Seeing the Unseeable--April 13, 2021

 Seeing the Unseeable--April 13, 2021

"He [the Son] is the reflection of God's glory and the exact imprint of God's very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word." [Hebrews 1:3a]

Just over two years ago, in April of 2019, astronomers revealed an image that was the first of its kind in human history. The news and tv media called it a "photo of a black hole," or, a bit more poetically, the "shadow of a black hole."  You might remember the image from the news, but in case not, it looked like this:

Now, to some this was a rather anti-climactic kind of thing to see, because it's a bit blurry and hard to suss out what's going on, and because movies and tv shows have done a much more elaborate job of imagining what black holes look like that this might have seemed like small intergalactic potatoes.  But to people who were really in the know, this was a HUGE deal, because black holes are, by very definition, invisible.  It's an object so dense, with gravity so strong, that not even light can escape it.  And a photograph, by definition, is a representation of the light thrown off by an object, either by shining or reflecting it from something else.  And add to all that this this object here is from the supermassive black hole in the galaxy M87, which is something like 53 million light-years away from us!  That's mind-boggling!

That dark spot in the center of the image is the space where the black hole's power is so strong that light around it cannot escape--it gets suck into the event horizon and therefore looks completely dark to us.  The material all around the black hole is swirling at very high speeds as the black hole's gravity well draws it in, like water going down the drain.  And as it spins around--some of it at very very high speeds, mind-you--it starts to give off light and heat.  That spot in the middle, though, is a actual representation, of where the light isn't--it's a real image of something that should be invisible.  Unlike an artist's painting or a computer graphics department's best imagined renderings, the image above is a real representation of what the black hole really is like--even though we shouldn't be able to see it at all.

Okay, so enough of me nerding out about astrophysics--except that this is the same kind of claim that the anonymous writer of Hebrews in particular (and the whole of the New Testament in general) makes about Jesus--that in him, we are given an image of the invisible God.  And more to the point, we are given in Jesus, not just someone's guess or their preferred imaginary mental picture, but a real glimpse of who God really is.  In Jesus, we see the unseeable.  We get, as the writer of Hebrews puts it, "the reflection of God's glory and the exact imprint of God's very being."  Not a golden calf that we might want to call "god."  Not our mental picture of some musclebound Superman figure with lasers coming out of his eyes that some part of us wishes God to be.  Not even the painting of the bearded old white man from the Sistine Chapel (painted by, surprise--a bearded old white man!) that says more about the artist than the God he was trying to paint.  In Jesus, we get a real picture of God in a human face--God, as God is when seen through humanity, so to speak, like the image above is what the black hole looks like when you try to represent it in a 2-dimensional flat image.

In fact, the word that Hebrews uses is where we get our word "character" from--that Jesus reveals the "character of God's being."  That's not about physical appearance--God doesn't have a beard or olive-brown skin like Jesus of Nazareth likely had, and God is not bound by the physical parameters of a human being, like height, weight, or density.  But it means that what we see in Jesus, what we hear in Jesus, what was touched and held and wept over in Jesus, is what God is like.  Jesus shows us the beating heart of God, and shows us authentically what God is like.

That claim by itself is huge.  Without even getting to that part about "sustaining all things by his powerful word," or even getting to the second half of this verse beyond it, that idea is radical.  It means that Jesus is a clearer picture of God's character than, say, a random verse out of Proverbs, or a wrathful oracle from a disgruntled minor prophet.  It means that we don't get to remake God in our own violent, vengeful, self-centered image and say it's what God is like because we don't like what Jesus shows us about God.  And it means that ultimately the cross of Jesus, the table fellowship of Jesus (with all the wrong people, by the way), the truth-telling of Jesus, the boundary-crossing of Jesus, and the vulnerable love of Jesus are true pictures of the heart of God.  It means that before we say "It's God's will that some people go hungry or live in fear, because that's just the way the world is," we have to stop and look at Jesus, who instead feeds people with reckless abandon and calms fears even of stinkers.  It means before we get to tell ourselves, "Nobody can tell me to share my abundance with someone else, because it's mine," we have to be brought up short by the same Jesus who announces God's blessing on the poor, who claims God's year of jubilee as his own mission, and who says that all of our possessions are gifts from God in the first place.  It means that the brown-skinned face of a homeless barefoot rabbi who was lynched with the approval of the respectable religious people, the politically powerful, and their militarized police force shows us more of who God is than that angry white bearded face on ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. 

Are we prepared, do you think, to surrender our preconceptions about what God is "supposed" to be like, in order to have the actual Jesus show us a real image of the invisible God?  That's where we start today.  Let us dare to let Jesus the Son enable us to see the unseeable in truth.

Good Lord, show us yourself, and let us be surprised, overcome, and overjoyed.