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Little Picture, Big Picture

Those pictures of us in our homes that zoom out to satellite views of our house, town, country, planet, galaxy etc till our minds rather give up are handy reminders that perspective and scale can give us very different ways of looking at the same thing. Little picture, big picture. Just been reading Paula Gooder’s This Risen Existence and I was reminded of this by a neat analogy she quoted (pp.5-6) from a BBC Drama, the Second Coming made in 2003. While she reckoned this production was largely disappointing, there was one remarkable scene where the main character was recognised as the Son of God and that moment was described as like a slice of one day being displaced into another: “the event happened Thursday evening and there’s a great big chunk of Tuesday in the middle”. Paula reckoned that was one of the best ways of looking at Jesus’ resurrection – it’s a slice of the end times, happening 2000 years ago. And of course this leaves open the possibility of the event of resurrection (including our own) being experienced by us now, as a slice of the end times. I reckon it’s a helpful image, and so too is the little picture, big picture analogy. In fact the latter might be even better, the little picture being our lives in their everyday detail with the ups and downs, changes and transitions, experiences, decisions and relationships, while the big picture is this resurrection life, our life related to that of the Risen Lord. We could miss seeing this life, a life immediately accessible, but we glimpse it now and then, as for example when in our Christian discipleship we rise above petty retaliation for the sake of another, serve self-forgetfully or allow gratitude to evaporate complaint.

So maybe the challenge is to live out of the big picture a bit more, which doesn’t deny or run away from little picture, because in any case little picture is contained within big picture. But little picture looks rather different within this big picture, and on this view, what’s as important as preparing for big picture Resurrection Life (ie Lent) is getting used to seeing and  living out of big picture, which is what the days of Easter to Ascension/Pentecost or all about. Maybe we could do with more overtly complementing Lenten disciplines with the disciplines we need to cultivate in Eastertide to live resurrection life, not least joy, gratitude and peace…