Well Imagine That

A Reflection on the Second Reading for Sunday, April 13th, 2025:
Palm Sunday of the Passion of the Lord

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Philippians
​2.6-11

Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death — even death on a cross.

Therefore God highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Pause. Pray. Reflect.

Jesus was born in our likeness, but in turn, we were made in God’s image and likeness. So naturally, I start wondering what Jesus found familiar in these little human forms.

I love a passage from Saint Ambrose that muses on this. If our likeness has to do with our physical height, he reasons, well then yes, we’re taller than, say, sheep. But then what does that make elephants? If it’s our eyes that make us “like” our all-seeing God, then why can’t he see the back of his neck? 

“In like manner, what avail is our sense of hearing if we cannot either see or hear what is only a short distance away?” he says. “If walls should intervene, both sight and hearing are impeded.” (As someone who stares at walls when I think Big Thoughts, I enjoy the mental image of Saint Ambrose doing the same, with a bemused expression on his face.)

Saint Ambrose concludes, therefore, that our fleshly bodies and material senses cannot be what are made in God’s image, but rather our souls, our minds, and our faculties of holy imagination.

“Our souls… are free to wander far and wide in acts of reflection and of counsel,” he says. “Our souls are able to envisage and reflect on all things.” We can imagine ourselves in Biblical Palestine, or in the Shire, or on the moon. We can imagine being with a loved one who isn’t physically present: “Those who are separated far from us engage us in conversation. We arouse the dead even to mutual interchange of thoughts and embrace them as if they were still living.” 

So when Jesus lived as a human, He came to experience both our limitations – those darn walls – but also how we humans can experience the divine likeness, however faintly, by employing our holy imaginations. I qualify “holy” here because when it comes to faith, to say “it’s all in your imagination” is insulting. What I’m getting at is what Scripture keeps telling us to do: in hardening not our hearts, seeing beyond what our eyes transmit to our brains and hearing beyond what tickles our ear follicles.

In thinking this way, it starts to make more sense to me that Jesus gets the most frustrated with His disciples when they’re not using their imaginations, despite Him constantly employing it to teach them. Growing up as a human, Jesus knows that teaching with imagination-rich parables and metaphors, using relatable and familiar-yet-powerful imagery is a key way (and likely the only way) to expand their minds to the realities of the Kingdom.

Jesus praises those He meets who have used their “likeness brains” – the incredible minds God has given us that allow us to think on higher things. He grants Peter the keys to the Kingdom because “flesh and blood has not revealed this to you.” Only moments later, He chastises Peter for “not thinking as God does.” Jesus points us to our masters in wonderment, children, as examples of using our God brains – for our Father has “hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children.” And yet, like in Mark 8, the disciples’ brains so quickly shrink back to material perception that the whole time Jesus is speaking in metaphors, they think He’s literally talking about the bread they forgot to pack for dinner.

I’ll leave us with Saint Ambrose again, who says it is our holy imagination that “crosses boundaries and gazes intently on what is hidden… God is attained, and Christ is approached.”




Kate Mosher

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