The theme for this week’s Acton Commentary, “The Image of God and You,” struck me while I was rocking my baby son in the early morning hours. In the dim light he reached up and gently touched my face, and it occurred to me how parents are so prone to see the image of God in their children. And yet I wondered what it might be like for a child to look into the face of a parent. What would the baby see there?
The face of God, in a way. Or at least, a face of someone created in the image of God. The parental-filial relationship is a leitmotif of Scripture, starting with the trinitarian relationship between Father and Son and then with human society and the trinitarian image of father, mother, and son.
Dorothee Sölle, picking up on a vocational theme found in Martin Luther, once said that “God has no other hands than ours. If the sick are to be healed, it is our hands that will heal them.” There’s a sense in which this is true, in that God has deigned to provide us with the grace and responsibility of work and prayer, what Pascal has called “the dignity of causality.”
But of course God has his own hands, made dirty with the work of healing and pierced for our transgressions. In this way, our image-bearing and calling is always derivative of and oriented to the divine archetype, Jesus Christ, “the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15).