God Squad: Jesus' resurrection the ultimate sign of divine love
Also, Tommy taught me that since Jesus came to Earth precisely to suffer and die, no blame for his death is appropriate or fair given his divinely ordained sacrificial mission. That did not make it easy for Jesus or God, but it made it necessary.
There is a text from the Hebrew Bible in Genesis, Chapter 22, that I then shared with Tommy that has similar theological conflicts. It is God's command to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac to prove his faith. Abraham had to believe two contradictory things: that God wanted him to sacrifice his innocent son and that God would never make him go through with such an abominable command. If he believed that God would never make him do it, he does not pass the test. If he believed that God would make him do it, then God is a monster. The life of faith is filled with such tests. Only God knows how we score on such tests. Our job is to be willing to sacrifice for God and to believe that such sacrifices cause God as much pain as they cause us.
What it means to be made in the image of God is that we have free will to make choices about our lives. We can know the difference between good and evil. We are aware of the moral good. It means that we must care for one another, that we must strive to pursue justice in the world, that we too must fill the world with life, that we must feed the hungry among us, that we should rest on the Sabbath, that when we kill an innocent person we are killing the image of God in this world, and that we must see every other human being as an image of God.
We learn this from an old Jewish story of how the great sage Rabbi Nachman of Berditchev was walking along the street with his disciples when he stopped and asked, "Who is that across the street?" One of them said, "Rebbe, that is just Moshele, the water drawer. That is nobody." The Rabbi chastised them and said, "You are not my students until you can say about any person you see walking on the street, 'There goes the image of God.' " And that is what it means to be made in the image of God.
