Imagine God. Imagine God. What is the image?
Is the image of a Shepherd or a lamb?
It would be interesting to do some sort of image search and count all the images of God.
What are the most popular, common, ancient and enduring images of God?
God as Shepherd is probably the winner, and the lamb a close second.
From the early church there are still literally hundreds of drawings and frescoes and mosaics depicting Jesus as the Good Shepherd. The bulletin has one of those images from the third century catacombs in Rome.
The image endures. The altar window is of the Good Shepherd, 1887. The tradition of Good Shepherd windows uses images from several biblical passages, some of which are the water and pastures of the 23rd psalm, the Good Shepherd images from the tenth chapter of John’s Gospel, the parable of leaving the ninety nine to find the one lost sheep, and from the book of Revelation as well with the reference to the Lamb also being the shepherd guiding us to the springs of the waters of life. It’s all packed in there.
The funny thing is that this image arose from a pastoral society and economy, where sheep and shepherds were common and essential for livelihood. We no longer have that bond to sheep and shepherds in our culture, economy and livelihood, yet the image endures, it still evokes and touches us.
The image has taken on a life of its own. We now know and care about sheep and shepherds because of the image of God as Shepherd and Lamb.
That is the power of the image of God, it endures and abides and works its way into the recesses of the human psyche and society. The Shepherd and the Lamb stick with us even though many of us have never actually seen or known either.
Imagine God. The Shepherd who is good, who knows the sheep, whose voice the sheep know and hear. The lamb who is worthy, who is sacrificed, who lives, who is at the center of the throne, who brings us to springs of the waters of life.
The Lamb who is our Shepherd taking us to the waters where we find life. That is what we are up to, traveling on a pilgrimage with God as both guide and companion to where life springs up as water.
In life we need guides and companions. Perhaps that is why the image of God as Shepherd and Lamb sticks with us so well. We need this. We need this deeply.
I believe the Holy Spirit evokes in us a creative and imaginative leap of faith where in we see God bursting forth from all the daily things of life. From nature, from relationships, from human activity and economy we see all these things as somehow showing us what God is like.
Christians are rightfully accused of mixing our images and metaphors of God, we can’t help it. We see something or someone and we know that somehow God resembles them in some way. God is like that rock, or that tree, or that marriage or that family or that person or that business, or that meal, like that shepherd, like that lamb.
We have a long and ancient history of even taking other religions, philosophies and pagan festivals and we baptize them and proclaim how they reveal something of the God of Israel. Whether it is Greek philosophy or the feast of dead we have taken them and reshaped them as revealing the incarnate God. It’s what we are known for. We colonize all languages and images with Jesus just as God invades all ideas and meaning.
Something partial is known of God in all things, the things that ring true and endure.
Then there is the person of Jesus Christ who is the fullness of God, nothing partial. In the Christian imagination we have these psychedelic episodes depicting Jesus as both lamb and shepherd. The book of Revelation is probably one of the best examples of Christian imagination going wild with images of God and God’s activity filling the world, so much so it is difficult or impossible to make sense of it all. Overwhelmed by God’s presence our language and images shatter to the floor all in a jumble.
That really is what we are like, we see everything somehow relating to God or revealing God in some partial way, and then when we try to speak in more particular terms of Jesus all that partialness slips away and we just simply fail to make sense because our senses are not up to it.
So as Christians we are always being either partial or nonsensical. We can’t help it.
Imagine God.
We are on a pilgrimage. What we now know as partial and fragmented will be full and whole.
Our cup of language and image is running over, what a mess we make!