Several years ago, we took a group of high schoolers to San Francisco on an urban-immersion mission week. The Lutheran congregation next door joined us, so I didn’t know all of the students before the trip, including two sisters whom I’ll call Mandy and Jessica. Mandy and Jessica were sisters but not twins; and while you might have been able to guess they were sisters, they were easy to distinguish.
When you spend a week traveling, eating every meal together, and experiencing new adventures out of your comfort zone with a small group, there is a unique bond with the team. There are inside jokes, shared experiences, even new vocabulary that only the group understands - this is one of the great benefits of short-term mission projects.
When we returned home, we did a few follow-up activities but eventually life returned to normal. Later that same summer I was at the Little League field watching one of Jackson’s games. The concession stand at the Aberdeen Little League was always the best place to get a burger in town, so after the first inning I got in line. One of the sisters from the Lutheran church was working in the concession stand and when she saw me at the counter, she came bouncing up with a big smile on her face to take my order. It had been several weeks since we had seen each other and so I returned the smile and in an excited tone said, “Hey Mandy! How are you?” Immediately, the smile on her face disappeared and her countenance fell. It wasn’t Mandy; it was Jessica. I had called her by the wrong name.
I don’t remember if I apologized or if I tried to play it off like I actually said “Jessica” when I ordered my cheeseburger with no mayo, but I do remember how quick her smile vanished. It was an innocent mistake. But it was a simple reminder of the deep human need to be seen and known and named.
The narrator in Ralph Ellison’s novel, Invisible Man, is never named. Commentators on the novel have simply identified him as, “Invisible.”
The novel begins with a statement of fact, “I am an invisible man.” Invisible reassures us that he is not a ghost “like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe,” he is a “man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids.” He is invisible nonetheless, “simply because people refuse to see” him (3).
Invisible’s story begins with an invitation to give his high school graduation speech to a gathering of the town’s white leaders. He discovers that his speech was just part of the night’s “entertainment.” Before the speech, a “stark naked” woman dances the drunken crowd of the town’s leading gentlemen into a tizzy and then Invisible is forced to join in a last-man-standing, Battle-Royal with nine other black students from his high school. The boys, caged in a boxing ring, beat each other to a pulp as the mob jeers at them with racial slurs. Invisible is then told to stand, face and mouth bloodied and battered, and deliver his graduation speech to the mocking crowd.
His reward is a leather briefcase holding a scholarship to “the state college for Negroes.” Invisible’s school Superintendent was not only present at the chaotic scene but was the evening’s Master of Ceremonies and upon giving the briefcase to Invisible, he says, “Boy…take this prize and keep it well. Consider it a badge of office. Prize it. Keep developing as you are and someday it will be filled with important papers that will help shape the destiny of your people” (32).
The briefcase becomes a talisman of sorts. Invisible takes the Superintendent’s advice and keeps all of his papers in it for the next twenty-years. He collected every accomplishment he believed might give him some semblance of dignity. At the end of the story, Invisible takes up “residence underground” in a manhole beneath the streets of Harlem. The first night in the manhole he finds three matches. The only paper he has is his collection of records in the briefcase. And so he begins to burn them one by one. Starting with his high school diploma. “I was in a deep basement, full of shapeless objects that extended further than I could see, and I realized that to light my way out I would have to burn every paper” (568). The record of his life is reduced to ash.
Between the Battle-Royal and the torching of his papers, Invisible tells the story of how he discovered he was invisible. He assumed that an education from “the state college for Negroes” was the first step to finding out who he was. But he is expelled after taking a wealthy, white trustee on an accidental tour of the blighted neighborhood surrounding the college. When he moved to Harlem, he was given a job as an organizer for a communist organization called The Brotherhood. They changed his name (we are never given the new name either), paid him well, and at first he believed they were making a difference, but he soon realized he was simply a prop in their agenda. After he overheard two of the Brotherhood members discuss whether he was “black enough” for their purposes, Invisible wonders, “What was I, a man or a natural resource?” (303).
Consider the sentence that starts the novel, “I am an invisible man” (3). This is a theological statement, whether Ellison intended it as such or not. Central to the Biblical understanding of personhood is that every human being regardless of race or gender, class or creed, has been created in the image of God. Invisible is a man created in God’s image; but even the people he believes are trying to help him, fail to see him.
Pastor and writer, Claude Atcho, notes that the “image of God…[includes] two broad categories…structure and function.” That is, people are born with both inherent purpose and potential. Atcho goes on to define this structure and function:
The image of God answers the existential question, What in the world am I in this world for? In the mandate to worship God, reflect him throughout creation, carry out his rule over the world, exist in flourishing relationship to other image bearers, we encounter the functional aspect of being a person, an image bearer…The structural aspect of the Imago Dei (image of God) means that God has created us with wondrous capacities - rationality, creativity, relationality - that, though marred by sin, still mirror him and help us fulfill our divine function and purpose.*
In the Old Testament, the measure of Israel’s faithfulness was often directly connected to two things: (1) their loyalty to a God they could not see and (2) their treatment of the people in their society that were most often invisible - the poor, the widow, the fatherless, and the foreigners. In the New Testament the Gospels are filled with stories of Jesus - who, as Atcho reminds us, is himself the very “image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15) - engaging, touching, healing, eating with and restoring dignity to those who are invisible. As Dane Ortlund sums up, “Jesus walked the earth rehumanizing the dehumanized and cleansing the unclean.”** Jesus’ followers are called to this same “rehumanizing.” It is their treatment of the invisibles (the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, the imprisoned) that separates the sheep from the goats in Jesus’ famous parable in Matthew 25.
