February 26th, 2026
Hello everyone and welcome to this week’s video.
I’m back at home this week. I’ve spent a lot of February away from home in General Synod and in London meetings and in the House of Lords. Living out of a suitcase is eventually quite wearing, stimulating though the activities may be. I think we all have a predisposition to call a place home. Our churches, villages and hamlets in this diocese are home for us. We come back to them time and time again.
Thoughts of home turned my thinking to the first story in the Bible in Genesis 1-3. It’s a story of humanity’s first home. What the story makes clear is that we cannot understand what it is to be truly human, nor our proper fulfilment and destiny, unless we understand these things in relation to the God who created us. Of course, secular psychology and counselling are of enormous value. Our understanding of the human mind, personal development and the effect of the behaviour of others on our own growth have grown hugely in the last 50 years. However, they remain an inexact science. Human beings are immensely flexible. We are spiritual, intellectual, emotional and physical beings and all those parts interact with each other.
Genesis 1-3 is not a literal story but it is a powerful one, giving profound insight into what it is to be human, male and female. It shows the dynamic interaction of these four aspects of our existence. Adam and Eve, the generic Hebrew name for men and women, are created and find a home in a glorious garden. Everything is in harmony: human beings and God, men and women together, human beings and creation. But then in Genesis chapter 3 everything goes wrong. Harmony and wholeness in Chapter 2 is designed to be found in relationship with God. Human beings are innocent but finite. We don’t know what is best for us because we don’t truly know ourselves. Adam and Eve live within the boundaries God sets, and which are accessible in the story, because of complete trust. The tempter persuades them that there is life outside these boundaries. They succumb. They are left cut off from the source of life only able to discern right and wrong based on feelings in the moment. God begins the project of putting things right from that point, but the Old Testament is largely a story of things spiralling out of control from a fallen foundation of subjective experience as the guide to right living. The redemption project finds its fulfilment in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.
The phrase ‘made in the image of God’ only comes a couple of times in the Old Testament and its a notion that doesn’t really appear much in the New. Ian McFarlane in his book ‘The Divine Image’ points out that its only with the arrival of Jesus that we have a reference point to tell us what the divine image truly means. Paul describes Jesus in Colossians 1: 15 as the image of the invisible God. By definition, we cannot find that within ourselves. Because of the story in Genesis 3, any image we hold of ourselves is inevitably distorted. We cannot find an unbroken ‘truth within’. All of us, in every part of us, are affected by sin. We are all still eating the forbidden fruit. It is only Jesus who is the perfect image. Its into that likeness we are called to grow, through repentance and faith, reconciled by Christ’s sacrifice for us on the cross and empowered to change by the Holy Spirit. If our explanation of the Gospel and invitation stops at ‘Jesus loves you just as you are’ (which is questionable theologically in any case) presumably there would be no need for the cross. The New Testament clearly says that was the whole point of Jesus ministry.
H Richard Neibuhr recognised that the theological liberalism in 1930s America in its attempt at relevance ended up undermining fundamental truths of the Christian message. He described it as “A God without wrath leads people without sin to a kingdom without judgement through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.”
This season of Lent invites us to look within but not uncritically. We will not find the pure image of God within. Yes, we will find elements of it, but we will only find the true image to which we are invited as we look at Jesus. As we travel towards the events of Holy Week, we will find that there is a remedy for our human brokenness. Our brokenness is not the last word. It doesn’t completely define us. In the face of that reality God does indeed love us more than we can possibly imagine and demonstrates it in the events of Good Friday. There love looked human sin squarely in the face and overcame it.
+Richard