The image of the invisible God

Colossians 1:15-27

15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, 16 for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. 17 He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18 He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. 19 For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, 20 and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.

    21 And you who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, 22 he has now reconciled in his fleshly body through death, so as to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him, 23 provided that you continue securely established and steadfast in the faith, without shifting from the hope promised by the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven. I, Paul, became a minister of this gospel.

    24 I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church. 25 I became its minister according to God’s commission that was given to me for you, to make the word of God fully known, 26 the mystery that has been hidden throughout the ages and generations but has now been revealed to his saints. 27 To them God chose to make known how great among the gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.'

Who is God?  What is God like?  When we imagine God, what comes to mind?  These are essential questions, yet even within the bounds of Christianity there are various ways of answering.  There is just one God, of course, but in another sense there are many gods, for often the God we believe in seems so different from the God our neighbor believes in that it’s hard not to wonder if we’re actually believing in the same God at all?  

We began our worship singing a song in praise of the invisible God, one who shines so brightly that it blinds our vision, whose glory conceals from our view.  The passage we read from Colossians also speaks of the invisible God, and paints a picture of humanity formerly estranged from God, doing what was evil less out of malice than out of ignorance, groping in the dark of an unsolved mystery.  They don’t know who God is, and they don’t know how to find God even if they wanted to.  

It won’t surprise you that Paul presents Jesus as the solution to this problem, but it’s therefore easy to miss the significance of what Paul says about Jesus here.  The statement that Jesus is the “image of the invisible God” sounds like the sort of thing we might expect, but it seems to me that few Christians have really grasped the significance of this claim.  The God who was previously invisible has now been made visible in Jesus, the eternal has entered the temporal, the infinite the finite.  Again, this may sound all rather obvious, but then when you ponder who God is, what God is like, when we imagine God in our mind, few of us, I think, primarily focus on Jesus himself.  But to be a Christian, first and foremost, is to believe that God has been revealed to us in Jesus, that when we imagine who the Father is we picture the Son, that when we wonder what God is like we look to the Gospels which bear witness to the things Jesus said and did.  The simple reality, however, is that we readily imagine God in ways that have little to do with Jesus.  

At the same time, when we think about Jesus, we rarely do so in ways that match the frankly extravagant claims Paul makes here.  We’re more likely to think of Jesus as God’s clever solution to an intractable problem, a mere child sacrifice, or, alternatively, as a good guy we should try to imitate (at least when it seems to make sense).  But Paul here presents Jesus as not just a reflection of God, but as God, the one in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, the one through whom and for whom all things were made, and to whom all things point and shall return.   Which is to say that Christ is the key to understanding everything, the light in which all mysteries are revealed.  Consider all the implications that would follow, if that were indeed true.  

Paul calls Christ both the firstborn of creation and the firstborn from the dead. Christ is the creator who also takes the form of a creature, not just a new Adam but, in a sense, the first true human, fully human precisely because he was also fully God.  He reveals not only who God is, but what it means to be human.  He is also the firstborn in terms of his status, the one who enjoys the inheritance of the Father, through whom we too become the children of God.  

And if we begin to comprehend this, even if only a little, it becomes all the more sublime that Christ, upon becoming incarnate, demonstrates who God is and what it means to be truly human by suffering death on the cross.  And it is through this faithfulness that God reconciles - not just humanity - but all of creation to God.  In rising from the dead he becomes the firstborn from the dead, who not only opens up the possibility of reconciliation with God under certain conditions, but who reconciles all things to himself.   And at this juncture, at least, Paul does not attempt to explain how the cross accomplishes this, but rather leaves this as a mystery within the mystery revealed.  Often the attempt to explain conceals more than it reveals.  

I fear that, even if you find all of this kind of interesting, even compelling, that this description of ultimate reality still seems far removed from reality as you and I experience it.  It’s hard not to ask yourself just how this could be true?  And here the best answer I can give is that the picture that Paul paints is, if nothing else, beautiful, and the relationship between beauty and truth is fairly absolute.  To have faith is not to eliminate doubt, to be able to answer difficult questions, to explain mysteries.  As Christians we believe that these things have been revealed, but also that we nevertheless remain largely blinded to them, that we only come to see with the eyes of faith, which may happen in the twinkling of an eye but more likely takes closer to a lifetime.  You have to live into them.  

And this helps shed light on what we did when we baptized Johanna.   In baptizing her - and act which recalls Christ’s own death and resurrection - we declare that his story is her story, that her identity, meaning, and purpose are all defined by who God says she is.  She doesn’t believe or understand any of this yet - and maybe the adults in the room only begin to believe and understand it as well - but today we declare that this is the truth about her, a truth we hope we’ll demonstrate for her, however imperfectly, and a truth she will one day not only believe but continue to grow into forevermore.  

Paul makes this confusing statement that he is “completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions.” There a lot to say about that, but the heart of what he means is that, because his story is Christ’s story, there is a way in which that story is not just part of the past but a present and future reality, something he continues to pursue.   Our hope is that all the baptized will discover than, just as Christ suffered so that we might live, the truest way to be human is to live for others.