The Power of an Image 3

God has not left us to guess Who He is.  In the Book of Exodus, when Moses asks to see His glory --i.e., His substance, His essence,--- the Lord appeared to him in a cloud and proclaimed his name--Yahweh (I Am)---saying, I Am; I Am, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin (Ex. 34:5-7).

But He did not stop even with this revelation of Who He is; He needed to put a face on the words He had spoken to Moses---He needed to give us an exact image of His personality and His "abounding" love and compassion.  We needed to see Who God is in order to fall in love with Him---and nothing else would do to satisfy the heart of God but that we fall in love  with Him.  Now we cannot fall in love with an abstraction; we need an actual, living and loving Person if we are to fall in love.

In the Book of Colossians, Paul writes of Jesus:  He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation....For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things (1:15-19).

God, who always sees our faces, wanted us to see His face also, as lovers want to reveal themselves to one another, and to share with one another their own experience of life.  It is not enough to "tell" the other what we have experienced; we want our lover to experience it with us.  That is why we say, "Come, look at this sunset." 

In his book on Prayer, Hans Urs von Balthasar writes this of contemplation:

The person at prayer need only let himself be carried from one picture to the next:  in the humanity which he enounters in each picture, he will see a revelation of eternal, triune love.  First the child as such, with his natural qualities; the boy, the youth with his, then the grown man; each stage and condition of life; waking and sleeping, liveliness and tiredness, solitude and conversation with others; the "feel" of morning, midday, and evening; work and rest, eating and fasting, pleasure and the forgoing of pleasure; human emotions and the lack of emotion, festivities and the monotony of the daily round.  God the Creator has designed and created every one of the changing conditions of human life, and now, in the fullness of time, he has sent his Son into them, to "taste" them and make them the "experiences" of God in human nature, to charge them to his account.  Thus he crowns the accomplishment of human life, and by rising from the dead, he elevates its truth, its quintessence, into eternity.

Now,...there is a communion in which the transitory becomes a vehicle for the eternal, filled to the brim and running over with the fullness of meaning of divine love.  The Child at peace in the lap of his virginal Mother; the way he clings to her breasts with his little hands, desiring her milk; the way he sleeps in her arms or, at night, at her side; his child's cry for nourishment, his first step taken by himself, the first words learned from his Mother; the first object he makes in the workshop with Joseph's help; friendship with all its joys and disappointments; school, the worship of God, solitary walks and times of prayer: everything begins to speak of the "revelation that was kept secret for long ages but is now discolosed" (Rom. 16:25), namely, eternal love.  All this human life of his is flesh of the Word of God, the expression of what is eternally true and valid.

In contemplating what we see around us every day, we find God----now there's an image we can live with!