Still Messiah after all these years?

Jesus Christus -- Gestern und Heute, Derselbe auch de Ewigkeit

 Jesus Christ -- yesterday and today, the same also to eternity

This framed work of scherenschnitte (a centuries-old German and Swiss art of paper-cutting design) recently came back to me.  My sisters, when they saw it, immediately thought it must have belonged to our grand-parents on our dad's side.  It is the kind of thing they would have had on the walls of their house.  And it has that air of unchanged and unchanging family inheritance.

But it's something my first wife and I gave to my parents years ago, after she found it in an antique store.  We thought they -- my dad especially, would like it.  It went back to her after his passing.  And now it's come to me.

Funny how Jesus gets around.  

And stays always the same?  

I wonder, is that your experience of him?

In my childhood, I knew two sides of Jesus: from Sunday school stories, a person long ago able to help people with miracles of healing and feeding -- someone to love as a friend; and from the much-larger-than-life Garden-of-Gethsemane portrait that hung at the front of the sanctuary, a solitary, gentle man of lonely, abandoned prayer -- someone to admire and feel sorry for, but who you couldn't really get close to.

At age 12, though, I began to cling to him as someone sent from God to save me after I died, from falling into hell and the hands of the devil -- both of which God had made.  From there it was a short step to know Jesus as a prophet of apocalyptic judgement on all the world, come both to announce judgement and to offer escape at the same time -- someone I needed to tell others about, for their own ultimate well-being.

Then things changed.  More and more Jesus became an on-going revelation, embodiment and enabler of God's good will for life in this world in the here and now -- someone to look up to happily, and learn from if you could.

And now?  I think Jesus for me right now is a window or door through which I am beckoned to enter into, and be opened to the mystery of God-in-us and of Spirit-ual life myself -- someone whose way of reconciled and divine life I am called to grow into myself after a lifetime of fragmentation and duality.

Jesus does get around.   

Or is it maybe that over the course of a lifetime, we get around.  As we circle around him, coming to see the one known as "God-with-us" from different perspectives and a variety of angles?  He is, after all, much bigger than any teaching, tradition or vision of him.

And one of the more intriguing, oddly enlightening, deeply encouraging visions of Jesus that I've been touched by recently is an image that's emerged in the group of young people currently in the confirmation program at our church.  It's Jesus as "the perfect pancake."

It makes sense to us.  And who's to say it isn't as perfect an image of the eternal Jesus as any?