The Image is Everything

Monday of Easter 2
12 April 2010

For us image is everything. Image is a "look," a defining appearance. People, businesses, and institutions are all striving to keep up an image. However, we have the strong intuition that there is a huge disconnect between image and reality. Image is only skin deep sometimes. Much in our society has this depth. Structurally, we are an "empty suit." However, this should not surprise us. Instead, it would be healthy for us to recognize this. Our "image" is an attempt to gussy up the city of the dead. Of course there is a hollowness about the city of men. Death is gutting it.

The Old Testament tells the story of the difference between the city of men and the city of God, in the allegory of Hagar and Sarah. Hagar, the Egyptian woman, was the image of loveliness and seduction. She had what we would now call "the look." In the bloom of her youth she was able to bear a child to Abraham when he despaired of God's promise. We easily blame Abraham for his moral lapse in sleeping with Hagar, his wife's Egyptian maid, and rightly so. But his adulterous behavior is not his major fault. He was led into this behavior by doubting that God could fulfill His gracious promise to him that he would be the father of many nations (Rm 4:17-18). He was uncertain that his aging wife now beyond childbearing years could mother the child God had promised. She no longer had "the look." The power to give life was no longer in her, long ago dried up by the desiccating years. Death was working its emptiness on her. She too doubted that God could do as He promised. In desperate despair she gave Hagar to him, "Get a child on her. It's the best I can do." And maybe Abraham had some right to her according to the laws of the ancient near east, but this was the city of men attempting to stave off death, a sign of earthly emptiness.

God used the woman who no longer had the "image," to fulfill His promise to Abraham and to us. God cares not for mere appearances (Acts 10:34). Sarah became the image of something greater than herself, rather than something less than herself. She had not the "look," but became the living sign of that city which lives by faith alone. She was the image beyond image. She was the image of that city in which those who live by faith are truly free. Sarah is our mother, because she bore the child of promise, a promise by which we still live. That promise gave us the one who was the image beyond image, the image of the invisible God (Col 1:15). After all, the image is everything.

St. Augustine

"There was indeed on earth, so long as it was needed, a symbol and foreshadowing image of the city of God, which served the purpose of reminding men that such a city was to come to be rather than of making it present; and this image was itself called the holy city, as a symbol of the future city, though not itself the reality. Of this city, Jerusalem, which served as an image, and about the free city it typified, Paul writes to the Galatians in these terms: 'Tell me, you who desire to be under the law, do you not listen to the law? For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave woman and one by a free woman. But the son of the slave was born according to the flesh, while the son of the free woman was born through promise. Now this may be interpreted allegorically: these women are two covenants. One is from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery; she is Hagar. Now Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia; she corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children. But the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother. For it is written, "Rejoice, O barren one who does not bear; break forth and cry aloud, you who are not in labor! For the children of the desolate one will be more than those of the one who has a husband." Now you, brothers, like Isaac, are children of promise. But just as at that time he who was born according to the flesh persecuted him who was born according to the Spirit, so also it is now. But what does the Scripture say? "Cast out the slave woman and her son, for the son of the slave woman shall not inherit with the son of the free woman." So, brothers, we are not children of the slave but of the free woman.' (Gal 4:21-31). This interpretation of the passage, handed down to us with apostolic authority, shows how we ought to understand the Scriptures of the two covenants-the old and the new.

"One portion of the earthly city became an image of the heavenly city, not having a significance of its own, but signifying another city, and therefore serving, or "in slavery" (Gal 4:25). For it was founded not for its own sake, but to prefigure another city; and this shadow of a city was also itself foreshadowed by another preceding figure. For Sarah's servant woman Hagar, and her son, were an image of this image. And as the shadows were to pass away when the full light came, Sarah, the free woman, who prefigured the free city (which again was also prefigured in another way by that shadow of a city Jerusalem), therefore said, "Cast out the bond woman and her son; for the son of the bond woman shall not be heir with my son Isaac," or, as the apostle says, "with the son of the free woman." In the earthly city, then, we find two things: its own obvious presence, and its symbolic presentation of the heavenly city.

"Now citizens are begotten to the earthly city by nature weakened by sin, but to the heavenly city by grace freeing nature from sin; whence the former are called "vessels of wrath," the latter "vessels of mercy" (Rm 9:22-23). And this was typified in the two sons of Abraham, Ishmael, the son of Hagar the servant woman, being born according to the flesh, while Isaac was born of the free woman Sarah, according to the promise. Both, indeed, were of Abraham's seed; but the one was begotten by natural law, the other was given by gracious promise. In the one birth, human action is revealed; in the other, divine kindness comes to light."

St. Augustine, The City of God, 15.2