Genesis 1:26-27 (NRSV)
On the sixth day God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”
So God created humankind in his image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
Genesis 1:26-27 (The Message)
God spoke: “Let us make human beings in our image, make them
reflecting our nature
So they can be responsible for the fish in the sea,
the birds in the air, the cattle,
And, yes, Earth itself,
and every animal that moves on the face of Earth.”
God created human beings;
he created them godlike,
Reflecting God’s nature.
He created them male and female
For centuries we have used these two lines of scripture to reverse engineer our image of God. If we are the image of God, we figure, then God must look just like us – only, maybe, bigger. Using that word “image” in it’s photographic sense, and working backwards from ourselves, God, we decide, must have ten toes and two arms and a full head of hair - just like us. (Not to mention the proper kind of genitalia - but that’s a whole ‘nother sermon.)
This hasn’t necessarily been any kind of “official” teaching, it’s just the way human minds tend to work: if I look like him then he must look like me, and this has been allowed to stand until it is a pretty well accepted way of thinking about God in our scriptures and in our conversations. In the Old Testament, God is spoken of as standing above the heavens, reaching out his hand, walking through the garden, speaking in a human voice using human words. It doesn’t hurt that we can justify our belief that we are pretty important as a species if we look just like God.
At the same time, because, like the White Queen in one of the Alice books, we sometimes have believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast, most of us would say, if pushed to it, that God has no form, no knowable shape – that God is something utterly “other”, very different from us. And yet there is that Sunday School image in the dark back corners of our minds of an old man floating about on a cloud, looking down on us.
My main question in all this is: why do we focus so on the supposed physical attributes of God and humankind? If I asked someone here to describe a loved one to the rest of us, they would probably start with a basic physical description: medium height, blue eyes, blonde hair – but they would soon go to the non-physical attributes: she is really sweet and kind, she makes me laugh, she’d never turn a friend away, she’s a hard worker - a genius with anything mechanical. None of these things have anything to do with the person’s physical make-up and yet these are the things that really make that person the special someone they are.
So ... when we hear scripture say that we are created in the image of God, why is it we worry about arms and legs and completely overlook the attributes of God that REALLY matter? What are some of those attributes? How do we describe God? [creative, loving. compassionate, forgiving, no boundaries, taking delight in creation ... etc.]
Why, when we think of ourselves as created in the image of God do we not ever think of ourselves as being endowed with THESE things? Think about it ... please, think about it.
This hasn’t necessarily been any kind of “official” teaching, it’s just the way human minds tend to work: if I look like him then he must look like me, and this has been allowed to stand until it is a pretty well accepted way of thinking about God in our scriptures and in our conversations. In the Old Testament, God is spoken of as standing above the heavens, reaching out his hand, walking through the garden, speaking in a human voice using human words. It doesn’t hurt that we can justify our belief that we are pretty important as a species if we look just like God.
At the same time, because, like the White Queen in one of the Alice books, we sometimes have believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast, most of us would say, if pushed to it, that God has no form, no knowable shape – that God is something utterly “other”, very different from us. And yet there is that Sunday School image in the dark back corners of our minds of an old man floating about on a cloud, looking down on us.
My main question in all this is: why do we focus so on the supposed physical attributes of God and humankind? If I asked someone here to describe a loved one to the rest of us, they would probably start with a basic physical description: medium height, blue eyes, blonde hair – but they would soon go to the non-physical attributes: she is really sweet and kind, she makes me laugh, she’d never turn a friend away, she’s a hard worker - a genius with anything mechanical. None of these things have anything to do with the person’s physical make-up and yet these are the things that really make that person the special someone they are.
So ... when we hear scripture say that we are created in the image of God, why is it we worry about arms and legs and completely overlook the attributes of God that REALLY matter? What are some of those attributes? How do we describe God? [creative, loving. compassionate, forgiving, no boundaries, taking delight in creation ... etc.]
Why, when we think of ourselves as created in the image of God do we not ever think of ourselves as being endowed with THESE things? Think about it ... please, think about it.
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