I Saw Jesus

“I saw Jesus.”

A young widow in my Bible study group said it, and the room fell silent.

Almost a year ago her husband died of cancer. She went to a church prayer retreat looking for guidance about her own life.

She came home with something she had been allowed to see, and she shared it with us.

Another young woman at the retreat was struggling with problems of her own. During a time of group prayer she let out a loud cry. The whole group focused their prayers on her. The widow was looking at her and praying when she saw something like black smoke move away from the young woman. Then she saw Jesus. He was standing next to the young woman, and He was taking the chains of guilt and sin off her. When the smoke was gone and the chains were gone, the young woman yelled out, “I am free.”

She does not remember saying it.

Our widow told us she could not say whether it was a divine vision or her imagination. Regardless, I think it was a wonderful gift. She will never forget it. I am not going to settle the question for her. Scripture does not settle it either, for the people who asked it before her.

Chains

She did not invent the picture. The Bible reaches for it first.

“The iniquities of the wicked ensnare him, and he is held fast in the cords of his sin.”

Proverbs 5:22 (ESV)

Cords. A person caught in his own sin is tied up in it, and the knots are his own work. Jesus says the same thing without the rope.

“Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin.”

John 8:34 (ESV)

A slave in the first-century world was property. He did not decide when he left, or whether he left at all. When Jesus uses that word, He is not being poetic. He is describing a person who cannot leave. The psalmist had already put the same people in a cell: “prisoners in affliction and in irons” (Psalm 107:10).¹

Sin is what a person did. Guilt is what it does afterward, long after the act is over. The widow named both. She saw chains of guilt and sin, and she watched them come off.

Standing Next to Her

Look at where Jesus was. Next to her.

Whether the young woman saw Him, I do not know. She was the one in chains, and He was the one working on them. She cried out, the smoke left, the chains came off, and she shouted that she was free. She does not remember it. Whatever freed her did not wait for her to understand what was happening, or to remember it afterward.

Scripture gives a picture of Jesus on His feet. Stephen, standing before the council that was about to have him stoned, looked up and saw heaven open.

“Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.”

Acts 7:56 (ESV)

Standing. The usual picture of Jesus at the Father’s right hand is of Someone seated, with the work finished (Hebrews 10:12). Stephen sees Him on His feet. The writer of Hebrews says why He is never idle: “he always lives to make intercession for them” (Hebrews 7:25).² He is at work for the people He loves.

The widow was not looking for this. She came to the retreat with a question about her own life, and what she was shown was someone else’s rescue. The Bible does not say why Jesus lets one person see what He is doing for another. It does show what He does with a friend’s faith.

Four men carried a paralyzed man to a house where Jesus was teaching. The crowd blocked the door, so they opened the roof and lowered him down (Mark 2:3-4).

“And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, ‘Son, your sins are forgiven.’”

Mark 2:5 (ESV)

Their faith, not his. The man on the mat is never recorded saying a word. The widow was praying for another woman, along with the whole group, and Jesus was standing right there.³

What He Came to Do

The strongest reason to trust what she saw has nothing to do with how it felt. It is what He was doing.

Early in His ministry Jesus went home to Nazareth. On the Sabbath He stood up in the synagogue where He grew up, and the attendant handed Him the scroll of Isaiah. He found the place and read (Luke 4:16-17).

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed.”

Luke 4:18 (ESV)

He rolled up the scroll, sat down (Luke 4:20), and said one more sentence: “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:21). The captives were the people He had come for. Liberty was His job description, announced in His own hometown.

The psalmist, centuries earlier, had traced the whole account in order: the darkness, the cry, the chains.

“Then they cried to the LORD in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress. He brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death, and burst their bonds apart.”

Psalm 107:13-14 (ESV)

The Gospels show Him doing it. A woman had been bent over for eighteen years. She could not straighten up (Luke 13:11). Jesus saw her, called her over, and said, “Woman, you are freed from your disability” (Luke 13:12). She stood up straight and praised God (Luke 13:13).

And what did the young woman say when the chains came off? “I am free.” Jesus has already told us what that sentence is worth.

“So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.”

John 8:36 (ESV)

This is also how Scripture tells us to weigh a vision: “test everything; hold fast what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21). John gives the same instruction about spirits: “test the spirits to see whether they are from God” (1 John 4:1). The test is not how dramatic the picture was. The test is whether the Jesus in it does what Jesus does. A Jesus who stands next to a bound woman and takes her chains off is the Jesus of Luke 4. What she saw passes that test. Whether it came as a vision or an imagining, the test does not ask.

Vision or Imagination

Peter once could not tell either. Herod had him in prison, chained between two soldiers, the night before his trial. An angel woke him, and the chains fell off his hands. The angel led him out past the guards, and the iron gate opened by itself (Acts 12:3-10).

“And he went out and followed him. He did not know that what was being done by the angel was real, but thought he was seeing a vision.”

Acts 12:9 (ESV)

Peter walked through a prison believing he was dreaming. He was free all the same. His uncertainty did not undo the gate.

Once the angel left him, Peter came to himself.

“Now I am sure that the Lord has sent his angel and rescued me from the hand of Herod.”

Acts 12:11 (ESV)

He was sure afterward, not during. The rescue did not wait for his certainty.

Paul had the same trouble. He was caught up into heaven and heard things he was not permitted to repeat (2 Corinthians 12:4), and when he wrote about it, he could not say how it happened.

“I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows.”

2 Corinthians 12:2 (ESV)

He says it twice, in the next verse as well (2 Corinthians 12:3). Paul never settled the question and did not need to. He knew who he had met. Peter, on a rooftop in Joppa (Acts 10:9), was “inwardly perplexed as to what the vision that he had seen might mean” (Acts 10:17). More than one of them did not know at first what they had seen.

Even Mary Magdalene, the one the Gospels remember for saying “I have seen the Lord” (John 20:18), stood in front of Jesus on Easter morning and took Him for the gardener (John 20:14-15). Seeing Him and knowing Him were not the same moment. He Is Risen walks through the witnesses who followed her.

What did Mary the mother of Jesus do with something she did not fully understand? Luke says it plainly.

“But Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart.”

Luke 2:19 (ESV)

She did not file it. She did not argue it into a category. She kept it. The widow can keep hers.

Blessed Are Those Who Have Not Seen

Most people have seen nothing like what the widow saw. No smoke, no chains, no Jesus standing in a room. If that is where you are, Jesus has already spoken to you.

Thomas had refused to believe until he could touch the wounds, and when he saw Jesus, he believed (John 20:24-28). Jesus answered him.

“Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

John 20:29 (ESV)

Peter, writing decades later to people who had never laid eyes on Him, said the same thing from the other side: “Though you have not seen him, you love him” (1 Peter 1:8). Believing without seeing is not the second-class version of faith. Jesus called it blessed.

Freedom did not wait for the young woman to understand what was happening, or to remember it afterward. He was next to her, and He did the work. He does for us what we cannot do for ourselves.

The offer is simple. Paul puts it in two sentences.

“If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.”

Romans 10:9-10 (ESV)

John says it in terms of a gift received.

“But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.”

John 1:12 (ESV)

You do not need a vision for this. You do not need to know what you saw or whether you saw anything. If you want to know what receiving Him looks like in plain words, Choose Jesus lays it out.

“I saw Jesus,” the widow said. One woman gets to tell the story. The other said three words, loudly, in front of everyone.

I am free.

She does not remember saying it. He was standing right next to her.

References

• The Holy Bible, English Standard Version (ESV). Crossway, 2001.
• He Is Risen and Choose Jesus, on this site.

Footnotes