The Christ in Every Story
It happens without warning, in the grocery store line, at the playground, in the slow flow of a Saturday farmer’s market. My eyes land on a stranger, and something in me wonders: If I could see with the eyes of Christ, what would I see right now?
Would I see a man walking upright, or the Christ in him stumbling under the crushing beam of a rough-hewn cross, splinters tearing into His shoulders, sweat and blood mingling as each step jars through His body? Would I see a woman quietly bagging her vegetables, or the Christ in her kneeling in a shadowed garden, sweating drops of surrender before a cup she wishes would pass? Would I see a child chasing bubbles, or the Christ in them laughing in the radiant light of Easter morning?
When I look at the world this way, everyone becomes a living gospel scene. The streets are Golgotha and Gethsemane, the marketplace hums with tombs and gardens, and every soul, whether they know it or not, is in the story.
This, I believe, is what Jesus meant when He spoke of the haplous eye:
“The eye is the lamp of the body; if your eye is haplous, your whole body will be full of light.” (Matthew 6:22)
The Greek word haplous means single, whole, undivided. It’s the eye that sees without separation—no sacred versus secular, no saved versus lost, no “us” and “them.” It is the undivided gaze that looks at the world and sees no one as outside the reach of God, no soul as separate from the Body of Christ.
The Christ Before Time
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” John opens his gospel not with a manger, but with a mystery: a Christ who predates Bethlehem, a Logos that breathed galaxies into being. This Logos—the divine pattern, the primordial blueprint—has never been absent. It flowed through the first rivers, sang in the first birdsong, sparked the first human heartbeat. It was there in Eden’s unbroken garden, there in the wandering of Israel, there in the breath that filled Mary’s womb.
When we speak of Jesus, we speak of the Christ made flesh, the eternal Word taking on skin and bone so that humanity might see, hear, and touch the divine pattern. Jesus revealed in His life what had been true since the first light: that God has never been far away. But the story does not end at the ascension, nor does it pause until a distant “Second Coming.” As Fr. Richard Rohr writes in The Universal Christ, the return of Christ is not a one-time cosmic event but the continual resurrection of the Christ within each of us. It is the divine spark, already present, catching fire in our awareness.
The Christ is not waiting on a cloud; the Christ is waiting in our recognition. This doesn’t negate the hope of Christ’s ultimate restoration of all things, it deepens it, because we see that restoration beginning here and now. The earliest Christ-followers understood this mystery well. Long before creeds and councils, before empire turned faith into an institution, the early church saw Christ not as an exclusive possession but as a cosmic reality. Writers like Paul spoke of the plērōma—the fullness of God filling all things (Ephesians 1:23)—and told the Colossians that Christ “is all, and is in all” (Colossians 3:11).
They didn’t simply worship the man who carried the Message; they sought to become the Message themselves. To them, Jesus was not merely a figure to be admired from a distance, but the living blueprint of a humanity fully aligned with God, a pattern we are invited to embody.
Somewhere along the way, much of modern Christianity became more comfortable venerating the messenger than embodying the message. As Rohr says, “too often, this obsession became a pious substitute for actually following what he taught—and he did ask us several times to follow him, and never once to worship him.” Jesus did not call us to worship only Him, but to follow His way. Worship without embodiment becomes hollow. The early Christic vision calls us back, to live the Mystery, not just recite it
the Gospel Scenes in Us All
Some carry Golgotha in their eyes. You can feel the strain in their shoulders, the slow, deliberate steps under an invisible weight. Life has beaten and bloodied them, and the Christ in them strains forward anyway, carrying both the suffering and the stubborn hope that there’s something on the other side.
Some live in Gethsemane, the dark night before the breaking. They are wrestling with the “yes” they do not want to give, whispering prayers that sound more like cries, knowing deep down that surrender is the only door to freedom. The Christ in them kneels, alone and awake, while the world around them sleeps.
Some lie in the stillness of the Tomb. They have let something die—the ego, an identity, a dream, a way of being—and now wait in the unlit space in-between. To the unseeing eye, this looks like defeat. But to those who know, this is the holy pause before resurrection.
Some walk in the joy of Easter Morning. You see it in their faces, hear it in their laughter, the Christ in them is alive and unbound, the stone rolled away. They are living proof that death is never the final word.
And some burn with Pentecost fire, hearts lit with purpose, their lives spilling over into acts of love and courage. These are the ones who can’t help but draw others into the flame.
We move through all of these scenes in our lifetime, sometimes in the span of a single day. And Christ is present in them all, not as a distant memory or a yet-to-arrive savior, but as the Divine Spark that has been here since the beginning and will be here until the end, the Alpha and the Omega.
Learning to See
If Christ is the eternal Logos and the intimate presence in every human soul, then the task of the disciple is not simply to believe in Christ, but to see Christ.
This is the training of the haplous eye:
To look at a friend in joy and say, “There is Christ risen.”
To see a stranger in grief and whisper, “There is Christ carrying the cross.”
To watch a loved one wrestle with surrender and think, “There is Christ in Gethsemane.”
To witness someone in stillness, their old life gone but the new one not yet visible, and know, “There is Christ in the tomb.”
But we cannot see this way if our faith in Christ is exclusive, if we decide in advance who can and cannot bear His presence. As Rohr says, “The only thing Christ excluded was exclusion.” There is no “entry ticket” to this reality. No one is left outside the Body. Nothing is separate. No soul is disposable. Christ is all and is in all (Colossians 3:11).
To be the Body of Christ is to recognize that salvation was never meant to be a private rescue mission. It is the healing of the whole, the reconciliation of all things. When one part of the Body suffers, the whole suffers. When one part is restored, the whole is lifted.
When we learn to see this way, the world becomes seamless again. We see one Christ-story unfolding through every human life, different chapters, same Author.
The Practice of Recognition
So the next time you find yourself drifting in the slow flow of a Saturday market, may your haplous eye flicker with recognition: Christ is here, Christ is there, Christ is everywhere. Perhaps the man in the wrinkled shirt is staggering up a hill only he can see. Perhaps the woman in the quiet corner is praying through her own Gethsemane. Perhaps the child with grass-stained knees is laughing in Easter light.
Let this vision change the way you move through the world. Let it turn strangers into companions, burdens into shared weights, and joy into something worth multiplying. Let it remind you that the Body of Christ has no missing pieces—that the Christ in you and the Christ in them are not separate, but one.
This is the resurrection we are invited into again and again: not a distant hope, but a present recognition. The Christ who was with God in the beginning is still here, still revealing Himself in the unlikeliest places, still waiting to be seen.
May we have the courage to see Him.
May we have the love to join Him.
May we have the humility to know—in the end—there is only one story, and we are all in it.
In love + light,
April