"He is the image of the invisible God..." - Colossians 1.15 (not referring to the above Pegasus)
Remember that catchy song One of us? Well, the quite startling claim of Christianity is that God became one of us. Just a slob like one of us. The earliest of Christians believed nothing less than Jesus being God. "My Lord and my God" said doubting Thomas after seeing the nail-pierced hands and wounded sides of Jesus. It seems to have taken the resurrection for the disciples to get Jesus' own confession that if you have seen Him then you have seen the invisible God, but once they got it there was no turning back. And rightly so. If I were to meet a man who claimed to be equal with God, and then proved to me that He was equal with God, by, say, coming back to life after a few days of deadness, I'd probably want to be a part of whatever He was up to.
And what is this image of the Invisible up to? In short, He is creating other images to be part of a world-wide community which is a reflection of the glory of God. That's the why of creation, and specifically, the why of the creation of human beings. "Let us make man in our image", declared the Triune God. The man from dust, Adam, corrupted that image. The man from heaven, Jesus, restored it to be something even greater than it originally was.
This is the good news of Christianity: the man Jesus is God, and He is once again making man in that image. The pivot which this re-creation turns on is the cross, a subject Paul briefly touches on in Colossians 1 having declared Jesus to be the image of God:
For in Him [Jesus] all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through Him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of His cross.
The Passion of the Christ, while flawed in numerous ways, has a couple of awe-inspiring scenes. One of those is courtesy of Mel Gibson's artistic license, where he films Jesus staggering along the Via Dolorosa with Mary too traumatised to look on. However, having recalled a moment from Jesus' childhood where He falls over and she rushes to aid Him, her maternal instincts take over in the present and she flings herself towards the blood-soaked Messiah and embraces His torn body. Here Gibson inserts the words of the risen Christ from the book of Revelation: I am making all things new. This way of suffering is what the image of God had to endure in order to restore His broken images, and make us new.
The problem many have is that they can somewhat grasp the image of God sitting on a throne displaying all manner of supernatural powers which wow the world into submission. What they can't grasp at all is the image of God dying in obscurity on a cross.
And what is this image of the Invisible up to? In short, He is creating other images to be part of a world-wide community which is a reflection of the glory of God. That's the why of creation, and specifically, the why of the creation of human beings. "Let us make man in our image", declared the Triune God. The man from dust, Adam, corrupted that image. The man from heaven, Jesus, restored it to be something even greater than it originally was.
This is the good news of Christianity: the man Jesus is God, and He is once again making man in that image. The pivot which this re-creation turns on is the cross, a subject Paul briefly touches on in Colossians 1 having declared Jesus to be the image of God:
For in Him [Jesus] all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through Him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of His cross.
The Passion of the Christ, while flawed in numerous ways, has a couple of awe-inspiring scenes. One of those is courtesy of Mel Gibson's artistic license, where he films Jesus staggering along the Via Dolorosa with Mary too traumatised to look on. However, having recalled a moment from Jesus' childhood where He falls over and she rushes to aid Him, her maternal instincts take over in the present and she flings herself towards the blood-soaked Messiah and embraces His torn body. Here Gibson inserts the words of the risen Christ from the book of Revelation: I am making all things new. This way of suffering is what the image of God had to endure in order to restore His broken images, and make us new.
The problem many have is that they can somewhat grasp the image of God sitting on a throne displaying all manner of supernatural powers which wow the world into submission. What they can't grasp at all is the image of God dying in obscurity on a cross.
"God became man to turn creatures into sons; not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man. It is not like teaching a horse to jump better and better but like turning a horse into a winged creature." - C.S. Lewis
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