The Son is the image of the invisible God.

Tuesday, 3/24/15

The Gospel echoed today’s first reading. There, when Moses lifted up the bronze serpent, all who looked upon it were saved. In the Gospel Jesus said, “When you lift up the Son of Man you will realize that I Am.”

“I AM” is the English translation of “Yahweh,” the name God gave for himself, speaking to Moses in Chapter Three of the Book of Exodus.

In the Gospel, when Jesus said, “I do nothing on my own,” he was telling us something about the life of Father and Son in the Blessed Trinity.

Now, although the Trinity, as a mystery, is a truth that we cannot fully understand, still God wants us to grasp as much of him as we are capable. He is like a father who imparts to his toddler as much as the child is able to grasp.  

So, let us ponder over what God reveals about himself in two passages from the Epistles. In the first chapter of his Letter to the Colossians Paul, speaking of the Son, began by saying,  “He is the image of the invisible God.”

After you have questioned how there can be an image of what is invisible, you can go on to read, “In him were created all things in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible.”

That was hard enough to grasp before the discovery of DNA a century ago. But, now we know that each of the millions of cells in our bodies is itself composed of millions of atoms. Now, that is intricate!

It gets mor complicated when you try picturing how the Father saw the pattern for all that in the Son.

Let’s put aside that passage from Paul’s Letter to the Colossians, taking up instead the opening verses from the Letter to the Hebrews. There, speaking of the Son through whom the Father created all things, the passage calls him the “refulgence” of the Father’s glory, “the very imprint of his being.”

If your brain is swirling from all that, perhaps you should go to the First Letter of St. John, where, speaking of the Blessed Trinity, John said, “God is love.”