In a Mirror at all?

Image of Christ which sold on eBay for $1500. It’s oil and transmission fluid spilled on a concrete floor of a garage. The woman who put it on eBay claims ignorance of its supposed value after a mere eight years of selling things online.

Imago Dei?

We understand who we are via mirrors in our lives. In an older world people understood their value and placement via a more rigid and prescribed social and religious structure. With those thrown to the wind (mostly a very good thing) it is now a smaller circle of friends, associates and family members which mirror back to us who and what we are.

Which is why the therapist business is booming and always will in Western free and, consequently, alienated society.

I can assure you it is your more significant others, past and present, who are definitive in the ways you see and evaluate yourself. This runs from the general (who you are in society…most often a cog or gizmo) to the specific (a daddy, mommy, brother, son, lover husband or wife).

Attempts at self-definition only seem to work when others buy along. Money helps with this buying of your story. Of course, the story you are selling is incomplete and quite possibly an utter fiction. I suppose the real question for any human being is how to have their fictions transformed into non-fiction both now and in the life to come. Perhaps it is even best to see all as one continuum.

The Life to Come

I was watching football on Saturday. The Washington Redskins were playing Seattle. The talk turned at one point to the Redskins season and how the shooting death of free safety Sean Taylor had affected the team and the league. The announcer spoke calmly about Sean Taylor watching the game from heaven as if that was as common a fact as the sun rising each morning.

I wondered what the reception would have been if such reporting had been printed in the sports section of the newspaper, or in Sports illustrated.

My point is this. We will introduce such talk safely after a tragedy and it’s “hands off” those who do. They are not to be taken seriously…it is just convention; something to make us all feel more assured when a man of great promise is shot down senselessly at 24 years of age.

It is, perhaps, a misgyided attempt to make sense of a life with such promise cut short by death. But isn’t this the case with all of us?

So we have fictions all around and we are a fiction ourselves.

Not even the Biblical writers (you know, with their penchant for making stuff up) confess they have little or no idea what comes after death. St. John, perhaps one of the disciples most qualified to comment, says only the following:

it has not appeared as yet what we will be We know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is.

This is both a mystery and an open answer worth serious consideration because it addresses the core issue of our present and future identity.

Anybody else interested in that?!

Of course you are. In a way it is all you think about all day long in a variety of ways. Just note it in all its places. Just note it for one day…today.

Ask “how does this question or situation relate to my self-defining and who I am and am becoming?

John says simply that we do not yet apprehend what we will be and that the only thing we know is that when we see Christ we will become like Him.

My old mentor Darrell Johnson once said that come into the fullness of being made in the image of God meant to become a type of Xerox… something which can only hold an image after it has received intense exposure to the original.

He stole it from someone else. I stole it from him. But you get the point. The question then remains: If we are changed by seeing Him as He is (I assume this is not just after death, but starts now) and therein become like Him…how does this work in our world?

How has the Church responded to this call for change and transformation in seeing Christ?

In my view it has done so by avoiding any change at all, for all you have to do is avoid seeing the Living One and His glory and you can remain the same and unchanged. Thus the “commemorative Jesus” of most of Christendom embodied emblematically in pictures, bland theological discussions, worn-out arguments about the “real historical Jesus” (much easier to handle a dead one 2 millennium later than a Live One today) or simply used as part of either a soteriological or eschatological algebraic equation.

The Living Christ is Hebraic not algebraic.

Yet the Jesus we are most often exposed to leaves no deeper or living an impression than auto fluids on a concrete garage floor.

So imagine a Church where the Living One is sought each day as the Center, as Lord, as Master. Imagine if real change and transformation comes from intense exposure to the original instead of enrolling in a class of dead precepts and principles. Imagine if our work in theology led to active worship as a response instead of a book deal for some watered down culturally-accommodated pablum.

If we are truly changed essentially by seeing Him, what are we waiting for? Why are we bidding on the dead concrete slab instead of seeing the Living One in Creation, in the Word, and finally face to face?