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Monday, May 07, 2007
Jesus In My Mirror
Ephesians 4:1-6,11-16
Imagine a world filled with people who look a lot like God -- beginning with yourself!
This week's message says that's the whole intention of Christian discipleship. That God created you and me to become like Jesus Christ, whose words and works perfectly embodied God's own character. (Hebrews 1:3 says Jesus "perfectly mirrors God, and is stamped with God's nature." And Ephesians 4:13 calls us to "grow up, to know the whole truth and tell it in love -- like Christ in everything.")
Grandiose? Unattainable?
Listen to the GODcast!
_______________
Frederick Buechner's huge bibliography includes one book that came and went in a hurry. The Faces of Jesus is one of those coffee table volumes that rarely get picked up and honestly read, let alone thumbed through enough to shake the dust off its pretty cover.
Too bad. It's an absolutely fascinating book. For both its full-color illustrations and his thoughtful commentary on them.
The artwork includes centuries-old religious masterpieces, modern primitive paintings, sculptures, folk representations from all around the developing world, even some American grafitti.
Readers familiar with Buechner's ideas should enjoy the ways he reworks them here, tying in biblical and real-life stories with one or another artistic portrayal of Christ and his meaning. Yet the book is anything but a rehash of Buechner's "greatest hits." He's a skilled docent, carefully interpreting the art itself, and slipping in surprising new twists here and there on his old familiar themes.
The climax comes when he pulls us close to catch the details of a 10th-century ivory relief sculpture, "Christ Enthroned with Saints and a Donor."
Buechner notes that the donor got in the picture himself, just because he gave the money to make the picture possible. Jesus sits on the curve of the earth with some of his saints gathered 'round. The donor comes in from the wings, overawed and embarrassed to be there. His knees buckle, and one saint holds him from falling over. He's there only by the grace of God, and he knows it.
Buechner says that's the way with all of us. The little man has "an expression of great dignity in his face.... It is not a dignity that is his by nature but a dignity that has been conferred upon him. It is Jesus who [confers] it as he reaches down to take him by the hand. One is struck by a curious resemblance between them."
And the two faces do look like mirror images. Which leads us to Buechner's punch line...
"The face of Jesus is a face that belongs to us the way our past belongs to us. It is a face that we belong to if only as to the one face out of the past that has perhaps had more to do with the shaping of our present than any other. According to Paul, the face of Jesus is our own face finally, the face we will all come to look like a little when the kingdom comes and we are truly ourselves at last, truly the brothers and sisters of one another and the children of God." (My italics)
Imagine a world -- or even one single room, like your Sanctuary on Sunday morning -- filled with people who look more than a little like God himself. Beginning with you!
That would seem to be the way that God sees all of us, all the time.
Imagine that!
posted by Jack Buckley at
12:11 PM
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