Retiring childish images of Jesus

I must have seen one too many pictures of Jesus as a kid---the Resurrection Jesus of Eastern Orthodox iconography. The image settled into theology in my mind, the unexamined notion that Jesus spends all his time just frozen on a throne, posing for portrait artists.

This is the kind of failure of imagination that we smile at in children but that is not amusing in adults: "When I was a child I thought as a child . . ." (1 Corinthians 13:11). In fact, my adult perception of God has embarrassingly remained one of remoteness, and a Savior as lacking in affect as the Vlidimir Madonna.

All this is changing gradually as God ferrets out error with multiple surgical instruments, as is His wont. First I started meeting Christians who live as if God is so near that one might expect him around each corner of the house, putting tea on for an afternoon conversation. And now, he has peeled away one more scale from my eyes, to reveal for the first time a verse I have read a hundred times:

"We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God" (Romans 6:9-10).

Jesus is not sitting or posing. He "lives life." And when the Bible says Jesus "always lives to make intercession for" us (Hebrews 7:25), it is not as some bored functionary slumped in his chair and pushing papers on his desk. Jesus is busy, occupied, traveling, ordering, dispatching. He is "the living God" (Daniel 6:26); presumably as active as He was when His dusty feet plied the streets of Israel---and with a newly unleashed authority.

Faith will never rise higher than one's perception of who God is. "The life he lives" is a phrase full of hope and feistiness. It invites prayer. Aslan is on the move, both bringing in His kingdom in lands I've never seen, and always ready for that cup of tea with me.

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