GOD CREATIVE

“It is the creative potential itself in human beings that is the image of God.” — Mary Daly

Psalm 33:6
John 1:1-14
Colossians 1:15-20

People try to escape Jesus for as long as they can. We can ignore him, and we do. We develop systems financially, socially, physically and especially pseudo-spiritually to get away from needing or heeding him. Loving us, he’s jealous; but loving us, he doesn’t force us to reciprocate.

Still, we have trouble escaping him. Maybe we can’t because we look like him. We were made through him. My friends, family and enemies were all fashioned and designed to be like him, and so I find his picture everywhere. A picture of his nature is in our desire to be with people, to be known, to love something so much it fills me up.

Paul said everything exists for Jesus, through him, and that everything is held together in him. Yeats said, “The centre cannot hold”. It appears so, given how fast and loose we play life. But he didn’t understand who holds the shaky center.

Every person has Jesus’ image. This fact conjures up something like the word “holy” with everyone we meet. We deal with images of Jesus.

Yet we curse these people? In or with his name, no less?

We still keep trying to escape from him. So he has shown himself more than creative; he’s shown himself ingenious, enterprising. This is because he’s a lover, jealous but not forceful.

He shows up looking like us. Now people run into him on the streets or in bookstores or warehouses or at dinner parties. Because he has shown up.

Still, we run away.

God created us through Jesus. So, present here, Jesus continues to create when he meets us. He reveals to us wild and alien things, thoughts like new colors. They come from another place, and we’ve neither heard nor seen them before. We don’t understand them, just as we don’t understand him. They recreate broken people, broken relationships and a broken world. They make us look more like this wild and uncontainable Jesus.

We were each made to be the kind of person Jesus is.

Everyone we’ll ever meet was made to be the kind of person Jesus is. And they were made for him.

Jesus hasn’t finished creating. He did something beautiful the first go round. And we broke it. Now he wants to make it new, to make it better. Do we want to escape that?

Do I want to get away from Jesus? Why?
Have I ever met anyone who resembled him? What was this person like?
Do I believe Jesus’ teachings make us new creatures? Is this a good thing?

Adam