Seeing in many dimensions

I remember a craze a number of years ago for 'magic eye' pictures. These seemingly abstract patterns, if stared at for long enough would eventually take shape before your eyes and form some sort of three dimensional image, or might do, or in my case never did. I was left a little bewildered as friends would stare amazed at these images while I was left confused at what they were seeing. I had all sorts of explanations and advice about how you had to look at them and where you focused your eyes, but I never saw anything beyond a mass of squiggles, lines and colours.
I think many people have a similar experience when they look at or think about Jesus. We get fed many different perspectives on Jesus, some of which seem to be mutually exclusive such as the angry Jesus in the Temple and the gentle Jesus meek and mild or Jesus as both lion and lamb. Indeed often the pictures of Jesus that we're presented with say more about the person presenting them than they do about Jesus at all.
Whatever we think about Jesus, there seems little doubt that he is one of the most significant figures in the whole of human history. I believe he is the most important because he was able to embody so many different things. He could take on the weight of Jewish expectations of a prophet like Moses, a priest like Aaron and a king like David. He could take on all that Israel was meant to be as well as everything that humanity was meant to be. On top of all of that I believe that he was both fully God and fully human, though I have to confess that I can't fully understand all that that means.
Through this term we are following a series looking, week by week, at a different picture of Jesus. Each one may only give one or two aspects of who he was but as we go through the series we will see a picture being built up taking on more and more dimensions. If you have missed the series and are interested in looking at an aspect of Jesus or would even like to listen to the whole series then please go to www.mpbc.org.uk/sundays and follow the link to recent sermons. We started the series in September.
I have found studying and speaking on so many different aspect of Jesus has opened my eyes to things I had not seen before as some of the stories and sayings that I knew start to take form and become something fuller before my eyes, just like the 'magic eye' pictures. My hope is that as I know Jesus better, I might become more like him as he truly is and not just as I might like him to be. My prayer is that for those of us making up Morden Park Baptist Church and for any others who join us over the internet, that we might meet with a fuller picture of Jesus and be transformed by his love and grace.