Restoring the image of God

Psalm 80:1-7

1 Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel,    you who lead Joseph like a flock!You who are enthroned upon the cherubim, shine forth 2 before Ephraim and Benjamin and Manasseh.Stir up your might,  and come to save us!

3 Restore us, O God; let your face shine, that we may be saved.

4 O Lord God of hosts, how long will you be angry with your people’s prayers? 5 You have fed them with the bread of tears and given them tears to drink in full measure.

6 You make us the scorn of our neighbors; our enemies laugh among themselves.

7 Restore us, O God of hosts; let your face shine, that we may be saved.

Micah 5:2-5a

2 But you, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah,

    who are one of the little clans of Judah,

from you shall come forth for me

    one who is to rule in Israel,

whose origin is from of old,

    from ancient days.

3 Therefore he shall give them up until the time when she who is in labor has brought forth; then the rest of his kindred shall return

    to the people of Israel.

4 And he shall stand and feed his flock in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God.

And they shall live secure, for now he shall be great to the ends of the earth,

5 and he shall be the one of peace.

Luke 1:39-55

If you were asked questions like, “What does Christ’s incarnation accomplish? What does it mean for our future?  What do we have to look forward to?”, I suspect it would be quite unlikely that your answer would include “restoration”.  And, similarly, if you were asked, “What do you long to see happen in the world?  What are your deepest desires?  What is the hope that sustains you?”, it would probably be quite a while before you would speak the word, “restoration”.    It doesn’t fit prominently into our vocabulary or our imagination, and yet it is central to the language Scripture and, I think, gives voice to the yearning of our hearts and minds.  

During Advent season we turn to the prophets who foretold the coming of a messiah, one who will bring justice and peace, a king who rule in righteousness, whose kingdom will endure.  Almost all of these texts arose during the time of exile, when Israel had been banished to Babylonian captivity, where they wrestled with the implications of their situation.  They had come to think of themselves as God’s chosen people, as those whom God had delivered into the Promised Land.  They thought their God was greatest, but now they been conquered by foreign people with foreign gods, which raises all kinds of questions.  Was their God really the most powerful?  Or did evidence suggest that Marduk was actually superior?  In any case, now they’re in Babylon where it’s unclear if the Lord has any authority at all.  This was a time when it was assumed that there were many gods, each more or less bound to a people and a territory.  How can we sing songs to our God in a foreign land, they lamented?  Has God abandoned us?  Or is God incapable of delivering us?

It’s during this time that something extraordinary and unforeseeable happens.  Rather than despairing of their situation and/or adopting the gods of the land in which they lived, they instead concluded that their God was, in fact, the most powerful, in fact that their God was the only true God, and that their exile did not evidence God’s impotence but rather God’s sovereignty to use foreigners to chastise his people, that they might return to him.   It’s sometimes said that the Jews invented monotheism, and - with some qualification - this is essentially true.  Or rather we might say that they were the people whom God made his people, to whom God revealed himself.    And if this were true, then God would not, could not, abandon them.  There would be restoration. 

And so a text like Psalm 80, originally composed in another context, takes on a new dimension:  

3 Restore us, O God;    let your face shine, that we may be saved.

4 O Lord God of hosts,    how long will you be angry with your people’s prayers?5 You have fed them with the bread of tears    and given them tears to drink in full measure.

6 You make us the scorn of our neighbors;    our enemies laugh among themselves.

7 Restore us, O God of hosts;    let your face shine, that we may be saved.

For those in exile restoration first had to do with the return to the land where God had delivered them long ago, where they had worshipped God in the temple which now lay in ruins, but which would be rebuilt.  The anticipation of this future joy sustained generations.  Exile would give way to homecoming, a triumph of a people and their God.

