Message from Canon Ashey

Canon Ashey How can we restore God's image in us? Dear Friends in Christ, Some time in the mid-1980's the curators of the Dutch Museum came face to face with a sight that caused them horror:  a disgruntled visitor unimpressed with a Rembrandt original had taken a knife and sliced it open.  They had to decide how to rescue this defaced painting - how to restore it to its original image. They flew in experts, art historians and scientists to observe the damage and to pool their accumulated wisdom to find some way to restore the defaced painting.  After months of painstaking work, they literally lifted the face of the painting off the canvas and placed it on another more durable canvass, and no one in the Dutch public could tell the difference, it was so close to the original image... No one of course, except the grand master himself, Rembrandt, who painted the picture.  Would he have detected the slight?  Would he have claimed it as his own? I did a little research into the restoration of defaced art works - paintings that have been scratched or burned, exposed to the harshness of the elements or painted over. The human and technological options for restoration are limited. The technological solution to a defaced or damaged artwork is to apply chemical solvents to restore the colors, but these are dangerous to the canvas, dangerous to the health of those using them, and dangerous to the environment.  One of the latest technologies is to fire a stream of oxygen atoms at the spot that has been in a fire or defaced with pencil, crayon or lipstick, or to bathe the whole thing in a stream of oxygen atoms.  In this process, the oxygen reacts with the carbon elements, producing carbon monoxide as the disfiguration lifts without even touching the canvas.  However, the system isn't for every damaged painting. Lead-based paints will react with the atomic oxygen to form a lead oxide that is brown in color. But where paint has flaked away to expose bare spots, the problem of restoration is much worse.  In that case, the only solution is a human one:  the experts have to fill in the blanks-a process called "inpainting".  And whether it's a canvass or a digital photo, the process is highly subjective for each work.  The restorer has to "guess" how to fill in the blanks, based on whatever details are visible in the margins surrounding a blank area.  At best, it's an educated guess - always an attempt to make up for lost information.   And the bottom line for success is whether it is a clever enough improvisation to fool the casual eye. Once upon a time, God decided to create a masterpiece.  So he made a canvass of flesh and blood and painted his very own image upon it - the Bible says in Genesis 1:27, "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them."  But through our own rebellion and pride we separated ourselves from God and, living apart from him, defaced that magnificent masterpiece.  In effect, we took a knife to God's masterpiece and gashed it open.  We defaced the image of God in us as thoroughly as that Rembrandt, as thoroughly as the man who took a hammer to Michelangelo's Pieta and in one stroke broke it apart. We still bear the image of God, faintly, defaced and distorted and broken - but the resemblance and the traces of his image in us haunt us.  So we try to restore the image by our own efforts.  We fly in multitudes of experts to advise us how to live a successful and fulfilling life.  We try to remove the stains by our own good works and best intentions, hoping that we won't make the stain worse.  We try to fill in the gaps, guessing from the margins of our lives around the edges of our emptiness and longings how to fill in those blank spaces - improvising what it means to be a good father or mother, husband or wife.  At best it's all guesswork, as we try to make sure that our efforts are a clever enough improvisation to fool the casual eye. But it doesn't fool us - not our innate sense of right and wrong, nor the longing of our emotions, nor the honesty of our hearts, nor the darkness and emptiness that cries out from our spirits.  And it doesn't fool the Master either! In his treatise On the Incarnation, St. Athanasius confronted this very dilemma:  How can we restore the image of God that new have defaced through our own pride, rebellion and living apart from God?  How can the "portrait" be truly and perfectly restored - without guesswork, without improvising, or without throwing the damaged canvas away and starting all over! Athanasius looked at all the possibilities in the light of what God has done - including the possibility that the Master Artist himself would simply throw the canvas away, give up on the human race and start all over.  And for Athanasius the answer was obvious:  "The artist does not throw away the panel," he wrote, "The subject of the portrait must come and sit for it again, and then the likeness is re-drawn on the same material." (Athanasius, On the Incarnation) You see, Jesus Christ was born to restore God's image in us! On the canvas of human flesh and blood, God has allowed himself to be re-drawn in Jesus Christ, to restore his image in humanity, and to show us what it means to be fully human again! Jesus himself became the canvas, in human flesh and blood!  On and in and through Jesus God drew the picture of himself.  A perfect and flawless portrait, as the author of Hebrews declares: "The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being..." (Hebrews 1:3 NIV). No guesswork, no stains of sin to remove, no places left blank for others to fill in later, no improvising from the margins.  Jesus is the exact representation of God's being, a word which means literally that God engraved on Jesus a perfect, flawless imprint of himself - not only in Jesus' words and deeds, but in his very character and life.  Not 99.9%, not "good enough for government standards."  In short, there is nothing left that we can learn about God apart from Jesus Christ. Why not?  Because Jesus Christ was born to restore God's image in us, opening our eyes and spotlighting the one, flawless, re-drawn image of God:  "The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world...We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth." (John 1:9, 14 NIV)  In the midst of good news and bad, in the hustle of this holiday season, in the turbulence that characterizes the Anglican world and our own, it's important in this Advent season to slow down and remember what it's all about: Jesus Christ was born to restore God's image in us.  And that is by far the best news and the best gift we could ever offer a hurting world!                                          Yours in Christ, Phil+ The Rev. Canon Phil Ashey Chief Operating and Development Officer, American Anglican Council