In Whose Image?
Simone Riva - It was the end of a day at summer camp. At one point, a high school boy said to me, “Today, I looked in the mirror and asked myself whose image I saw.” He was telling me about his feeling of having grown up and changed so much since the previous year that he hardly recognized himself.
Strange impressions arise when we look at our own reflection, and often there is no room for half measures: we either hate ourselves or we love ourselves. When God creates man, He lays the foundations for true love for oneself: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Gen 1:26).
At the same time, however, this image and likeness are entrusted to the freedom of the creature, who, while living life, can corrupt and deform this “imprinting.” The famous myth of Narcissus effectively exemplifies one of these reductions: that of self-possession. Christ, on the other hand, shows the original path of self-giving.
Both Narcissus and Christ die, but only the death of the Son of God leads to life. Jesus, in a sense, changed the characteristics of the mirror, giving humanity back the possibility of seeing the Trinity as the true reflection of its own image. For this reason, even in the never-ending struggle with ourselves, the door has finally been opened to a new gaze that reaches us from the outside. We find ourselves through the eyes of another.
This is the dynamic that takes place in the very heart of God, as Joseph Ratzinger wrote in his Introduction to Christianity, speaking of Christ's mission in relation to the Trinity: "As mediator, he is God himself and ‘man himself,’ both in an equally real and total way. Now, this means that God presents himself to us here not as Father, but as Son and our brother; with the result that—in a process that is inconceivable and at the same time highly conceivable—a duality subsisting in God is manifested, namely, the existence of an ‘I’ and a ‘you’ in his unique essence" (Queriniana, Brescia, 1996, p. 122).
The intensity of the relationship between the Father and the Son is something we can also recognize in our innermost being, precisely because we are created in the image of God. This intensity always takes a dramatic form, making it truly difficult to take each other for granted, with all our differences, uniqueness, and originality—qualities that only those in power fear. On the contrary, they feel they must tighten their grip, control everything, and ensure that the chain of communication is not interfered with in any way.
The Trinity has never asserted its authority except by continually risking human freedom, thus introducing a new way of living responsibility. Pope Francis spoke about this when describing Christ's method: "[Jesus speaks of authority] in terms of self-sacrifice and humble service (cf. Mk 10:42-45), of maternal and paternal tenderness towards people (cf. Lk 11:11-13), especially those most in need (Lk 10:25-37). He invites those who are invested with authority to look at others from their position of power, not to humiliate them, but to lift them up, giving them hope and help" (Angelus, November 10, 2024).
Because this method has never changed, the exciting adventure of a new life begins, one in which, as Ioannis Zizioulas writes, “we acquire our identities not by distancing ourselves from others but in communion with them in and through a love that ‘does not seek its own’ (1 Cor 13:5) but is ready to sacrifice its very being to allow the other to be and to be other.”
It is always striking to find God present in human questions, and in the questions of a young man who has his whole life ahead of him. With the simple gesture of looking at himself in the mirror on a day when nothing, in particular, would have led him to ask such a question, he discovers that he is more like God than the rest of the world might suggest.
We are an infinite mystery to ourselves, and we cannot do without the Holy Spirit who, as Ratzinger affirms in the text already quoted, is “the way in which God himself gives himself to us, in which he inserts himself into us so as to be in man, while always remaining, even in this ‘indwelling,’ infinitely above him.”
