From Octo-Man to the Image of God.

When I was an undergrad, I spent some time volunteering for a child sponsorship organization. I would circuit local churches on Sundays and set up a booth with brochures and packages that contained pictures of children and sponsorship instructions. However, my chief responsibility was to answer any questions people might have about the organization and convince them of the value of this charity. It was in this capacity that I felt like I was not representing the company so much as I was representing the children. The equation I had worked out in my head was that the more packets I gave away, the more children might have brighter opportunities and futures. I studied the organization and practiced answers to typical questions.

Despite my preparations, one very popular question always upset me. “Do the children go to church and are they taught the Gospel?” This kind of question was always asked in the context that an affirmative was the desirable response. Anyone within a Christian community, especially an evangelical community, might think this question to be completely reasonable and even virtuous. Yet my first thought was always: “Does it matter?” or “If I say no, is that a deal-breaker?” I always cringed at this question because for some reason, all the information I had just given about food and medicine and basic education, all things taken for granted by Americans, was not enough. And it was someone’s Christianity that kept them from thinking so.

Or put another way, their vision of Christ kept them from seeing the image of God.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how I think modern Christians have constructed a new “Golden Calf” in the shape of “Octo-Man.” But I want to go a bit further. Not only have we constructed a false representation of our God, but we do so at the cost of seeing God’s own image in each of us.

What has always struck me as very shocking and frustrating is that Christians are seen as escapists, constantly looking past death and forgetting about the world and context we live in right now. One of my non-Christian friends has rightfully observed that if he became a Christian, his profound respect and reverence for life would be damaged because – according to his observations of all the Christians in his lifetime – his life would all of sudden become interstitial instead of finite. For him, this life is couched in such significance because that is all there is. But for us Christians, we lack the motivation to find this life important.

And this has been my experience of other Christians in my life, also! But it shouldn't be that way. Of all people on this earth, Christians have the clearest motivation to have the utmost concern for other human beings. Christians have the most obvious motivation to be humanists.

In our Creation myth, it is written that God created all humans in his own image, the image of God. Now this is loaded with political and religious back story. So let’s briefly talk about that.

Back in the Ancient Near East (the culture the Genesis story was written in) the mention of the “image of God” was used in many places other than the Hebrew Bible. It was also used to describe rulers and kings. This descriptor effectively set these people, the kings and rulers, apart by saying they contained the traits and authority of god, therefore all subjects should treat them with the respect and reverence they would offer their god. Disrespect the king, you disrespect the god. And the inverse as well. What sets Genesis apart is not the idea itself, but the notion that ALL HUMAN BEINGS contained this image. This meant all Israelites, all Babylonians, all Samaritans, priests, peasants, concubines, kings, farmers, shepherds, drunkards, Sodomites, the Pharaoh, EVERYONE.

Secondly, having some kind of idol of the god was prominent, even preferred. People wanted something to see – an image that represented their deity – to which they could offer their reverence as if it were their god. The God of the Israelites, according to the Biblical record, has persistently eschewed an idol or physical representation. He wrote it twice in stone that his followers were NEVER to create an idol of him nor worship it. What are we left with? An invisible God. A persistently invisible God.

Except for the image imbued in his creation. In everyone. All of us.

Time passes. History happens. Jesus arrives on the scene with a radical new theology and ethic. He goes around – town to town – healing people, feeding people, and preaching a new interpretation of Torah. One of those teachings is a super interesting parable in Matthew 25.

It’s the end of days and everyone stands before the king for their final judgment. He is separating people into two groups: good (sheep) or bad (goats). Sheep get heaven. Goats get hell. But here’s the super interesting thing! The criterion for earning heaven or hell has nothing to do with beliefs or doctrine or attendance at church or tithing or even proclaimed faith in God. It has to do with feeding the hungry and welcoming the stranger and comforting the sick. It has to do with meeting the temporal needs of the poor – other human beings.

And then, Jesus goes even further in the parable! The king (the judge) says, “Truly, I tell you, just as you did to the least of these, you also did to me.”

Stunning.

The invisible God, represented by the king in the parable, expects us all to treat each other, and especially the least among us, AS IF we were treating him. AS IF it were God herself in front of us.

Human beings are the vessel God has chosen to make herself visible. The image of God that serves as a proxy worthy of our reverence and respect is … us. All of us. Here on earth.

Returning to my original illustration concerning the ambivalence towards child sponsorship, my uninhibited reaction to the question of teaching the Gospel was not because I think the Christian faith should not be concerned with telling the story of Jesus. In fact, I believe the opposite. My recoil was because of an assumption that food, medicine, and a basic education were not enough to elicit a desire to help when the reality of millions of children (and adults for that matter) living without the most basic needs essential to all human life, sustenance, should be the most crucial concern of the Christian faith!

I mean, think about your children (or future children) for a second. We feed, clothe, protect, and secure the best medical treatment for our own children without a second thought about whether or not doing those things impacts the eternal situation of their soul. It isn't zero-sum; by feeding your children, you aren't choosing to do that INSTEAD of teaching them about Jesus or taking them to church or whatever religious education you provide. We don’t require our children to attend Sunday School if they want food or water. We never forget to give our children medicine because we were too concerned with their soul.

Christian scriptures testify that God is the God of the whole world; he is the Creator of every person. If Christians truly believe this, and truly believe that all humans bear the image of our God, then our love and fidelity to our unseen Lord should first and foremost be manifest through our love and fidelity to his visible image in one another. It is to this that Jesus testifies in Matthew 25 when the inheritance of a Kingdom is based on the provision of basic food, water, clothing, and medicine to “the least of these.” The truth of the gospel message is not an otherworldly Truth hovering outside our sensory grasp. It is the idea that the corporate body of Christians can become the Body of Christ working without hesitation towards the affirmation that every human, all of creation, is loved by God and worthy of a dignified existence.