Atcho makes the observation that theologians often correctly recognize that sin mars our ability to image God faithfully. My greed is a failure to represent the God who is abundantly generous. Holding on to bitterness and anger is not just disobeying a commandment, it is a misrepresentation of the character of God. Paul commands the Ephesians to forgive each other “just as in Christ God forgave you” (Ephesians 4:32). Part of being created in God’s image is the mandate to show the world what God is like. Sin always misrepresents God. But Atcho notes that the church’s teaching on sin’s effects on the image of God often does not extend far enough. Not only does the sinner misrepresent God but the sins of one person (or group of people) also can inhibit or prohibit those sinned against from their capacity to image God as well.
This is something often missed in church debates about systemic and structural racism. Atcho gets to the heart of the question that Invisible Man forces us to consider: “What does it mean to live as an image bearer when other image bearers try to limit your existence? While the image of God cannot be extinguished in any person, the freedom to image God can be restricted - not simply by our sin but by the unrighteousness of others” (Atcho, pg. 11). In limiting Invisible’s humanity to its usefulness as a model for black responsibility at the state college or as a spokesman for a political agenda in New York, Jim Crow America did more than prohibit his access to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” It also stunted and constrained an even deeper inviolable human right - the capacity to fully live as an image bearer. Eugene Peterson would often describe the world as “sin-stunted.” It is an apt description. Like a malnourished child’s physical development, Invisible’s creativity and capacity for human flourishing was stunted “simply because,” to use his phrase, “people refused to see” him.
When I mistook Jessica for her sister Mandy at the Little League concession stand that evening in July, her confidence fell. The sparkle in her eye vanished. That was just a momentary lapse, a mix-up of names. Part of America’s history, including church history, is the intentional, centuries long, refusal to see an entire race of people. To render them invisible. And in doing so, stunting the ability and the freedom of countless men, women, girls and boys to image God in their unique ways for their own flourishing and robbing the world of the full expression of their humanity.
This has to be part of the church’s role in the world - to speak and act on behalf of those rendered invisible. And to confess our complicity when we fail to see people in the full dignity their very existence demands. Earlier I suggested that there is a deep human need to be seen and named. I am sure that is true. The doctrine of the Image of God, however, recognizes that this is more than a psychological need, it is inherent to our very nature as human beings created in the image of our Creator.
I am sure that passing sane and generous immigration reform is challenging in the current stupidity of our politics. As chaos and war and rumors of wars continue to stunt our world, the number of refugees continues to grow. International Justice Mission estimates about 50 million people, mostly women and children, in the world today are in some form of slave-like condition. Invisibles abound. I often become overwhelmed trying to imagine what faithfulness looks like in the comfort of the northwest suburbs of Des Moines, Iowa. I also cannot imagine that any of those current realities, including my lack of imagination, would serve as a valid excuse for the goats in Jesus’ parable. All four parables at the end of Matthew 24 and into Matthew 25 (the wise servant, the prepared virgins, the good and faithful investors and the servant sheep) are about those who take the benefits afforded them in the gospel and faithfully meet the challenges of their day - as they wait for the kingdom of Jesus to fully come to earth as it is in heaven. Our call is the same.
The good news is that while our sin consistently mars our calling to faithfully image our invisible God, Jesus, the Good Shepherd, remains committed to know each of his sheep by name. We are neither nameless nor invisible because of Him. And from that assurance we get to work, regardless of the conditions of our day. As C.S. Lewis reminds us, “favorable conditions never come.” This probably means some of us are called to keep pressure on our elected officials to figure some things out. It means those who are able should continue to support IJM and World Vision and other organizations fighting for and serving the most invisible ones around the world. And it most certainly means recognizing that I pass thousands of image-bearers every day in my community, many of whom remain invisible simply because I refuse to see them. How much more could our communities flourish if we found meaningful ways to nurture their image-bearing capacity in the name of Jesus?
Last October I went to hear a Brahms’ violin concerto at the Des Moines Symphony. To open, they played a short piece (7 minutes) entitled Serenade by the composer William Grant Still. It was stunning. Still was the first African-American composer to have a symphony (Symphony no. 1, Afro-American) played by a professional American orchestra (Rochester, 1930). The Des Moines conductor made the comment that it is wonderful that we are re-discovering great pieces like this, but also unfortunate that it has taken so long simply because of the composer’s skin color. Thankfully, by God’s grace, no matter how sin-stunted the world becomes, neither the function nor the creative capacity of the “image of God can be extinguished in any one person.”
Imagine, however, how the world might have flourished if image-bearers like Still didn’t have to overcome his invisibleness and was simply free to be. Or consider how much we have lost on account of the countless others down the years, and in our own day, not allowed to thrive under the thumb of oppression. The capacity for creativity and beauty and goodness found in God’s image bearers, even stunted as it currently is, is astounding. Listen to a recording of Serenade on YouTube for just one example. Then imagine a world where that capacity is only and always allowed to flourish. That is the kingdom of Jesus. Come, Lord Jesus, come.
Next month’s read: Four Letters of Love by Nial Williams
* Claude Atcho, Reading Black Books: How African American Literature Can Make Our Faith More Whole and Just, pg. 10. Atcho has a wonderfully crafted essay on Ellison’s novel, Invisible Man, in this book simply called, “Image of God.” I am indebted to Atcho’s essay for much of the inspiration for this reflection.
** Dane Ortlund, Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers, pg. 32.