Ordinary 15

The Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Deuteronomy 30:10-14; Psalm 69; Colossians 1:15–20; Luke 10:25-37

Now that are phones are fundamentally pocket computers with cameras, we are the most photographed and photographing people in history, are we not? We’ve become obsessive in taking photos, mostly of ourselves it seems…a narcissistic tendency of humans. The adage that “a picture is worth a thousand words” has little meaning today. Now we are simply taking a thousand pictures from ‘selfies’ to every meal we eat and most images have little meaning or depth.

Recall the power of images. The terrified nine year old girl running naked down a highway after a napalm attack during the Vietnam War, the photo of the drowned body of the two year old Syrian refugee boy, Alan Kurdi on the beaches of Turkey, or the images of Derek Chauvin’s knee on the neck of George Floyd. Such images can galvanize people’s attitudes and movements for change. They can also be as easily forgotten among all the images that overwhelm us.

So in a world drowning in images, what does it mean when Paul writes, “Christ Jesus is the image of the invisible God?”

In this case the image is not a digital photograph. There is no physical description or depiction of Jesus prior to the fourth century.  The image of a male with long hair and beard is our imagination. It’s an image of Jesus we’ve created and it tells us very little about his person.

Paul offers us a dynamically different way of encountering Jesus; not a physical likeness from which we easily make judgments about each other but a series of images with depth of meanings that play off each other revealing divine realities.

“Christ Jesus is the image of the invisible God.”

In this opening phrase we are confronted with a visible and invisible life reflecting and revealing each other. The visible image of Jesus is found in spoken Word and Sacrament that is shared by us who also are “created in the image and likeness” of the same invisible God but here Jesus is unique in being the “firstborn of all creation.”

Creation takes place in Christ Jesus, through Christ Jesus and for Christ Jesus. Christ exists before creation, brings creation into being and sustains all creation together and will bring creation to its fulfillment. Genesis spoke of God creating; Paul speaks of Christ in whom all the fullness of divinity was pleased to dwell as creating. Christ Jesus and God are one; act as one; speak as one, thus Christ is the beginning. The beginning is not a moment in time but a dynamic being.

Do we not find hope and solace in this image?

Did you not notice, regrettably, that the three examples of powerful human images I put forth of Kim Phuc Phan Thi, Alan Kurdi, and George Floyd were images of war, violence and death? The image of Christ Jesus that Paul portrays is in contrast life itself!

If Jesus is revealed in spoken Word and Sacrament shared, he is head of the body, the Church. For it is only in the midst of the Church gathered where Sacrament is shared and Word is spoken. Thus the Church makes the Eucharist and the Eucharist makes the Church where the living, creating Christ is in our midst.

And what is Eucharist?

As Paul completes his great display of images, Eucharist is Christ reconciling all things for himself making peace by the blood of his cross. For Paul, the Church can never escape the Cross. It stands at the center of all creation. The cross reconciles the brokenness of creation. The cross is where humanity and the fullness of divinity encounter and embrace each other. Thus Christ is the firstborn from the dead, an image of life eternal. The act of creation and redemption are one act of salvation.

In our divided and deeply polarized world; a world of disease, war and violence, the rising and falling of empires, uncertainty and the sense of hopelessness and powerlessness among so many people, we proclaim Christ Jesus, not a first century Jewish rabbi but, the very presence of God among us who is reconciling, healing and raising up humanity.

That is an image worth posting on Facebook.