I once preached a sermon during a Good Friday service called “The Optics of Grace”. In that sermon, I pointed out how optics can fool us and cause us to miss what’s actually happening. Jesus is on the cross, bloodied and bruised, and hanging between two thieves. As the Scriptures say in Isaiah 53:5 (NLT):

“But He was pierced for our rebellion, crushed for our sins. He was beaten so we could be whole. He was whipped so we could be healed.”

Jesus hanging on the cross looked like anything but grace. The optics of the moment suggests that the man on the cross is guilty. Not only are the optics wrong, but this moment of supposed terror is saving our very souls. It doesn’t look like it in the moment. The truth wouldn’t be fully realized until 3 days later.

In our current form as humans, we have fallen in love with the optics of things. When we love or hate what things look like on the surface, we lose our ability to investigate. We lose our abilities to look beneath the surface.

Many preachers have shouted the church on optics alone, without any substance. Catchphrases, Scriptures, and even illustrations and props cause a lot of emotions, and while there are certainly some exceptions, there are times when the presentations of some fail to give the people anything substantive on the chosen text to apply to their lives. They’re emotionally charged, but spiritually malnourished in the moment.

Many a marriage has been deemed successful because of the optics of the wedding or social media posts, and not the substance of lived experiences. We’ve fallen in love with the optics of celebrity marriages – marriages that are often put together to advance careers or that rarely last – instead of looking at people that we come into contact with on a regular basis, people that have been married for decades, that can give us some sound and practical insight on how to make a marriage work.

It’s true in sports and in politics where we love performative acts over actual action and results. We assume energy to be accurate, and we assume slow and deliberate to be ineffective. We assume that championships can be won in one summer of manipulation and piecing together teams, as opposed to assembling talent, allowing it to gel, and in time, you will get the prize through hard work and perseverance. We want to see a good show, even if it’s failing behind the scenes. We want what it looks like, not what it’s actually supposed to be. We no longer love success like we used to. We love the optics.

It’s been both said and shown that the wealthiest people in this country walk around anonymously. Not because they don’t know what to do, but in fact, because they do. They understand that they’re not wealthy because they know how to “flex”. They’re wealthy because they know what to DO. They don’t need to prove their worth to people that don’t know how to look beneath the surface. If we can’t see beyond optics, it’s our problem, not theirs.

Some of the most biblically astute people that you will ever meet have never set foot inside of a seminary. They’re well read, well versed, and anointed. But without the optics of paperwork, they are often overlooked and undervalued by the community around them because their actual knowledge wasn’t proven in a classroom in front of instructors and peers.

The statement “can’t see the forest for the trees” suggests that we miss the beauty or the fullness of the forest because we’re focused too much on the trees we see. It suggests that when we focus only on what our eyes tells us is there, we miss everything else that the forest is offering us. I would caution us today to stop falling for optics. We claim to be so well versed these days, and all it takes is for something to be packaged properly (or improperly), and we’re thrown into chaos.

As someone that has worked in television in the past, I can assure you that facts never determined how a story was presented to the audience. While we may have had the facts on hand, we presented things from angles so that the viewer saw what we wanted them to see. If they stumbled upon the truth, so be it, but the point was to draw people in and allow them to see the facts, but on our terms. In that way, the truth may or may not be lost, but that wasn’t our cause or our care. Our cause and care was optics.

Sometimes we’re our own worst enemies. Not because someone changed the optics. But because we refused to dig. Because we failed to understand that most of what we see is never what it looks like. It looked pretty bad on Good Friday. But Resurrection Sunday still came. Now we tell the story, not based on what it looked like in the moment, but based on what happened in the end.