When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way. Luke 4:28

What is your image of God? 

A quick Google image search on Jesus turned up everything from Our Lord of the Golden Retrievers: 

 to Che‘ Jesus:

We each have our favorite images of Jesus. They shape not only our relationship with Him, but our understanding of Jesus mission and what God wants for the world—and by extension our vocation as his Body.

The loving Jesus comforts us, but leaves us baffled when bad things happen. What kind of God could allow the Haitian earthquake or the death of 30,000 children a day in Africa? There is no God, some conclude—or at least no God worth loving. Of course, this leaves no room for the God who instead of loving us by removing suffering, loves us by entering into our suffering (c.f. Good Friday).

Others of us embrace the radical Jesus—a kind of holy Bruce Willis, a rebel with a cause hell-bent on bringing some serious justice to a messed up world. The trouble with a bad-ass Jesus is, of course, the injustice continues. Our glimpses of the Kingdom are brief and blurred by the veil of our own attachments and self-reliance.

A singular vision of Jesus is destined to fall short of His glory. Instead, the Scriptures present us with a Jesus full of complexity and contradiction. And yet, we also see a Jesus of stark simplicity who distills the Law into two commandments: love God, love others. Jesus consistently surprises us. He shows us we serve a God who still has a few aces up His sleeve.

The crowd in Nazareth struggled to make sense of the collision between who Jesus was and the Jesus they wanted. Presented with One who refused to live into their narrow expectations, they looked for the nearest cliff.

Which raises the question: what do we expect from God? What visions of Him do we routinely hurl off the cliff of our imagination simply because they stretch our assumptions of how things should be?

How blessed we are that God defies the gravity of our limited vision and instead walks in the midst of us.

Defy gravity @ www.trinityspokane.org