To See the Face of God

By Evelyn Harrington

Do you ever wonder why we smile at each other? Or have you considered why we hold the door open for the stranger walking behind us? Or have you ever thought about the significance of why we generically ask someone how they are, even when we know not to expect an authentic answer? All of these might seem like insignificant gestures, but underscoring each is the understanding that the human being next to us is important. We recognize that they deserve a certain level of respect and dignity.

There’s this quote from Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables: “To love another person is to see the face of God.” I’ve heard it many times, and each time I’ve tried to understand what Hugo was saying. But it never really made sense to me. In fact, it sounded far-fetched. Sometime later, I was reading a book that quoted Viven Burr, a postmodernist thinker, who declares, “There are no essences inside things or people that make them what they are” (171), and just like that, the quote from Victor Hugo clicked: “To love another person is to see the face of God.”

Burr’s statement that there’s nothing connecting the individual to the rest of humanity completely eradicates the foundation we have for human dignity and empathy. She makes this assertion to argue that being made in the image of God somehow detracts from our value as individuals, yet it’s this shared foundation that allows us to show respect and ascribe dignity to those who are different from us. 

We’ve heard people call indescribable acts of violence inhumane. That means it isn’t human. The implication is that we highly esteem what it means to be human if evil can be summed up as something we’re not. In essence, being human is understanding the difference between what is good and what is evil. None of us aspire to be cruel or sadistic. Generally, we uphold values like kindness and love. These are human values. In other words, the collective idea of what is “human” is our reference point for ethics. We treat others the way we want to be treated, because there is a deep, collective understanding of how every human being wants to be treated. 

Perhaps Burr is struggling with the idea that this collective knowledge couldn’t have simply materialized out of thin air. After all, how do billions of people across the centuries come to a place where they understand, at least in some capacity, that flourishing is good and evil is bad? How did we get to a place where the suffering of nameless people somewhere on the other side of the globe found its way into our emotions and grieved us? Hugo answers, “To love another person is to see the face of God.” 

In other words, when we love others—when we commit to the idea that human flourishing is important—when we recognize that the stranger next to us is valuable—we express our shared identity as image bearers. And when we do that, we ultimately point to God, whose image we reflect. Because in the very first chapter of the entire Bible, God sets mankind apart from the rest of creation when He says, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth. So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them” (Genesis 1:26-27). 

Ultimately, when a story about a stranger’s suffering pulls at your heart, it’s the string that connects you to the rest of humanity that’s tugging at you—reminding you it’s there—reminding you you’re human. Behind every smile, every simple kindness, every frivolous courtesy is that unobservable thread inside of us, defining what we are. You might think it’s strange that Vivien Burr wants to deny that… but then again, some people might find it uncomfortable being face to face with God.  

Works Cited: 

Muehlhoff, Tim and Todd Lewis. Authentic Communication. InterVarsity Press. 2010.