Prismatically Encapsulate

A few weeks ago, the pastor from our sending church, Lake Forest, made a statement about “Prismatically Encapsulate”. It sounds beautiful but what does it mean? We weren’t the only ones that asked that question and Mike on his blog said that:

There was something that drew me in to want to look at this further. The idea of the ‘incarnation of Christ’ is a major motivation for what it is we do here in Europe so to explore it further is always a passion of mine.

The first thing I did was to take a look at the two words and looked them up on the Merriam-Webster online Dictionary, after all – I’m a computer geek and not an English major. Prismatically is the adverb form of Prismatic which has several definitions but I think the best definition for us is 1b “resembling the colors formed by refraction of light through a prism.” The second word is Encapsulate which is “to enclose in or as if in a capsule.” Now as I think about these words in relation to who Jesus is, I don’t see this ‘prismatically encapsulate’ as the made up words of a raving lunatic emerging church pastor (even if he is).

My son has been a fan of prisms ever since he first saw the movie “Pollyanna”. Even now we have a prism hanging in our kitchen window which spreads rainbows through the room every evening. Its amazing to know that the light (that we can’t see but is just this energy moving through the universe) can be broken up into visible colors that we can understand and comprehend. Now when pure light is broken up by a prism, we see the colors of the rainbow but that’s not all that light is made up of but only the part our eyes can see. Pure light is made up of much more than just the visible color range but a prism allows us to see what it is we are able to comprehend.

Now our prism throws multiple rainbows around the room. But what if all these rainbows were focused together to form a single, powerful, vivid rainbow? (You know that’s what a laser partially does – it concentrates wavelengths of light into a single stream). Jesus is that singleness that concentrates all that the prism reveals to us into a solo, tangible form. He encapsulates all that is understandable of God as He is fully God and fully man.

Jesus Christ isn’t only the encapsulation of the comprehendable, vibrantly colorful ‘rainbows of God’ but He is also the prism that layouts out the ‘parts’ of God into a way that we can begin to understand. (These ‘parts’ don’t add up to the whole of God but are the parts that we can understand and take in).

Scripture is full of times when Jesus would say “Heaven is like…” or “God is like…” but He not only spoke His rainbows; He lived His rainbows. To look at how He lived His life here on Earth is to look at how He took the power of God and transformed it into forms of energy that we could feel, touch, sense, comprehend, and learn from. He spoke to people giving them hope, He ministered to the poor and those in need, He listened to those that needed an ear, and He gave of Himself so that others could live. Jesus Christ prismatically encpasulates God here on Earth for us so that through Him, everyone in this world might know God.