The Visible Invisible

Colossians 1:15-20

Christ the King Sunday

25 November 2007

 

Stanford mathematician Keith Devlin has devoted much of his career to making mathematics accessible to a non-academic audience.  You may know of him as the Math Guy on NPR.  A number of years ago, in delivering the commencement address to the mathematics graduating class of the University of California at Berkeley , he discussed the importance of changing the public perception of math as boring, irrelevant, and useless.  He offered the students two different “slogans” for combating those stereotypes (both of which he went on to use as titles of two of his many books).  The first he said he had read elsewhere; it was “Math: The Science of Patterns.”  (With apologies to you who are scientists, I’m not really sure how this makes math seem less boring).

 

He claimed to have come up with the second slogan himself:  “Mathematics makes the invisible visible.”  He gave some examples, telling the students:

Without mathematics, there is no way you can understand what keeps a jumbo jet in the air. As we all know, large metal objects don't stay above the ground without something to support them. But when you look at a jet aircraft flying overhead, you can't see anything holding it up. It takes mathematics to "see" what keeps an airplane aloft. In this case, what lets you "see" the invisible is an equation discovered by the mathematician Daniel Bernoulli early in the eighteenth century.[i]

 

He cited other examples: Newton used the equations of motion and mechanics to help us “see” the invisible forces that keep the earth rotating and cause an apple to fall from the tree to the ground.  Aristotle used mathematics to make visible the invisible patterns of sound that we call music.  Linguist Noam Chomsky used mathematics to make visible the invisible, abstract patterns of words that make the grammar of a sentence.  Devlin went on to argue that mathematics helps make visible otherwise invisible moments in the past (such as the beginning of the universe), and that mathematics may help make visible the otherwise invisible future (such as the end of the universe).

 

It is a provocative and delicious idea: that the invisible workings of the universe – from grammar to gravity to weather to music to the curvature of both earth and space – that all these things can be made “visible,” be made comprehensible, by the use of tools our teachers began giving us in first grade.  Of course, most of us have let go those tools along the way.  We claim we aren’t any good at math.  We don’t have a head for numbers.  It’s boring.  We will take for granted that the plane will stay in the air, the apple will fall to the ground, and the earth will keep spinning in space around the sun.  We do not care to know what makes it all work.  We seem happy enough with invisible things remaining invisible.

 

Compelling as Devlin’s slogan may be – Math: Making Visible the Invisible – he is not exactly, as he claims to be, the inventor of the phrase.  Many, many years ago, centuries ago, millennia ago, even, another man used the same language to describe something even more complex.  In Paul’s letter to the Colossians, he writes, “[Christ] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers – all things have been created through him and for him.  He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” 

 

In Christ, the invisible became visible.  And the invisible Paul refers to is no mere universe, it is the mind behind that universe  - the creator of the cosmos, God.  In this mind are all the invisible patterns of the universe, including grammar and gravity and music and weather and the substance and shape of all material things.  But this mind holds so much more than even our math and our science can make clear – like the human heart, and the mystery of being, and the meaning of life.  Also things like the shape of justice and the matter of mercy and the substance of hope.  There are no mathematical formulas or scientific patterns that can explain these, or make them visible.  It took a life.

 

That life was Christ, the image of the invisible God.  In the form of his life we see the form of the mind behind our universe.  And what do we learn about that mind from the life of Christ?  Of course we see love, and true power, and forgiveness, as well as compassion and tenderness and mercy.  But the accent of that life falls where Paul draws our attention: “For in [Christ] all the fullness of God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.”

 

The implication here is that there was an original harmony to the cosmos, as God had created it in Christ.  This unity, this wholeness, was “put out of joint.”[ii]   To our eyes, in fact, it still appears out of joint.  Wars and rumors of wars, famine, ethnic cleansing, terror, destruction on a global scale as well as, frequently, on a personal scale – in so many ways things seem to be falling apart.  Powerful forces of fear and violence and chaos seem to be on the march.  “Things fall apart, the center does not hold.”  But this falling-apart is not the whole reality.  All hostile powers, cosmic and earthly, have been overcome by Christ.  Everything that is breaking apart, every life that is falling apart, is being reconciled to God, in Christ.  Brought into the fold.  Brought into wholeness and harmony.  Brought into the heart of the God of the cosmos.  Redeemed.   It is happening on every level of reality, but we mostly cannot see it.  Yet.

 

This is an astonishing claim on its own, when what is visible to our eyes seems to tell us otherwise.  But the truly staggering part of the claim is how this reconciliation is coming about: through the cross.  Through the ugliest vehicle imaginable, the most beautiful possibilities are made real.  Through a stark and visible sign of humanity’s depravity shines the visible promise of the invisible reality of God’s love, and mercy, and reconciling power.

 

We can scarcely make sense of this.  The cross itself is violent and gruesome.  The empty tomb, unreasonable and mystifying.  But what these signs mean to show us is that God takes the worst we have to give, takes violence into his own being, and subverts it through the power of self-giving love, in order to draw all things, all beings, all reality to himself.  Christ overcomes all the terror and disharmony and sin and fear and death-dealing darkness of our world, not through imposing himself, but through absorbing it all into himself on our behalf, and then defying it all, denying any of it the last word.[iii]   His crucifixion stands as visible sign of an invisible reality – God’s solidarity with any who suffer.  His resurrection stands as visible sign of an invisible reality – God’s subversion of violence, and the ultimate end of all alienation, suffering, and injustice of any kind.

 

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These are the things we claim as Christians, and it is especially what the church proclaims today, on Christ the King Sunday.  In the face of all the powers-that-be, we are saying there is another power, and we are asserting our allegiance to that power.  In the face of so much visible breakage and pain in our world, we are announcing another reality – one in which all things hold together in Christ, all creation is being drawn into harmony and healing in Christ.

 

In Christ, that invisible realm was made visible.  His life went up like a flare, illuminating hidden layers of reality.  In embracing and practicing the truth of that deeper reality, the church, the body of Christ, continues to make visible the invisible.  Sometimes.

 

The problem is, we treat Christ much the same way we treat math.  Boring.  Irrelevant.  Useless.  Something taught to schoolkids but of not much use now that we’re in the real world.  We do not care to know anything more than the bare facts of the reality we can see – like how to make it in this world, how to get ahead, how to keep our families safe.  We think we can get along just fine with invisible things remaining invisible.

 

And that works well enough, I suppose, as long as things are going well for us, and as long as we don’t care how they are going for anyone else.  But the moment we are faced with our own real crisis, or the moment we lift our eyes off our own little lives and really see the world around us, we are confronted.  We are confronted with the invitation to stake our living on the radical truth[s] of an invisible realm.  A realm where courage counts for more than calculation and where risk counts more than success.  A realm where the poor, the broken, and the broken-hearted are cherished and cared for.  A realm where hope defeats despair, and mercy overthrows revenge, and trust overcomes anxiety.  A realm where faith propels passion and  action.  A realm where everyone, everything is in the service of reconciling all creation to God.

 

And that is our work, isn’t it?  If we are people who call Christ Lord, if we are people who assert our faith and allegiance to that reality, then our lives are also meant to be making visible what the world cannot yet see, and that is this: we have all been claimed, we are all being drawn, even now, toward the very heart of God.  Though reality seems fractured and fractious and in ruins, even now we are being redeemed and reconciled.  Even now, God is pulling us all toward wholeness, toward harmony, toward shalom, toward home.  And all we have to do is let ourselves be drawn, and to give ourselves to the drawing of the whole world.