Graven Images vs.

Icons of God
Doug Floyd
12/2007

I’m still holding out. My antiqued nativity set still lights up the end of my driveway. I
didn’t actually finish it making it and setting it out until the week of Christmas, so I hate
to take it down right away.

Last year my sister mentioned buying a plastic yard nativity and antiquing it. That
sounded like a good idea, so I collected Mary, Joseph, the baby Jesus, the Wise Men, a
camel, a sheep, a donkey and a cow.

In early December, I unpacked my nativity and began painting. The process included
applying a primer coat of paint, then applying a copper coat and finally adding a dark
antique stain that I would rub off with paper towels. This project gave me opportunity to
do something with my hands instead of sitting at a keyboard or reading a book.

As I painted, I reflected on the stories and waited for inspiration. I’ve heard monks often
pray and meditate while kneading bread, and this seemed like a perfect exercise for
reflection while I worked.

But nothing came to me.

I painted, I stained, and I photographed my progress, but somehow the deep insights
seemed hidden away. The only thing that came to mind was how the cow reminded me of
the golden calf in Exodus. Surely, there must be some other great insight I could gain
from this effort. A graven image on display for Christmas doesn’t seem inspirational.

Night after night, I reflected and the graven image idea returned again and again.

Gradually I began to consider what is a graven image? What is an idol? It is a form, a

representation and image of the real, but it lacks one vital thing: breath, pneuma, spirit.
It’s void of life.

God forbid the ancient Hebrews from creating graven images, and Jeremiah warns that
“every man is brutish in his knowledge: every founder is confounded by the graven
image : for his molten image is falsehood, and there is no breath in them” (Jeremiah
10:14). Without breath, without spirit, these images are simply forms—not persons.

God is person, and a person cannot be contained in a spiritless image. So when God
chose to create an image of Himself, he breathed into it. Created in the image and
likeness of God, humans are persons—not graven images. We are vital, living, changing
and reproducing beings. When Adam gives birth to Seth the scriptures say, “he fathered a
son in his own likeness, after his image.”

Just as God creates humans in His own image and likeness, humans create other humans
in their image and likeness. A graven image cannot reproduce. It has no vital life. It has
no animating spirit. It is frozen in time.

Each year we revisit the stories of Mary and Joseph through plays, nativities, and
Scripture readings. Each year we join them in the journey to Bethlehem. Over time, it
may be easy to forget that these were real people with real challenges. They may have
lived in a different time and different culture, but they still faced the basic struggles of
being human. In other words, they weren’t so very different from us.

And yet, they were caught up into a grand drama that occupies our imagination year after
year after year. Our nativities can serve as reminders, signposts or snapshots of a moment
in time. But Joseph, Mary and Jesus are not suspended in that moment. They lived, and as
they lived they faced all the struggles of living in spite of the miraculous tale.

We face the danger of reducing the Biblical characters to graven images, to mere
representations, to 2 dimensional figures in a morality play trying to teach us a lesson. We
face the danger of forgetting these are stories about real people. When we do so, they
seem to tower above us as some mythical cast of characters who lived divinely inspired
lives in spite of their faults.

Yet, in reality, they were humans. Real people with real struggles unaware of being
caught up in the divine drama. And I suspect, most of us, most of the time live our lives
unaware that we are caught up in a divine drama.

Just as God breathed into Adam, he breathed into us. That breath, that pneuma, that
animating spirit is a vital, reproducing life bestowed on us by God. We are real persons
created in the image and likeness of God. We are not graven images.

Jesus came as the perfect, complete image bearer. Jesus came to restore the image of God
in us corrupted by sin. Jesus breathes upon His disciples and tells them, “Receive the
Spirit.” He restores the vital, animating life of God within His people.

I fear sometimes that we may not always treat one another as real, vital persons created in
the image and likeness of God. Instead, we might at times reduce one another to graven
images, to mere representations. So we get angry when someone doesn’t act the way we
expect, the way our “image of them” suggests they should act.

We may expect them to perform just as the image in our mind suggests they should
perform, but they are not that image. They are real people—separate from us with a
unique mind and body and spirit. And it is possible, and in fact probable that they will not
always see the world as we do. Just as Paul and Barnabas did not always see eye to eye—
neither will we.

As we learn to appreciate the people in our lives, we must give them grace to be the
people God created them to be. We must trust that the same Spirit that rose Jesus from the
dead, the same Spirit who groans and works within us, is working in them. They are not
created in our image but in the image of God.

As we enter the season of Epiphany, we celebrate the revealing of God to the world in the
person of Jesus. I would hope we might also celebrate the image of God in the people of
God around us. I would hope that we might remember that each of us have been created
in the image and likeness of God.

We are not graven images. We are corrupted images. The nativity tells the story of Jesus
coming as the perfect image. The cross tells the story of Jesus restoring and redeeming
our corrupted images. The resurrection tells the story of Jesus breathing into His images
His animating Spirit.

My nativity sits on the hill as a reminder of the difference between graven images and
images of God. I am reminded afresh to realize the people in my life: my family, my
friends, the clerk at the store, the officer giving me a speeding ticket, the waitress
forgetting to refill my drink. These are not graven images, they are vital, glorious,
wondrous images of God—some living in the reality of that redeeming love and others
waiting to be embraced and told of that redeeming love.