When we hear, as in our 2nd Reading (Col 1:15-20) that “Christ is the image of the unseen God”, I think we need to notice that God is most definitely “unseen”. You can see and hear me give this Homily on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBTeymHJ9pM
Sadly, despite the ancient tradition of never trying to picture God the Father, there are some who have attempted it; and in doing so have confused any number of people. Perhaps the most guilty party is the Pope who along with Michelangelo created that depiction of God the Father in the Sistine Chapel, where God is seen as an old man reaching his hand out to create Adam. This is such a famous picture that once seen it cannot be forgotten; and generations of people have thought of God as at least a bit like that, including many who have rejected belief in God because they think that we think God is like that. This is why it is so important that we hear again and again that God the Father is unseen, and remind ourselves that this means not just that we cannot see him, but that God is not visible in any sense at all. As St John says at the beginning of his Gospel, (1:18) “No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.”
I think it’s worth thinking further at this point about what we mean by “invisible” things, because there are two kinds. First there are things we cannot see with the naked eye, like molecules and atoms and the structure of DNA. Vital things of course, but with the right equipment they can be seen or at least identified. God is not invisible like this. But second, there are things that simply can never be seen, like love and justice and truth. We can see what they do but we can never see them. These are the things that God is like, indeed sometimes we actually say that “God is love” or “God is truth,” etc. But some might say, “What about St Paul’s saying (1 Cor 13:12) “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face.” ? The answer surely is that here St Paul is not using the word “see” to mean as with the eyes, but means “see’ as “to understand.” So we might say about something we did not fully understand when it’s explained to us, “Ah now I see,” meaning now I understand.
We Christians inherit the idea that God cannot be pictured from the Jewish people. In the rest of the world,the gods were always depicted in some kind of human form, and so when you went to visit a Temple of Zeus you would find a statue of Zeus looking like a man at the heart of the Temple ; and if you went to visit a Temple of Venus, you would find a statue of a beautiful woman. Pagans did not understand any other way of thinking about God, and so when the Roman General Pompey invaded Jerusalem in 63 BC it is said he was surprised when he entered the Holy of Holies at the Heart of the Temple to find an empty space. There was nothing to be seen. Remember too that the first Christians were sometimes accused of being atheists because they appeared not to worship any of the known gods. The nearest Jews got to the idea that God could be made present to us humans was not in a statue, but in the idea that God was present in the Holy Teaching (what they called the Torah). That’s why in our 1st Reading (Deut 30:10-14) those who heard Deuteronomy were told “The Word is very near to you.” Muslims have a similar belief that God is present in this special way in the Holy Quran.
This then is one of the things Jews and Muslims find hard to understand about our Christian faith. They will agree that Jesus is a very holy man, even a prophet; but the idea that in him as a man we meet God, is very different. Yet this is what Jesus teaches us, when he says “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:9) Our Reading today is even more explicit, because in it St Paul claims that the God we see and meet in the man Jesus is the God who created all things. The man Jesus is not another God or a demi-God, sort of working alongside God the Father, but is the same God yet making himself visible for us as a man in a particular place and time. We really need to try to grasp the immensity of this claim – the idea that God can be both totally other, an invisible power underlying the Universe - and yet able at the same time to come close to us as a fellow human being. How easily we take for granted the extraordinary almost crazy nature of this claim, yet it is at the heart of our Christian faith.
This is why many Christian teachers have pointed to the Parable of the Good Samaritan – our Gospel for today (Luke 10:25-37) - not just as a teaching on how we should be good caring human beings, but much more, as with many other Parables, as teaching on what God is like. The point is that the Samaritan does a fairly crazy thing. It would have been much more sensible, like the Priest and the Levite, to leave that apparently dead body on the road. What good would it do to risk being attacked oneself, and why spend quite a large amount of money on someone you do not know, who indeed as a Jew might be regarded as one of your enemies who almost certainly despised and hated Samaritans like you? And then to offer the Innkeeper as much extra money that he might spend looking after the wounded man was even crazier; for innkeepers were not the kind of people you trusted with this sort of thing. Think how those who heard this story would have reacted. They would have roared with laughter, “Trust an Innkeeper? You must be joking.”
But that indeed is the message of today. We know what a dreadful mess we humans have made of our world. We know how we are not to be trusted with the good things God has given us. And yet says Jesus, God takes the same risks with us, as the Samaritan took with the wounded man. God is not sensible like the Priest or the Levite. God is love and justice and truth and reaches out to us however many times we fail him.
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