Seeing Jesus

Grief can take us in strange and unusual directions.  When I was seven years old my father died.   One of the things I relished hearing from my uncles and aunts was, "You're the spitting image of your Daddy."  Hearing such made me want to stand a little taller.  In those days after his death, I would look at his picture and make my face look like his face.  I practiced holding my eyes and mouth as his looked in the picture.  I wanted to look like him, to be like him, to live up to the words my relatives said about the way I looked like him.

 

In a conversation between Jesus and Philip, the disciple said to the master, "Lord, show us the Father, and we shall be satisfied."  In the responding words of Jesus, we hear Him saying, "Whoever has seen me has seen the Father."  (John 14:8-9)  Of course, here is one of those places where the Scripture is not to be taken literally.  Jesus was not saying that the Father in heaven bears the same physical image as the Son on the earth.  Instead, He was speaking of the heart and the expressions of the heart.  This is the point where seeing Jesus is the same as seeing God.

 

It can be no other way.  God is not One who is limited by the things that are physical.  While we cannot define Him, nor describe Him, we know He is not bound by the physical as are we.  It is better to think of the Spirit as we seek to know how it is that God expresses and reveals Himself.  But, it is still true that what we see of the heart of Jesus reflects what is in the heart of God.  What we see revealed about Jesus in the pages of the Word  reveals to us the image and heart of God.