I Thought You Were Jesus

A young girl came up to me the other day and said these words to me. She now knows I am Jim. I could have told her that a number of folks who left the church thought I was Satan. But that's another story.

 

Children often think the parish priest, all dressed in white, is Jesus or God (I have gray hair.) It's understandable. We think, how cute. But, hold on.

 

I think these children are more theologically astute than we think. In Matthew 25, Jesus seems to say, he is the person in need we serve. In Hebrews (and the Genesis story it refers to,) entertaining another is entertaining God.  Right out to the box, God tells us in the first pages of Genesis, we are made in God's image. We who follow are called His Body.

 

You, in some mysterious but real way, are Jesus interacting with other Jesus' all day long. I wonder what a day would be like if we consciously saw one another (and ourselves) as the Jesus we are. What if we reached down within and drew on the Jesus within? What if we saw the relationship inherent in the Trinity in our day-to-day interactions with one another? What if we never saw an adversary, or a down-out-outer or a foreigner without seeing Jesus first?

 

I want that day.