became his devoted wife.[1]

Getting beneath the surface to the soul of a person takes insight more than sight. It takes the eyes of the heart more than the eyes of the head. But we are a superficial people.

Even the exalted prophet of Israel, Samuel, needed to learn this way of seeing with the eyes of God. As God’s most reliable agent in Israel, Samuel had judged the people righteously in earlier days. But when the people demanded a king so that they could be like all the other nations, God sent Samuel to anoint Saul as the first king of Israel. Saul was everything everyone might want in a king. He was tall and handsome, appealing in every way. He was probably head and shoulders above everyone else in stature and in stature—probably like our own George Washington. He was the kind of man who looked like a natural leader. But his monarchy soured from the inside out. He turned out to be a self-absorbed leader more concerned with his own position than the people he served or the God he worshiped.

And so God sends Samuel to find a new king whom God would select. Our text takes us to the home of Jesse who had eight sons. When Samuel arrives, he doesn’t reveal his intention immediately. He tells Jesse that he intends to offer a sacrifice to the Lord and has him call his sons to join them. When the boys are paraded before him, Samuel assumes the firstborn is the one. Firstborns are assumed even now to be born leaders, because they are often looked up to by their siblings and often feel responsible for their younger brothers and sisters. But not always. Sometimes they can have a sense of entitlement, unconcerned with anyone else’s point of view, assuming that the world revolves around them the way the family did in the first years of their life.

Eliab is not the one. He must have looked enough like Saul that Samuel thought him presidential—I mean kingly. But God says, Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature,… for the Lord does not see as mortals do; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.

Mortals look on outward appearance. No kidding. This may be the most pernicious prejudice in our society. Tall people don’t have to work as hard to prove leadership ability as short people, thin people are assumed to be more disciplined and reliable than heavy people, and beautiful people have huge advantages over others just in getting attention for doing nothing. If a short man seems confident and assertive, he may a Napoleon complex. We don’t have a similar phrase for tall people. You don’t hear about a Goliath complex. And while eating right and exercising are important to good health, overweight people might have family history they are battling. And the thing about beauty is that most people think if they don’t have it, they can buy it. Cosmetics, silicone, collagen, botox: we could go on and on. And the beauty industry wants us to go on and on, don’t you know?!

Why do we want to go on and on? Because we agree with the judgment of mortals instead of the judgment of God. Even in the ministry, we have this problem. Some of you have a hard time figuring how to compliment ministers on our staff, especially the women ministers, especially the female residents, without commenting on how cute they are, what they are wearing, whatever. You may not mean anything by it but affirmation, but sometimes it makes one wonder whether even in the church it’s the outward more than the inward that counts. Let me encourage you to look deeper and find a way to speak about competency, sensitivity, character, and skill. Martin Luther King, Jr., dreamt that one day his four little children would live in a world where they would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Women feel that way, too. Large and small people, too. Unattractive people, too. Ask yourself whether you are judging from the outside in or the inside out.

When we look for evidence of call to ministry from among young people, or when seminaries recruit students, or when we recruit pastoral residents for our program here, or when search committees recruit pastors for churches, the tendency is to seek “the best and the brightest.” But how do you measure “best” and “brightest”? It’s not appearance or social skills or test scores, even if those help. It’s something less obvious, something inside, something having to do with something we normally don’t know how to measure.

Look again at what happens when Samuel looks at Jesse’s sons, and then look at Jesus when he looks at the blind man. One by one Jesse leads his sons to Samuel, and one by one Samuel senses somehow that none has what it takes, whatever that is. Finally, Samuel asks if Jesse has any other sons. Yes, the eighth son, David. David is out in the fields tending sheep. Samuel sends for him, and David comes before him. Samuel sees that he is ruddy, which some think means he had a sunburned complexion and others that he was a redhead. He had beautiful eyes, we are told, which may speak to his vitality. And he was handsome. So apparently, David had some outward appearance going for him also. But more than likely, he was not tall. And how tall he would ever become is unknown, but he was probably short at this point because he was so young. Josephus, the Jewish historian of antiquity, says he was ten years old at the time. Others think he may have been as old as fifteen. Either way, he was a boy. And either way, we are confronted with one more thing that challenges us—age; or as Hillary Clinton would say, experience.

We are not told anything about his character. A few chapters earlier, we are told that the Lord had selected as the new king “a man after God’s own heart,” but we are not told who that is or what that means. Later we find out that David had slain a lion and a bear that had come out against his father’s sheep and that he had the courage therefore to stand up to Goliath the giant. We find that he had a gift for friendship, as he and Jonathan became closer than a man and woman. And we learn that he was full of compassion and mercy, playing the harp for the king when madness struck Saul, and sparing the king’s life when he could have killed him, even as Saul sought to kill David.

Whether these are qualities that made him a man after God’s own heart, we can only guess. It was certainly not that he would be a perfectly moral and upright character. He was a man of war, bloodthirsty and cold at times. He was a lousy father and a terrible husband. But he did respond to the prophets who told him the will of God and what would please the Lord.

And that leads us to the blind man. When the disciples see him, they don’t really see a man; they see a man who is blind. They ask about how he became blind. Blindness, in other words, defined the man. Likewise, after he was healed and could see, his neighbors asked if this wasn’t the man who had been a beggar. Some thought it only looked like him but must not be him. Again, to them he was the beggar and always would be.

Jesus saw with the eyes of God. He saw what Samuel saw in David: more than meets the eye. He saw a man with the potential to be more. He saw a man whose life could bring glory to God. Jesus would not bite on the disciples’ questions about why the man was blind. He only pointed to the man’s potential to glorify God. And the man proved that by doing something Jesus told him to do, he would be able to see. If he washed in the pool of Siloam, which he had sat near, begging as a blind man, his entire life, he would be able to see. He obeyed, trusting not in his own experience but in the word of the Lord.

Seeing begins with obedience to God. What’s in a person is what matters most; God sees that before we do. When we learn to live from the inside out and learn to see people that way, things on the outside sometimes change. The blind man sees when he obeys. David becomes a king when he does the will of God. God is glorified by those who do God’s will, not by those who look glorious themselves or look to glorify themselves.

Abraham Lincoln was an ugly man. He was tall but gangly, sort of an Ichabod Crane. But remarkably, the legend of his poor looks was revised by those who knew and admired him. If you search the Internet, as I did this week, looking for testimonies about Lincoln’s appearance, you will find something surprising: the more nobility others saw in him, the more they commented about his peculiar good looks. They began to see in his deformities something of unusual grace and beauty.

If the church wants to bear witness to the glory of God among us, we can do so by learning to see one another as God does, not as mortals do. Here we value those who make themselves available to God for whatever service they are called to. Here we look beneath the surface to find that more than meets the eye. Here we learn to see as God sees. Or here, at least, we try.

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