The phrase Pope Leo XIV carried through Spain last week has deep biblical roots — and only twice in Scripture does God or Christ issue it as a direct command.
The motto chosen for Pope Leo XIV’s visit to Spain — Alzad la mirada (Lift up your eyes) — is not some slogan coined for the occasion. It has a precise address in the New Testament, and behind that address stands an older text in Genesis that gives it unexpected depth. The phrase recurs elsewhere in Scripture — the Psalmist lifts his eyes to the hills, Isaiah commands a weary Israel to look up at the stars, Christ himself lifts his eyes to heaven before the high-priestly prayer — but as a direct command, spoken by God or by Christ to a specific person, it appears in precisely two places: Genesis 13:14 and John 4:35. They are worth reading side by side.
Pope: "The Lord repeats those words to me first"
Dear brothers and sisters, the motto of this Apostolic Journey was “Alzad la mirada,” “Lift up your gaze!” (cf. Jn 4:35). Jesus addressed these words to his first disciples, to teach them to see the desire for life, truth, and fullness in people and in the crowds.
The Lord repeats those words to me first, and by his grace I also experienced them during this Journey.
Today, I would like to share this invitation with you: let us lift up our gaze! Let us learn from Jesus to look at our neighbour, at people, and at the world, “through God’s eyes,” that is, with love, respect and compassion.
Genesis 13:14
After Abram and Lot have separated — Lot having chosen the well-watered plain toward Sodom — the Lord speaks: “Lift up your eyes and look from the place where you are, northward and southward and eastward and westward, for all the land that you see I will give to you.”
The timing is everything. Abram has just made the more generous choice, ceding the better land to his nephew. The command to lift the eyes is not a reward for cleverness but a consequence of kenosis — of letting go. Having released what he could reasonably have claimed, Abram is told to look, and the horizon that opens before him is the Promised Land in its entirety.
The text carries a deliberate contrast with what Lot did just verses before. Lot lifted his eyes by his own will, choosing what looked fertile and prosperous. Abram lifts his eyes only at the command of God. That distinction — autonomous looking versus obedient looking, the eye drawn downward by appetite versus the eye raised by invitation — is the theological hinge of the passage. The land is seen, here, by someone who was first willing to stop treating it as property.
John 4:35
The scene is the Samaritan well. The disciples have returned with food; the woman has gone back to her village and is now bringing the townspeople out to meet Jesus. He turns to his disciples: “Do you not say, ‘There are yet four months, and then comes the harvest’? Look, I tell you, lift up your eyes, and see that the fields are white for harvest.”
The farmers’ logic — four months between seed and grain, wait and be patient — does not apply to what is already ripe in front of them. The harvest is now, and the only obstacle to seeing it is the downward gaze of routine and calculation. What seems premature is already complete; what the disciples expect in four months is standing in the field today.
The Greek phrase is literally lift up your eyes, an idiom echoing the Hebrew nasa’ einayim — and it echoes, among other places, Genesis 13:14. What God said to Abram after the separation from Lot, Christ says to the disciples beside the well: stop looking at the ground, stop measuring what you have or have not, and attend to what is already in front of you.
John 6:5 — Jesus lifts his own eyes first
There is a third moment in John that belongs here, though its Greek is slightly different. Just two chapters after the Samaritan well, at the feeding of the five thousand, John describes Jesus before the miracle this way: epāras tous ophthalmous ho Iēsous—“Jesus, having lifted up his eyes, saw a great crowd coming toward him.” The verb is epairō rather than the exact command form used at the well, but the gesture is the same—and its significance is different in kind from the other two passages.
At the well, Christ commands the disciples to lift their eyes and see the harvest. Here, he performs the gesture himself, before they do, and what he sees when he looks up is five thousand hungry people and not enough bread, the faces of the "harvest" he invites the disciples to see. He does not calculate the deficit and turn away. He lifts his eyes, sees the need, and feeds them.
Pope Leo XIV, closing his visit to Spain, pointed to exactly this: “The Lord repeats those words to me first," he said, "and by his grace I also experienced them during this Journey. Let us lift up our gaze—let us learn from Jesus to look at our neighbour, at people, and at the world through God's eyes, that is, with love, respect and compassion.” The Pope was naming what John 6:5 shows: that the command to lift the eyes is not issued from above by one who does not share the gesture. Jesus looks up first. The disciples are asked to do what they have already seen him do.
The structure the passages share
Read together, the three texts describe a single movement at different registers. In Genesis, the lifting of eyes follows renunciation and opens onto a promise: Abram has let go, and the whole land becomes visible. At the well, it follows a call to recognition: the disciples are being told that urgency, not patience, is the right response to what stands before them. At the feeding, it is Jesus himself who models the gesture, looking up at a crowd and seeing not a logistical problem but five thousand people who need to eat.
That is the biblical grammar the papal motto carried through Spain. The eyes are lifted, in Genesis and in John alike, by someone who has first stopped calculating what they have or have not. And in John 6, it is Christ himself who shows how it is done—before he ever asks it of anyone else.
