Second Sunday Before Lent

The Bible tells us very firmly that humans are made in the image of God, Genesis Ch. 1: verse 26, ‘then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness’. And so God created us, just as He created all things and continues to create everything in the world. Certainly over the centuries God has usually been depicted in art, in human form. What automatically springs to my mind is that great painting of God, by Michelangelo on the ceiling of the Sistene Chapel, pointing his finger in the direction of Adam and in doing so creating humankind. Michelangelo also painted the fall of humankind in the Garden of Eden, but that’s a different story.

Of course we may not look anything like God physically, because we don’t know what God looks like. In the religion of Islam, it is not permissible to depict God in any artistic form, other than in words. But how do we resemble God? Well that is a much easier question to answer now than in pre Christian times, because we have the advantage of being able to look at Jesus Christ, the Son of God.  We don’t actually know what Jesus looked like physically, we don’t have a drawing done of him in his lifetime, and what is sadly true is that Jesus, until recently was depicted as a white European man. As a middle-Eastern Jew, Jesus wouldn’t have looked anything like me or you, and yet that is how he has been portrayed. But it doesn’t really matter what he looked like, for we know what sort of a person he was, and that’s what matters.

In today’s reading from Colossians, we are told that Jesus is the image of the invisible God, which refers to his nature, not his physical appearance, just as God is the God of Love, so is Jesus the Lord of Love for all people. But Paul also tells us that he is also the first born of all creation.  Paul is telling us that Christ created all things, things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, and that he is the head of the body, the church. What theologians call the Church Triumphant and the Church Militant. The Church in heaven and the Church on earth, to you and me.

We have to remember here that Paul had no access to the Gospels, which were written later than his letters, indeed Paul had probably been put to death before the first Gospel, which we believe to be Mark, had been written. The Pauline letters were some of the earliest Christian writings that we are aware of, and he wrote them in isolation, away from the Church leaders in Jerusalem, and so its hardly surprising then that he makes no references to them, but at the same time there are echoes of the Christian message we read in all the Gospels, and subsequent writings we have contained in the New Testament. Paul was writing about his first hand encounter; his personal conversation with and through the living Christ, and that shaped Paul and it shapes us today.  Paul knew that the Risen Christ was God Incarnate, who had taken human form, lived amongst the people and died to save all humankind from their sins, how could he not know this.  How can any of us encounter the Risen Christ in our lives and deny that He is ‘God with Us’. This passage from Colossians echoes the introduction to John’s Gospel where John describes Jesus as the ‘Word’ who was with God from the beginning of time and was therefore divine. And the ‘Word’ was made flesh and dwelt among us. Paul goes further than this, because he sees Christ as the mediator of both Creation and Redemption. Christ creates with God and through God, then somehow holds the unity of creation in His hands, restoring the fallen, bringing humankind back to God the Father, who created us all in the first place.

This may seem difficult for us to understand, because Jesus was born and lived among us for 33 years, and died on the Cross, like the other two men on either side of Him.  If He was human how could He be in creation from the beginning of time.  His death on the Cross is the key to it all. Clearly Jesus had changed through His death. He was certainly alive again on Easter Sunday, but He was alive in a different way. When we hear the stories of that first Easter Sunday and the subsequent days, we hear repeatedly that Mary Magdalene, His disciples, the men on the road to Emmaus, didn’t recognise Him at first, it was only when He spoke to them, or broke bread with them that they realised it was the Risen Lord. Although there had been very strong indications throughout His earthly life that Jesus was the Messiah, it was after His death and resurrection that people began to realise that he was indeed the promised Messiah, the Christ, the Saviour, the one chosen by God to rescue the world from evil.

Christ’s appearance had physically changed through his death and resurrection, and those who had followed him for the past three years didn’t recognise him. It was this new Christ, in a different dimension, who was with God at the beginning of time, not Jesus the man.  Christ the divine was Jesus the man for those 33 years of human existence.  Before that and since, His essence is entirely divine. So Jesus was in creation, is in creation now and will continue to be in creation. And maybe it’s the same for us.  Maybe we too have come from God and are going back to God, that certainly the great Christian Hope, that at the end of this earthly life we return to God our heavenly Father, in which we are no longer troubled by damaged bodies or damaged minds. Meanwhile, we are the Church Militant here on earth, and in the words of St. Teresa of Avila:

‘Christ has no body now on earth but ours;

No hands but ours, no feet but ours.

Ours are the eyes through which is to look out Christ’s compassion on the world:

Ours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good:

Ours are the hands with which he is to bless men and women now.’