Who's that?
Frank Boreham was born in Tunbridge Wells, England and it's said that when he was a small child, taking a walk in the care of a young companion—it's said that a gypsy lady looked at his hands and said, "Tell this child's parents to put a pen in his hand and he'll never have difficulty making a living." So the gypsy said and Boreham went on to publish nearly fifty books and 3,000 editorials for the Hobart Mercuryover a period of 47 years. Fancy that!
He tells us that once he was looking in the window of a picture-framing shop and saw one of Copping's portrayals of the face of Jesus. Boreham wasn't alone. A little boy, his face shoved hard up against the window to see what was on offer, was eyeing the same face. Up came a rough-looking and rough-spoken woman who grabbed the boy roughly by the hand and tried to drag him off but he, resisting, wanted to know, "Who's that?" With a savage tug of the arm she got him away, "Come on, come on! It's a portrait of Gawd, that's all." Though it's crudely put, the woman spoke a central truth of the Christian faith and a truth that should be life for the world.
Colossians 1:15 speaks of Jesus as the image of the God we can't see and in 2 Corinthians 4:6, in contrast to eras of former darkness and partial truth, we hear that God came, bringing in a new creation as surely as he had brought in the first. "For God who said, 'Let light shine out of darkness,' made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ."
In Colossians 3:10-11 (NJB) Paul reminds the Christians that they had been re-created in the image of God and that "in that image" there is no room for sinful divisions between people and classes. "There is only Christ: he is everything and he is in everything." [Moffatt renders it: "Christ is everything and everywhere."]
Christ is everything!
Christ is everything! You can see it in his face. All that Israel and the wayward world were looking for, hoping for, longing for, groping and dying for is found in him—in that face!
Where he is, all that is pathetic and divisive and snobbish and racist is obliterated! We might justify that kind of rubbish while we're glaring at each other's face from behind our fences or trenches or tanks but it's something else to justify it when we're looking squarely into his face as he listens intently to our good reasons.
Christ is everything.
Say it out loud. Christ is everything.
Really? Is he really?
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.
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