In November of 1996, my wife and I welcomed our first daughter into this world. One of my favourite pictures is where my wife, Carlita and my new daughter, Katie, only days old are gazing at each other’s faces.
I wonder what each of them was thinking as they stared into each other’s eyes, lost in wonder?
Each of us without exception comes into this world having no idea who we are. We are first given a sense of identity by those closest to us. Usually our parents.
Their faces become a mirror in which we see ourselves, from which we are informed of our value. If you are so fortunate as to have loving parents, you will start out with a very healthy sense of self worth and identity.
As time goes on, other people come into our lives. We look into their faces and see a reflection of our value based on their opinion of us. Not all of these mirrors give us an accurate reflection. Some are cracked, twisted, warped. We see in those mirrors that there is something ugly in us.
Defective.
Damaged.
Worthless.
Over time our ego develops, which is our false identity. We in turn, driven by our ego, behave as we believe we are. If you believe you are defective, damaged and broken, you will act like it. Inevitably we end up reflecting a distorted image of others back to them when they look at us, infecting others with false identity.
How many of us have forgotten who we are? How many of us have been looking into mirrors of ego and believing the image?
In John 17:22, Jesus is conversing with His Father, and makes this startling statement of humanity:
“The glory which You have given Me I have given to them, that they may be one, just as We are one.”
The word, “glory” is an interesting word. We often have a picture of God with this bright light shining out from Him on which we cannot bear to look. We think of this as His “glory”. The word from which we get “glory” is the Greek word δόξα transliterated as “Doxa”. It can certainly be taken to mean “shiny resplendence” in certain contexts, but not here. The primary meaning for this word is actually more like, an opinion or judgment of someone’s essence. Of who they truly are.
Their true self.
I can only imagine that since the entity we call “God” is made up of three persons existing in perfect unity, sharing the same essence of selfless, outpouring, other-thinking or “agape” love, that God the Father has an extremely high opinion of the Son—Jesus.
Jesus has taken this same opinion of value and identity that He has received from the Father and has given it to us!
Not that we didn’t already possess it. We just forgot who we are.
From the get-go in the creation narrative of Genesis, God declares humanity to be “good”. Just like Him. After all, a good God cannot create anything that is not good. Our inherent goodness as humans does not come by our own merit as secular humanists would claim, but comes from the ultimate divine goodness which created and sustains us. We can only come to believe that we are as such by looking at the right mirror.
The divine mirror.
Ever found a $100.00 bill in an outhouse? It may be covered in filth, but it hasn’t lost any of its value which has been assigned to it. Not many of us would be willing to reach in and rescue that bill, but if you do, it can be cleaned off and made presentable again. It hasn’t lost a penny in value—even while filthy! It still has the same value as the day it came off the press.
Jesus did that very thing for us. We have an assigned value of pricelessness, but found ourselves in the bottom of the outhouse of ego (false identity) and behaved according to who we thought we were. God became human and entered the outhouse for a rescue mission. He is the mirror we must look at to see the reflection of who we are. Many forms of religion have projected an ego onto God. One such false religious teaching called “Calvinism” asserts that all people are born depraved and sinful. It teaches that God cannot accept us, cannot even look upon us until we clean up our act and ask Him to forgive us. According to this particular teaching, God has created most humans with no chance of being loved, accepted and valued by Him. Only the lucky “elect” will be let into heaven at the end of their lives. Most of humanity was simply created to be tortured in a place called “Hell” for eternity. How disgusting! This is not the God that Jesus revealed to us. This is a monster of our own making! Any religion which tells you that God is capable of giving up on you at any time is a sad projection of our own fears which are born out of false identity. Such religious foolishness must be soundly rejected.
God does not have an ego. God does not need to punish us, nor is He interested in such activity. He has taken away our false identity and restored our intrinsic value. You cannot enjoy this reality until you believe it any more than the $100.00 bill (if it were sentient) could enjoy its value if it thought of itself still covered with excrement.
Let’s gaze into the eyes of the divine and discover who we truly are. We are also invited to reflect God’s glory (opinion of humanity) to others around us. When others look to you, what kind of value do they see? We were made to live in unity, with God and with each other. There is no division except that which our egos create. There is no us vs. them except for that which we impose.
You are good. You are priceless. You are forgiven. You are holy. You are accepted.
Now be who you are.