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The bigger picture

Colossians 1.15-28
What’s under the blanket [a rocking horse toy]?
It’s not easy to guess what’s hidden under a blanket, is it? Even with clues! How much easier to tell what something is if the blanket is taken away!
This ancient hymn says that God cannot be seen. It’s as if he’s hidden under a blanket of mystery. But Jesus is exactly like him, so through him we see what God is like.
Even though he’s a human being Jesus is still the person through whom ‘everything was created’ - ‘everything seen’ like galaxies and planets, worlds teeming with life, human beings, and everything ‘unseen’, dark matter, gravity, atoms and cells, the Higgs Boson (whatever that is!) ‘All things were created through God’s Son, and everything was made [by God] for him. God’s Son was [there] before all else, and by him everything is [still] held together. God himself was pleased to live fully in his Son’ because creation had lost its harmony and only through Jesus’ death, which revealed God’s sacrificial love for all things, could ‘all beings… be brought back [into harmony with] God.’
A picture of plastic floating in the ocean
Someone has said that it’s a bit like human beings carelessly creating disorder by allowing lots of plastic rubbish to accumulate in the oceans, and then needing help and inspiration to sort out the mess again and seek to restore that lost harmony. Jesus ‘is the very beginning… ‘All things were created in [him],’ even the little crab caught up in the bag, which means he is caught up in the struggle they have against pollution and environmental damage, and he wants to bring everything back to how it should be.
What does this picture  look like to you [of a camel rider with a small herd of camels in front of the iconic temple building in the ancient ruined city of Petra, viewed through the narrow opening between two rocks]?
If you’ve seen the film ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’ you might just recognise the Temple of the Crescent Moon where the Holy Grail, the cup used by Jesus at the Last Supper, had been carefully guarded for centuries by a frail old knight in armour until Indiana and his friends showed up. Who is sitting on the camel? Is it Indiana’s assistant Faisel-el Kahir, who wanted to take some camels from the Temple to compensate for his brother-in-law’s car being blown up by the Nazis earlier in the film?
Of course, the Temple of the Crescent Moon doesn’t really exist. So where was the film really shot? It was made at the rose red city of Petra in Jordan, the place that someone said was ‘half as old as time’ and the temple was built not to hide the Holy Grail but by an ancient Arab kingdom long before the time of Jesus. It follows that the man on the camel is just a man with a bunch of camels, perhaps for tourists to ride on.
What the picture gives us is a glimpse of something much bigger, just a slice of what we would see if we passed through that narrow opening and stood in front of the rose red ruins themselves. Mostly, that’s what we see when we look for signs of God in our world - glimpses of a much bigger picture. 
The bigger picture of the Temple
By dying to reveal how much God loves us, Jesus takes us through the narrow opening to behold the truth about what God is like.

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