Behind this entire discussion rests one incredibly important question: What does it mean to know the face of God? Now, before I lose some of the readers who aren't interested in God to begin with, let's rephrase the question; this will be helpful for theists as well. Do we ever brush up against something in our lived experience that defies explanation, that suggests the world actually does not revolve around us, and when we encounter this power/force/feeling/being it leaves us with a sense of awe, humility, and maybe even breathless awareness that there is something Great in the universe hiding just behind a vapor-thin veil? This can happen in a myriad of ways, of course. Perhaps in something as miraculous as watching your child be born. Maybe it happens during a long meal with your best friends, when you lean back from the table and look around at faces you love more than you thought possible. Or it can happen in moments of horrible sorrow, like when you watch a parent weep over a dying child and you know the only reason they can and must suffer this is because they love the little one more than life itself.
Whether complex or simple, jubilant or terrible, these moments come and, sometimes, leave us wondering. Was that newborn just another organism entering the human herd? Is this affection for friends just a chemical reaction to good wine and the biological effects of laughter? Is death just the universe's cold reminder that we don't really matter to anyone in anyway at anytime? Maybe so. Maybe so...or...
So what's the point? The best we can deduce is that God might be communicating Himself through the world. But there is still Christ. And for the skeptical let's not even talk about the claims made by the Church about who Jesus was; let's just stick to the phenomenon that over two millennia have passed since a lower class, Jewish man named Yeshua walked around for three years or so, taught a lot about ethics and also made some subtle claims that He was bringing light and life to the world. And to prove it, his followers claimed that people were being healed in his wake. Then, by all contemporary accounts he was crucified before he rose from the dead. Now the point is not in these details, the point is that whatever happened two thousand years ago, people are still talking about it. And (here's my bias) I think it was because the people that met Jesus came face to face with the reality we've been discussing in this post. Everyone from the poor to the rich, from the elites to the outcasts, were brushing up against the unexplainable miracle that was this man, and it left them either wanting more or to destroy it.
"Behold, my servant whom I have chosen, my beloved with whom my soul is well pleased. I will put my Spirit upon him...and in his name the Gentiles will hope." - Matthew 12:18, 21
