God In Person

During this pandemic, I've come to know some new people through online meetings such as zoom. A couple of months ago, of the new people I have met online, I saw someone for the first time in-person. We recognized each other instantly. (We might've squeed* with excitement and rushed to give each other hugs.) And yet: she was shorter than I realized. In my mind I quickly adjusted my mental image of her with that and a few other things that weren't clear on camera. She probably did the same with me. While we had no trouble recognizing each other, a video conference wasn't quite the same as meeting in person. 

Our image of God has the same issues. We're not in a position to see what we want to see, and the obstacles don't yield to technological solutions like zoom. If God wants to know us in person -- and for us to know him -- then we have places that we look. Sometimes we look to nature, sometimes we look to Scripture. For a Christian, ultimately our face-time with God is in the person of Christ. 

Jesus serves that place in our knowledge of God, as he said: "He who has seen me has seen the Father." He is the image of God; through him we know God and recognize God. We balk at seeing God as down-to-earth; it's not how we think of God. Inside our minds, we tend to de-personalize God. Heaven help us when an academic tries to prove they know God. They tend to trot out abstract theories or lofty descriptions. The theologized God is often "omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent" -- as opposed to "slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love." There's a bias in the academic world that the best knowledge is impersonal. The incarnation -- Jesus showing us the true the image of God in person -- says that our bias is mistaken. In Jesus, the image of God is someone who loves the world, who meets us at our point of need. When we meet God in person, that is the image that will allow us to recognize him. For the long days between now and then, they will allow us to hold faith that his coming will be a good thing. 

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* The spell-checker is taking issue with the verb "squee". I expect that one will make it into the dictionary eventually, but it's in common-enough use that I'll ignore the spell-checker on this one.