But they longed not only for a restoration of the previous status quo - to the time of a divided, dysfunctional monarchy - but to the glory days of David, when they were ruled by a man after God’s own heart, when the nation enjoyed prosperity and the esteem of the nations.  We see throughout the Scriptures and into Jesus’ day the expectation that a figure like David would arise to lead God’s people in victory.  The passage which we read from Micah gives voice to this kind of hope, that a quasi-divine figure would appear, gathering the people, feeding the flock, establishing their security and greatness, establishing an enduring peace.  

But why stop there?  Why not hope for all things to be restored?  There was a time before there were tribes and nations, before enmity and division, before sin entered the world, when humanity walked with God in the garden, when God’s faced shined upon them, and they were unashamed.  The ultimate restoration is again to be restored to a right relationship with God.  During exile the Israel comes to understand itself - it’s calling - as a light to the nations, as the people through whom all people would come to worship the one true God.   This is the vision of Isaiah, especially, a vision echoed in the final chapters of the book of Revelation when all peoples will walk in the light of the Lord, and there will be no more day.  The Garden will be restored.  

And Mary herself prophesied that this restoration would mean an inversion of the social order, that the powerful would be humbled and the lowly lifted up, the hungry filled and the rich sent away empty.  The world would be turned upside down - or really, it would be returned to the right way up, to a kingdom of justice and righteousness - especially for the humble.   But we’re still waiting.  

Back here in the 21st century you don’t have to be one of God’s chosen people to face a crisis of meaning, to sense that something essential to our identity and purpose has been lost, to feel like God has abandoned you or maybe never even was there at all, to long for the home you’ve never even known.  We feel somehow alienated, not just from one another, but even from our own selves, convinced that life really should’ve been more than it is.  Frustration and disappointment are the human condition.  Exile provides an apt metaphor for existence.   

In Christian parlance the word that names both the cause and effect of this alienation is “sin”.  This is a word that makes some of us uncomfortable because it seems to evoke a kind of moralism that unavoidably leads to  legalism, judgementalism, etc.  This happens when we narrowly define sin as the violation of certain commandments, be they explicit or otherwise, and given the way this can easily lead to condemnation, our discomfort is understandable.  But what sin names, much more than a breaking of divine rules, is the turn away from God and the consequent disordering of our lives.  

Scripture speaks of humanity having been created in the image of God, of us as beings who bear God’s likeness, who though finite participate in the infinite. It is for this that we were made, not because God indulged in a kind of vanity project, but exactly so that we might partake of God’s nature.  To be Christian is to face up to the discrepancy between what God desires for us and what we desire for ourselves, but we should never take this to mean that God desires anything but our good.  God condemns sin not because it hurts God - that’s impossible - but because it hurts us.  And one venerable way of speaking of sin is that it obscures, it mars, it damages the image of God in us.  To sin is not just to rebel against God, it is to rebel against your own humanity, precisely because to be human is to be made in the image of God. 

In this light, I want to introduce you to an old but, at least amongst protestants, unfamiliar way of thinking about Christ’s incarnation and how it affects our salvation - and that is that Christ’s incarnation, exactly because he is both fully God and fully human - but without sin - restores the image of God in humanity.  And thus rather than, as we often tend to do, narrowly defining salvation as the mere escape from sin’s consequences, the averting of punishment, we can see salvation as the restored possibility of a right relationship to God, of participating in God’s nature, of Christ as the firstborn of the new creation.  

And therefore we also learn to see salvation not merely as a future hope but, potentially, as a present reality, as not only a way to be right with God but a way to be truly human.  We even see, in Christ’s incarnation, the intersection of the temporal and the enteral, which, I think, reveals to us what we already knew, that to be human is to have eternity in our hearts, to be inclined, despite our brokenness, to the conviction that our finite condition simply must be overcome, that we are in need of, even bound for, restoration, a return to the Garden. 

There are times when I feel like preaching obligates me to proclaim what I’m not sure I totally believe, but I am increasingly certain that to be Christian, to follow Christ, is the truest, most “authentic” way of being human, now and forevermore.