To Be Seen

In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, a libertine strikes a magical bargain that enables him to impose the physical consequences of his hedonistic lifestyle onto an iconic portrait of himself, hidden away in an attic. The arrangement leaves his own body youthful and striking as ever in a high society that admires him with envy. The novel was written a hundred thirty years ago as something of a satirical horror story, (and ironically was oft-censored) but something tells me that many of our contemporaries might be inspired to view the protagonist as a hero.We seem to be living in an age that desires image and identity entirely divorced from content and character: the former pair upheld by carefully curated public personae while the latter are a matter of inviolable private discretion. Yet despite all vain attempts to set them asunder, it would seem that God has immutably joined these realities together with cause and effect. The truth of our character never stays hidden for long.Jesus seems to think this is a good thing, and not because he’s laboring under the delusion that what's going to come out will be flattering. In our passage this week, Jesus warns against our instinct to hide the truth of our desperate situation, from others, from God, and even from ourselves. This is especially important when it comes to the area of our life where we’re in the best position to bring those awful insufficiencies to God. In our haste to be seen as we wish we were, we miss the opportunity to be transformed into that very image! If we can resist the urge to be seen by others as impressive, we can begin to see ourselves as broken before the gaze of God, and then what the world will see is a people being made whole again.Josh