Digital Edition
Faces of God
Oct
Photos of human tragedy reflect the suffering face of God
In the pictures of people fleeing from Afghanistan comes a difficult reminder that we are all made in the image of God.
In the days following the fall of the Afghan government in mid-August, I found myself riveted by the photojournalism coming out of Kabul—desperate people clinging to the exteriors of aircrafts, huddled masses crammed onto the floor of a cargo plane. A small child in a red dress drinking milk from a bottle caught my eye, then two young boys in matching blue-striped T-shirts and a baby girl in pale yellow riding on a man’s shoulders.
In the moment this photo was taken, inside a U.S. Air Force C-17 as it evacuated families from Kabul to Qatar, none of these kids appear particularly alarmed or distraught. Perhaps that is the only comfort to the bleak reality the picture paints. Where will they go from here? What awaits them in the future? Does the child in the red dress know from where her next bottle will come? Is she going to be hungry as she seeks a new home?
The stories of these children are just a few within the far-too-long list of headlines reporting on the struggles of immigrants and refugees around the world. Yet it almost feels as if the prevalence of such reports has rendered them ineffective. As the adage suggests, a thousand words don’t do the situation justice or, as it may be, spur readers to pursue a more just world. And yet, there are singular pictures that haunt me, and their widespread use in digital media suggests they haunt others too.
We tend to romanticize images of an incarnate God birthed in a dirty stable, escaping violence across the Egyptian border, and even executed by the state on a cross. The circumstances of Jesus’ life were indeed bleak at times. Just as we’re prone to overlook the deep humanity with which Jesus experienced injustices in his life, we also often don’t consciously recognize the image of God revealed to us through persons suffering today.
But consciously or not, I think that’s why my eyes return to images like the one of the girl and her bottle aboard the C-17. These human faces don’t just reflect light into a camera lens: They reflect the face of God in the world today.