The Transforming Power of an Image
It is Advent once again. I don’t have to tell you this, of course. If you walk into our church building on Sunday, you will know immediately something is afoot. The church is festooned with trees, garlands, wreaths, and candles—in a word, concrete images that suggest something extraordinary is happening. It is like the more glorious a thing is, the more we want to set its significance to both proclaim it and make our joy more complete.
Speaking of images, we live in a world surrounded by images. Social media and the internet, not to mention TV, or our computers, phones, and clothing, all bear images. As we drive our cars down the road, our senses are confronted with images that tell a story of a kind of delicious food, a certain kind of attire, or a gadget we might need to make our lives happier or better. It isn’t that we discovered the power of images in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries. People have always used images because images are more powerful than words or bullet points. Images are processed 60,000 times faster than text and sort of bypass our critical thinking and factualities.
The ancients knew this, and the way Rome held power was through images of Caesar. His image was everywhere, reminding people that they owed supreme loyalty, safety, sons, and daughters to Caesar. You might not see Caesar unless you were a person of supreme rank or royalty, but the poorest peasant knew who he was and that they owed him everything. So when the Apostle Paul writes that Jesus is the image of the invisible God, he essentially dropped a bomb shell on Rome's reign of terror, and it has been subverting lives, communities, nations, and empires ever since.
Join us Sunday, and we begin to look at all the excellencies of Jesus this Advent Season. It really is a season of joy and wonder. I am so thankful that we have a whole month set aside to ponder the mystery of the Incarnation!