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I ride the Metro bus from downtown Los Angeles out to the Valley.
People get off, people get on. No one smiles. No one looks
directly at anyone else. Mostly they stare, mesmerized in their
own private thoughts. Some anesthetize themselves with earphones
that tune them into a different world. If you live in a big city,
you understand the averted eyes. You know the fear. So many
people, so close together, and scared to death of smiling.
I see many people on board, some in uniforms, others with packages
from shopping. Still others carrying books to or from a class. But
no smiles.
A smile is a sign of humanity. A sign that we are willing to
communicate. That our sadness, no matter how deep, will not
overcome us. But for many on that bus journey, there is no joy.
Their lives, I suppose, are full of pain and hopelessness.
Trapped.
Trapped in dead-end jobs they do not like.
Trapped in a cycle of unemployment and welfare.
Trapped in marriages.
Trapped in singleness.
Trapped in divorce.
Trapped in widowhood.
Trapped in life.
Trapped.
And without a smile.
A smile, too, is a sign of hope. Of hope in another person. Of
trust. If I smile at you, if I let my personality bridge the
distance between us in a packed city bus, perhaps you'll smile
back. Perhaps you'll connect with me. And so I smile in hope, and
am met with eyes turned away, of body language that protects
itself from those closest by, with a posture designed to avoid
contact, personal contact, on a crowded bus.
The lack of a smile is loneliness personified, I guess. It is not
letting oneself relate. It is being surrounded, but lonely --
desperately lonely -- yet are afraid to smile, for that would
break the loneliness and threaten the solitude. So they do not
smile.
They do not smile, I suppose, mainly out of fear. Fear of me. Fear
of the person next to them. They've heard stories of robberies and
purse-snatchings, of abduction and rape, of people who are not
what they seem. And so they do not smile. Especially on a bus full
of people all headed the same direction. They do not smile. They
are scared to death of smiling.
I wonder how Jesus greeted people? With a grave religiosity? With
a proper reserve? With a clearly defined distance from soiled
humanity? No. He felt the jostling of the crowds. He touched the
unclean. He stopped and inquired, "Who touched me?"
I don't think He was afraid to meet people's eyes with His own. I
think He smiled into their soul a smile of hope that would ignite
hope within them. A smile of friendship and acceptance to
tantalize and then gently unwind that tightly-coiled loneliness. A
smile of fearlessness willing to handle our pent-up hostilities
and agendas and not-so-pure motives.
Jesus, I think, is God's smile towards His world, towards His very
lonely and divided and fearful world. All heading the same
direction on the same crowded bus.
One Man began to smile and refused to stop until He had the
attention of all who dared lift their eyes to His. And then, one
by one, the crowd of people began to smile, too, for His was a
contagious smile, an open smile. And they began to smile with Him
in a new and friendly freedom.
God's smile in Jesus begets faith in us. God's smile through our
faces communicates that faith, as well. And that tenuous faith,
that hope-filled faith, once rooted in a human heart, produces a
joy that cannot suppress an ever-widening smile of its own.
Author: Dr. Ralph F. Wilson