Like Him

The scriptures referred to are 1 John 3:1-3.

We know what Sherlock Holmes looks like. Quite apart from the illustrations, he is described in the first novel: “In height he was rather over six feet, and so excessively thin that he seemed considerably taller. His eyes were sharp and piercing..; and his thin, hawklike nose gave his whole expression an air of alertness and decision. His chin, too, had the prominence and squareness which mark the man of determination. His hands were invariably blotted with ink and stained with chemicals, yet he was possessed of extraordinary delicacy of touch....”

We know what James Bond looks like. Not from the movies but from the novels. He is described by a female character as “certainly good-looking...Rather like Hoagy Carmichael in a way. That black hair falling down over the right eyebrow. Much the same bones. But there was something a bit cruel in the mouth, and the eyes were cold.” Those eyes are blue-grey. He's 6 foot tall and weighs 168 pounds. One thing no movie Bond sports that the book character has is a thin, 3 inch vertical scar on his right cheek. (And yet people initially said Daniel Craig couldn't play Bond because he was blond!)

Those are two of the best known fictional characters in the world and we know what they look like. Likewise from portraits we know what real people like George Washington, Ben Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson look like. We have a good idea of what Socrates looked like because we have some busts of him. You know which well known person we have all heard of but about whose appearance we haven't a clue? Jesus Christ. Neither the gospels nor the book of Acts offer any description of him and pictures of him were discouraged in the first couple of centuries of Christianity. Jesus was symbolized in early Christian art by the fish, the peacock or the anchor. When personified he was shown as the Good Shepherd, a beardless youth carrying a sheep on his shoulder. Sometimes he was shown as a baby. In the late 3^rd century, we start seeing Jesus with a beard and by the 6^th century this becomes the conventional picture of him. But whether he actually looked like that, whether his hair was long or short, whether he even had a beard or not, are matters of debate.

And you know what? That's good. Because if we knew what Jesus looked like, it would give some people reasons to be proud and others reasons to feel excluded. If he was redheaded, gingers would feel superior to others. If he was tall, lanky folks would lord it over short people. If he was thin, it would make fat people seem less Christian. I once had an inmate flatly state that Jesus was black. Having been to the Middle East I said it is more probable that he was a lot darker than me but lighter than the inmate. I myself was surprised to see at the Holy Land theme park in Orlando, in a film using very Semitic actors to play Abraham and Isaac, that they nevertheless reverted to a blond, blue-eyed actor to play Jesus. And I have seen Jesus in African American churches depicted as black and in Asian churches depicted as Asian. We all want to relate to God in the flesh. But ultimately it doesn't matter, so long as people realize that in truth we do not know exactly what he looked like. There is enough discrimination in this world without bringing Jesus' appearance into it.

Part of this may be by design. The second commandment forbids our making images of God and worshiping them. So it is interesting that the people who came to believe that they had lived with God Incarnate didn't leave a physical description of him. Perhaps they foresaw people making an idol out of Jesus' appearance. They realized that who he was might get lost in the all too human obsession with how people look.

But then the Bible is pretty much on message all the time. It doesn't usually offer us extraneous facts, like how people looked. We don't have physical descriptions of most of the people in the Bible. Leah, Jacob's first wife, had beautiful eyes (or weak eyes; it depends on the translation.) Esau was hairy. David was ruddy and not very tall. That's about it. 

(Now some people make much of the fact that Jesus in Revelation has bronze skin. Actually it says, the figure was “dressed in a robe reaching down to his feet and with a golden sash around his chest. His head and hair were white like wool, as white as snow, and his eyes were like blazing fire. His feet were like bronze glowing in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of rushing waters. In his hand he held seven stars, and out of his mouth came a sharp double-edged sword. His face was like the sun shining in all its brilliance.” (Revelation 1:13-16) Small wonder John falls at his feet as if dead! By the way, the bronze feet look like molten metal, not like a sunbather's tan. And his head is as white as his hair. And his face looks like the sun. And let's not forget the sword emerging from his mouth. This is a frightening vision, filled with symbols. This tells us nothing at all about what the earthly Jesus looked like.)

Why am I belaboring this? Because in today's passage from 1 John it says, “Beloved, we are God's children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.” (1 John 3:2) I doubt John is saying we will all become physically like Jesus. He is saying something more profound.

In Genesis 1 there is one characteristic that humans have that none of the other lifeforms God creates have: we are made in God's image. What does that mean?

In the Jewish Study Bible the notes link the image with God's authority. After all, God also tells the first humans to fill the earth, subdue it and rule over all the animals. But even that commentator points out that we are not owners of the earth but stewards for the actual owner, God.

The Hebrew word for “image” is derived from the word for “shadow.” The word for “likeness” can also mean “shape.” So clearly the author is saying we were created to resemble God. But in what way?

Looking at what we know of God at this point in the story, we can see that he is intelligent, organized, powerful, and communicative. He creates things that are useful and good and he delights in them. We can certainly see those things in human beings.

We are intelligent. Now I know that everyday we learn of ways in which other animals are intelligent as well. But there is a difference. Certain birds and apes can talk—if we teach them. And their grammar and the thoughts they express never progress beyond the rudimentary. They can do addition and subtraction but not algebra or trig or calculus. Some seem to have self-awareness but they do not seem to get introspective or contemplate their own mortality. They have an innate sense of justice but they don't have complex moral codes which wrestle with what you do when two values conflict. As with all the ways the other animals resemble humans there is a difference in degree so great that on a practical level it may as well be treated as a difference in kind. An ape may make a tool out of a stick; he will never make a Swiss Army knife or smartphone.

