Image of the Invisible (Proper 11C epistle)

Cosmic Christ, by Fr. John Giuliani

Image of the Invisible
Homily delivered Ninth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 11C)
17 July 2016; 8:00 a.m. Said and 10:00 a.m. Sung Eucharist
Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)
Readings: Genesis 18:1-10a; Psalm 15
Colossians 1:15-28; Luke 10:38-42

God, take away our hearts of stone
 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

In A.D. 112, a young governor in a province of what is now northern Turkey wrote the Roman Emperor for advice on how to manage Christians.  In it, Pliny the Younger tells the Emperor Trajan what he has learned about Christianity by interrogating Christians:  “On a fixed day of the week they assemble before dawn to sing responsively a hymn to Christ as to a god, and to bind themselves by oath not for any criminal purpose, but to commit no fraud, no robbery or adultery, to bear no false witness, and not to deny any debt when asked to pay up. After this they customarily separate and reassemble to eat a communion meal, all together and quite harmless.” 

Singing “a hymn to Christ as to a god,” marked Christians from the beginning.  There are several possible examples in the New Testament, whether actual quoted hymns or rhythmic poetic texts soon to be used as such.    

John’s prologue, from about the time of Pliny’s letter, is one: 

“In the beginning was the Word.

The Word was with God,

and the Word was God.

He was in the beginning with God.  

All things came into being through him,

and without him not one thing came into being.

What has come into being in him was life,

and the life was the light of all people.

The light shines in the darkness,

and the darkness did not overcome it…

The true light that enlightens everyone was coming into the world.

He was in the world,

and the world came into being through him;

yet the world did not know him.

To his own he came,

Yet his own did not accept him. 

Any who did accept him

He empowered to become children of God…

The Word became flesh

And made his dwelling among us,

and we have seen his glory:

the glory as of a father’s only son,

full of grace and truth… 

Of his fullness we have all had a share:

Love upon love…

No one has ever seen God.

It is God the only Son, close to the Father’s heart,

who has made him known” (1:1-18)

A far earlier one, from the early 50s, is found in Philippians:

[Christ] was in the form of God,
    but did not regard equality with God
    as something to be wielded,
 but emptied himself,
    taking the form of a slave,
    being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
    he humbled himself
    and became obedient to the point of death—
    even death on a cross.

Therefore God also highly exalted him
    and gave him the name
    that is above every name,
     so that at the name of Jesus
    every knee should bend,
    in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

 and every tongue should confess
    that Jesus Christ is Lord,
    to the glory of God the Father. (2:6-11)

Today’s epistle reading includes a third one, from the later 50s: 

[Christ] is the image of the invisible God,

the firstborn of all creation;

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.

He himself is above all things,

and in him all things hold together.

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 all things.

For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell,

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. (Colossians 1:15-25)

“The image (icon) of the invisible God”: a visible showing of the unseen driver of the universe.  It is kind of a contradiction in terms: image of the invisible, the seen un-seeable.  But this ode to Christ resolves the contradiction in the very way creation occurred.

It plays with the various meanings of the word that begins the Bible: In the beginning (in Hebrew, Bereshith) (Genesis 1:1). The Hebrew word reshith, based on the root r‘š, to head or start, means many things, including head, firstborn, supreme, and beginning.  When we hear that Christ is the image of the unseen God, we are reminded of creation, where man and woman are created “in the image of God” (Gen 1:26).   We then hear that he is supreme (above all things), the head, the firstborn, and the beginning.  Even the preposition be of bereshith “in the beginning” is the object of meditation here: “in him,” “through him,” and “to him” all play with the different meanings of the preposition. 

 

The theology here is astounding. It turns on their head several images that are part and parcel of the Roman Imperial cult and state propaganda.  Augustus was seen as having providentially brought the Pax Romana, the Roman era of peace and prosperity, an object of thanks and pride for Roman citizens benefiting from it.  Others saw it differently: one Briton chieftain famously said, “They create a wasteland by war, and then call it peace.”  But for Romans, the Emperor was celebrated as “God’s son,” “the first citizen,” and Jupiter on earth.  The authority of the state—represented by abstracted Jupiter on earth.  All personified images of state power such as thrones, dominions, powers, and rulers were summed up in his person. 

But here, it is Jesus, a man who just twenty years before had been put to death by the Roman method of execution reserved for rebels and the worst criminals, who is before all things, in all things, and made all things.  It is Jesus who is the image of the invisible God, and not only the beginning and means of creation, but also its purpose, or end.  “In him,” says the hymn, “all things hold together.”   Jesus is Lord and God, says the hymn, not Caesar. 

It is popular in some circles today to lament the shift in early Christianity from the message of the historical Jesus—the kingdom of God is in our midst, so do justice, love compassion, and walk humbly with God—to a cult that worshipped the person of Christ and focused on rewards of punishments in the life after death rather than justice and mercy here and now.  I think, though, this caricature of early Christian faith misses the point.  Again, Jesus’s life and death was in the relatively recent memory of his Palestinian followers.  They continued to follow him after his miserable death because of his continued living presence among them.  They reached out to gentiles because of what they had learned from him about God’s universal love. 

And in reflecting on the astounding turn-around of things after his death, when he came to them again more alive and real than he had ever before Calvary, they realized that the whole world made sense only in light of the resurrection of Jesus, only in the reality of his person.  It was only in his person that they could see exactly who God is and what God intends.  All things depended on Christ, and creation itself came from him and for him.   They came to this faith not as a betrayal of his memory, but precisely because of it and how it connected with their experience of him as living Lord in the present.   There was a continuity between the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith, between what Marcus Borg called pre-Easter Jesus and post-Easter Jesus.  The continuity was his person, and in this all things began to make sense in a new way.  The cross, what had been a despised and feared instrument of state terror used against Jesus, became the basis of hope and a sign of forgiveness.  The lords and powers of the world paled in comparison.  The “peace” of Rome paled by comparison.   Incarnation, the divine becoming flesh, took a central position in our understanding of the world.  

This is what lies behind the idea of mystery in the section of today’s epistle reading just after the hymn: “the mystery that has been hidden throughout the ages and generations but has now been revealed to his saints. 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.”  Just as God was in Jesus, Christ is in us.  Incarnation.  The invisible made visible. 

Living the kingdom—doing justice, loving compassion, and walking humbly—this was what it meant to make Christ known through our way of life.  Acts of hospitality and generosity—like those in the other lessons today (Abraham and Sarah welcome the three strangers, Mary and Martha welcome Jesus and learn something about simplicity and intentionality from him in the process)—these acts were increasingly seen in light of incarnation, as ways both of welcoming and serving the head of all things and of making the love of God present for those in the world with us, of making the invisible become visible.   And so we come back to the kingdom: do justice, love compassion, walk humbly. 

Hymns express our faith, and these early ones helped make it.  And in so doing, they imagined the world in a wholly new way, and made hope, life, and joy possible in an otherwise grim and forbidding world.     

 In the name of Christ, Amen.