Naked - A revisit to Genesis ??

During my teenage years I had a very painful relationship with the mirror. Every day it would remind me of the confidence crippling condition that plagued my face. I'm sure on average an hour or more a day was spent twisting my head in directions that it should not go and constantly adjusting mirrors to ensure I could see from every angle just how bad the acne really was.. The other 23 hours were spent wondering whether I would be accepted looking like a shiny red porous ketchup bottle that had accidentally been filled with mustard. It was pretty hard to get out of my head the reflection I had been staring at.

Earlier in my blog I wrote about how self conciousness seemed to be a consequence of the fall. Before this event it was as though Adam and Eve were staring intently into the person of God. In a sense God acted like a mirror. They were defined by what they saw. What Adam saw in God helped him understand himself. Then suddenly they were plunged into darkness. The mirror which once defined them was now seemingly opaque. I sense the terror of that moment as I read Genesis. Suddenly this deep and searching question grips them, 'who am I'? They became aware, in a new way, of this thing called self, now starved of what once fed it.

It seems funny when you think of it like this that it took philosophers until the enlightenment to begin trying to figure things out with themselves as the first point of reference (humanism). It would seem it took thousands of years for their brains to catch up with their souls. Here was Adam staring into a broken mirror lost and confused as he looks down and realises he is stood there naked and all the animals were watching. The changed, self concious Adam is desperately looking for some kind of assurance that he is 'OK'. Self is no longer feeding on God, it is searching for some sort of covering, something else to give it meaning.

We all know that struggle, don't we? The nagging questions of are we 'OK' or not? Are we loved, accepted, included. A constant looking at others, trying to figure out whether we are made in their image or not. I'm surely not as fat as her? Do I sound as confident as that? Have I got the same determination as him? Surely I don't dress that bad? If only I could get as toned as him! Our relationship economy ensures that we surround ourselves with the people that make us feel good, the ones that we like the image of, the rest we push out into life's lonely corridors. The ones that stammer; or dress funny; or can't figure out social rules all leave us with this nervous thought that actually we might not be OK either. 'Self' likes to feed of people that comfort it. So we reward those people, and with 'self' puffed up by the reward it returns the compliment. We group ourselves in packs feeding off each other, trying to understand ourselves in a broken mirror and closing the doors tightly to those that don't conform.

Some people give up the fight, they resign themselves to being losers, they take comfort in hating themselves. Others buys Ferraris and polish them until they are so shiny that they can just about see their own reflection. They feel really good about themselves because they think they are a Ferrari.

Jesus is different. Really different. He has what Adam lost. At one point he turns around to his friends and says "I only do what I see my father doing". He has got it. He has the intent starring into God thing that Adam seemed to lose. Jesus wasn't busy building himself nice houses or hanging out with the righteous people. He didn't need that stuff to make him feel good about himself. He didn't struggle with the questions that we struggle with. He didn't need the posh car or the job title to convince himself that he had made it. No! Jesus was staring into God and what he saw defined him. What he was looking at explained the "who" question for him. We feel insecure when people don't like us, we feel undermined when people question us, we retaliate when people hate us. Jesus hung on the cross, staring intently into the faces of his enemies, their eyes so hate filled that they had demanded his life and yet from His heart Jesus pleads for them to be forgiven. Nothing is more deeply moving, more utterly profound, more truly beautiful than this moment. This is the definition of wholeness, the explanation of what it means to be fully human (in the creation sense). Only the person who lives staring into the mystery called Love could do this.

Until I started to think like this I never really understood how I could be called righteous. I didn't get why, although I went on sinning, I some how got to be righteous because of the cross. Then I realised that Adam wasn't staring into a mirror at the beginning of the story as I thought. In fact it was the other way round. Adam was the mirror. Eternal life was the opportunity to tilt a lump of dust and water in the direction of a great light. The glorious reflection defines, gives meaning, identity and reason. Jesus fixed what severed that relationship in the garden, he took a cloth, dipped it his own blood, wiped down your mirror and then invited you to look into the light again. Despite the memories fading in the glass, despite the shadows that occasional darken your shine the invitation cries out for you to allow the warmth of His light to fall on you again. As you respond in this way His righteousness begins to define you, His love begins to stream out of you, His beauty marks. Left congealed in the bloody rag is the dirt that once dimmed this perfect reflection. You are free.

I guess this all helps me to understand a little more of what it means to die to self, to take up my cross daily, to lose my life. All the reference points I once used to understand myself have got to go. The constant inventing myself in the image of others must end. I'm in the world but the world will not define me. I'm not made of the stuff of this world. I can't look there any more to understand my identity. Eternal life will found when I rediscover the God whose image I was created in.