We are organized. Well, not all of us individually if you go by my desk. But as a species which is not the strongest or fastest or has not been gifted with the longest and sharpest claws and teeth, we have triumphed by using our intelligence to organize ourselves. A group of humans properly organized can take on a woolly mammoth or a whale. Sure, ants and bees come together to create the equivalent of cities but they don't make traffic lights or handicapped ramps or have traffic courts to determine who is right in a dispute. Nor can they organize anything as vast and varied as a country made up of beings not related through a queen/mother but held together by a constitution, embodying certain ideals. We are so intelligent and organized that we are the only species on earth to go off-world.

We are powerful. We can and do affect not merely the ecosystems in which we live but the entire planet. Sadly our power is often displayed in our tremendous ability to destroy things. We are the only species capable of destroying virtually all life on earth, either slowly by climate change or rapidly with nuclear or biological weaponry.

We are communicative. Most animals communicate vocally, visually, by touch and/or by olfaction. We have them beat. We are always communicating content to one another not merely by voice or look but by book or TV or radio or by text or via the internet.

We are creative—immensely so! It is difficult to find a place on earth where you can't see or interact with things humans have created. In fact we have left things some of the things we have created on the moon and on Mars and we have even crashed some into other planets.

Sadly not all of the things we create are useful—fidget spinners are the pet rocks of today—nor are they all good. Mankind has expended a great deal of creativity on ways to hurt, harm and kill each other. That said, we do delight in what we make, even the awful things, if only because it shows off how clever we are.

Those are all ways in which we are like God, if in a diminished and often distorted way. But I think there is one more significant way we are like God.

In Genesis 2, we are told something odd: “Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.” (Genesis 2:24, Everett Fox) The math doesn't add up. The writer may just have gotten poetic but we all know that 2 people do not literally become one body. The oneness is a metaphor for the unity that comes from love. And that would put humanity one up on our deity, unless this is also true of God in some way.

And the clue to that is in 1 John 4:7-8, where we are told: “Dear friends, let us love one another, because love is from God, and everyone who loves has been fathered by God and knows God. The person who does not love does not know God for God is love.” Notice that it doesn't say God is loving but that God is love itself. Again, if the writer is not just being poetic and sentimental, he is saying that God is a love relationship. If we put together all the other data the Bible gives us, this means God is the Father loving the Son loving the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit.

It also means that as God Incarnate, Jesus is the Divine Love made concrete. In Jesus we see the God who is Love in human form.

Now I know you have heard this from me before. I want to look at what follows from this. As we saw, we were created in the image of God. But our misuse and neglect of the attributes he has endowed us with—authority, intelligence, power, our abilities to organize ourselves and communicate, our creativity—has marred that image in us. In some people it is really hard to see even a glimpse of God. But as we said, we see that image of God restored in Jesus.

And if we accept Jesus into our hearts and lives, he sends us his Spirit to dwell in us. As it says in Ezekiel 36:27, “I will put my Spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes, and you will be careful to observe my ordinances.” Paul says, “Do you not know that you are a temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?” (1 Corinthians 3:16) And the Spirit of God works to restore the image of God in us.

Recently we saw an image that Russian hackers disseminated last year showing Jesus arm wrestling the devil. And it appeals to a lot of people who see Christianity, like everything else in the world, as a competition. There are 2 sides, God's and Satan's, and you have to choose one or the other. The problem is that looking at it that way brings out the worst in us. We want our side to win at all costs so we will do whatever we can to make that happen. When you see so-called Christians lying, cheating, using worldly power and unethical means to achieve their ends, that is because they have succumbed to blind partisanship. When they do such things, they have, in the words of Jesus, gained the world but lost their souls. (Mark 8:36) If you simply must look at life as a game, then at least take the old adage to heart that it does not matter whether you win or lose, at least not in the eyes of the world; what matters is how you play the game.

Because what life is really about is who we are and who we are becoming. Our goal is to be like God. The way we do that is by letting God's Spirit work in us so that we are becoming more loving, more joyful, more peaceful, more patient, kinder, more generous, more faithful, gentler, more self-controlled, more Christlike people day by day. Jesus is God made human; he calls us humans to be the Body of Christ, the ongoing embodiment of the Divine Love in action on earth.

Of course we will not achieve that Christlike image of God perfectly in this lifetime. That's what's so exciting about our passage from 1 John. First we are assured that we beloved and that “we are God's children now.” Not later, when we get it right, but now, while we are still in the process.

And then it says, “what we will be has not yet been revealed.” And that's true. We don't know what the ideal version of us is. I don't know what a perfected Chris Todd looks like. We do not know what God's version of us, what he intended each of us to be, looks like. But it says, “What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.” When we see our Lord, we will not be him, of course but we will be like him. We will see how closely we have come to be approximate him. We will see the family resemblance, if you will.

And we will see him as he is. What does that mean? God is infinite; we are finite. We will see that no one of us can truly reflect his image, which is, remember, love.  Love requires more than one person. It is really only in a loving relationship that we can reflect God's glory. All of us reveal some aspect or more of him but it takes all of us, living together in love, to reflect our multifaceted God. Only redeemed humanity, from every nation, tribe, people and language, coming together like a vast living mosaic, has any hope of reflect the infinite, intricate, amazing love of God in Christ.

But remember, not only is God infinite, he is eternal. So while we will be like him, we have all of eternity to keep growing in Christ, to keep tweaking and filling in and perfecting our destiny, which is to be like our God, who is love and reflects love and includes all who love and who made everything out of love and who calls all to love. Like him.