God must smile, speaking of God as human, whenever we discover evidence of His quiet working among us.
Our daughter Elizabeth tells this story about grandson Christian, 6-years-old and about to enter first grade. “While we were in the car on the way to the shoe store, Christian starts down this path: ‘I think I’d like to be like Jesus.’ ‘OK,’ mom responds, ‘why?’ “Because He got to die on the cross. I think I’d like to do that to be like Him.’ ‘Um, why would you want to do that?’ ‘Redemption, Mommy. Jesus died on the cross for redemption for us.’”
Having her law degree, Elizabeth pressed Christian on his desire to die on the cross but she pressed to no satisfactory conclusion. Granted, he doesn’t yet have an inkling of the pain of crucifixion or the cruel reality of death, but still their conversation shows both the working of the Spirit of God and the young boy’s receptivity to that working.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote about the image of God, a theme throughout the Bible. “The image of God is the image of Jesus Christ on the cross. It is into this image that the disciple’s life must be transformed. In baptism Christ engraves the form of death on his own. Having died to the flesh and to sin, Christians are now dead to this world, and the world is dead to them. Those who live out of their baptism live out of their death. Christ marks the life of his own with their daily dying in the struggle of the spirit against the flesh, and with their daily suffering the pains of death which the devil inflicts on Christians. It is the suffering of none other than Jesus Christ that all of his disciples on earth have to endure.”
“Speaking of God as human,” I wrote in the first sentence. He indeed did become human and whenever our obedience to God’s will brings us suffering for following Christ, we are being conformed to the image of God incarnate. It happens in first graders and should be happening in adults our whole life long. “This is a progression in us from one level of understanding to another and from one degree of clarity to another, toward an ever-increasing perfection in the form of likeness to the image of the Son of God.”
Whom do you see as you go about the tasks of today? “The image of Jesus Christ, which is always before the disciples’ eyes, and before which all other images fade away, enters, permeates, and transforms them.” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Discipleship,” 285, 286, 281)
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