John
12:44-46, “Then Jesus cried out, ‘Whoever believes in me does not believe in
me only, but in the one who sent me. The one who looks at me
is seeing the one who sent me. I have come into the world as a light, so that no one who
believes in me should stay in darkness” (NIV).
This Scripture should be incredibly
convicting to followers of Jesus, everywhere.
I might be a nerd (go ahead and replace “might
be a” with “am,” if you need to), but the daily office inspired me to look for
a simple explanation of how mirrors work, and I found exactly what I was
looking for in the article, “How Mirrors Work.” (go figure)
Here are some thoughts:
“In order to understand mirrors, we first must understand light. The law of
reflection says that when a ray of light hits a surface, it bounces in a
certain way…”[i] Somewhere else I read that the angle of reflection
is predictable—equal to the angle at
which the light originally hits. I find
this remarkable considering our propensity to ‘reflect’ Christ
inadequately. If we really want the
people who are looking at us to see Jesus; we have to push back against distortion,
and I think the only way to do that is to transform… redeem… restore the
surface off of which he is reflected.
Overall, “light itself is invisible until it bounces off
something and hits our eyes.”[ii] When it bounces; the light scatters, and we
interpret what is seen. But mirrors don’t
work like this, because they are smooth, which means the incoming image is not
disturbed.
And also… It’s
common knowledge that a mirror image is ‘backwards,’ but as it turns out, this
is not a switch from left to right but from front to back. So, “your mirror image is a light-print of
you, not a reflection of you from the mirror's perspective.”[iii] Strangely, if we want to push through this metaphor,
this would mean that our reflection is not, in fact, what we see but what Jesus sees,
looking at us from behind. I’m pretty
concerned that this might mean we are able to block others from seeing Jesus,
entirely, if we won’t get out of the way.
L.
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