I Read It and Missed His Face

The maple at the corner of the yard has gone the color it goes for about nine days a year, and he has the porch to himself until about four o'clock, when the school bus comes.

He is finishing. That is what today is. Revelation 22, on the porch, in a folding chair, with the low October sun coming sideways under the roof and warming one side of his face. Inside the front cover of this Bible there is a column of small pencil marks and dates. Eleven of them. This afternoon he adds the twelfth.

He reads the last chapter slowly because he wants it to feel like something. It does, a little. He closes the cover and sits with his hand flat on it, and there is a good quiet on that porch for about a minute and a half.

Then the bus, and the gate, and his granddaughter comes up the steps at the speed nine year olds come up steps, drops her bag, takes an apple out of the bowl without asking, and sits down on the step below him with her back against the post.

She has a question. She has had it since the bus. She asks it with her mouth full.

What is Jesus like?

And he opens his mouth, and out comes a good answer. The second Person of the Trinity. Fully God and fully man. The Word made flesh, sinless, crucified, risen, coming again. Every clause of it is accurate and he could defend all of it in a room full of people who disagreed.

She chews. She looks out at the maple. She says, okay, but what is He like, though.

And the porch goes very quiet, and it is not the good quiet from before.

Because he has just realized, at seventy one years old, with twelve dates in the front of that book, that he could tell her what Jesus accomplished and what Jesus said about forty subjects, and he could not tell her what it would be like to be looked at by Him.

He has read every word about that face. Eleven times. He has never once let himself be told what it looks like.

And that porch is not only his. You may have the schedule on your phone, or the leather one your wife had rebound, or the plan where the psalm and the proverb come round with the date. You have read it. You have read it more than most people ever will. And a child could still ask you a question this afternoon that you would answer with a doctrine when what she wanted was a face.

The word Hebrews uses is a portrait word

Let me be exact, because the vocabulary here is doing something a reader can walk straight past.

Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power.Hebrews 1:3

The phrase behind express image is the word for the mark a die leaves in metal. Not a resemblance. Not an artist's impression. The stamp and the coin. Whatever is cut into the one is standing there in the other, in every particular, at full depth.

You are being conformed to a Person, and Scripture will not let that be reduced to a set of behaviors. Romans 8:29 says the destination is the image of His Son, named as a Person rather than as a standard, and His Spirit is the one doing the conforming, so the target of your whole life is a face and not a list of things you finally stopped doing.

That distinction is worth twenty years to a man like you. A moral checklist can be recited by somebody who has never met anybody. A face cannot. Jesus told Philip that a man who had seen Him had seen the Father, and He said it to a disciple who had stood next to Him for years and was still asking for a diagram.

There is a reason Paul talks about the light of the knowledge of the glory of God shining in the face of Jesus Christ, and the Spirit is written into that same letter as the one who gives the light rather than the reader who works it out. You have been given the face, not a summary of the face.

What you are being made into is not a shorter list of faults

Here is where this category gets ruined, and I have helped ruin it, so I will say it first against myself.

Ask most serious believers what they would be like if they were finally changed, and the answer comes back as subtraction. Less angry. Less anxious. Less on the phone at midnight. Not that. Every item is a thing removed, which means the picture of the finished man is the current man with pieces taken out, and nobody has ever loved that picture enough to look at it.

That is not what Scripture holds up. The likeness is a positive: a man whose first move toward a leper was to reach out and touch him. Who stopped a funeral because He saw a widow, and the account says He saw her before anybody said a word to Him. Who cooked breakfast on a beach for the friend who had denied Him, and led with the fire and the fish rather than with the subject.

Galatians 4:19 speaks of Christ being formed in a believer, and formed is a word for something taking shape rather than something being scraped away, and it is the Spirit doing the forming. You are being filled in, not sanded down.

One plain paragraph before we go further, because a man alone on a porch can turn this subject into shame in about four minutes. If the distance between the face in the gospels and the man in the folding chair has stopped being conviction and started being weight, put a person in the chair next to you. A doctor first, because a body running on five hours of sleep will misreport your soul to you and do it convincingly. Then a counselor who will sit through the whole eleven passes of it, and a pastor who knows your name without checking. And if the arithmetic in your head has started including whether the family would have an easier October without you in it, put the book down and dial 988, or the crisis line for your county, and stay on until somebody is standing on the porch with you. Bringing somebody into that second chair is not a way around what is being done in you. On this porch it is how it gets done.

You were never being remade into a stranger, and the man in the chair is the one He is doing it to. First Corinthians 2:12 is written to say we have received the Spirit of God so that we might know the things freely given to us, and the Spirit does that knowing in a real man with a real history and a bad shoulder.

Reading for the face

So how does a man who has read it eleven times read it a twelfth time and actually see somebody?

Slower, and for different data. Eleven passes went looking for propositions, which is honest work and I do it for a living. Read one scene for the person in it instead. What He does with His hands. Where He is looking. Who He touches first. How long the silence runs before He says anything. Who He lets interrupt Him, which turns out to be almost everybody.

Take the woman with the twelve years of bleeding. Everything in that scene is a face. He stops a crowd that is carrying Him to a dying child, He asks who touched Him, and He waits, in public, in the middle of an emergency, until a terrified woman has told Him the whole truth. He does not need the information. He wants her to have a face to tell it to.

You have a Lord who stops in the middle of the crowd when somebody comes up behind Him, and that is what you are being made like. Mark 5 is written down with all the awkward waiting left in, and the same Spirit who moved a man to keep that detail is the one shaping it into you.

None of that can be run as a program, and I am not handing you one. It is what a person does when they are near another person for a long time.

Second Corinthians 3:18 keeps the eyes on Him and puts the changing on the Lord who is the Spirit, and the whole verse is written in the passive on purpose. You are being made like Him while you look, and you are not the one working the change.