Seasoned with Salt
Day 219 – 7 August
The Portrait and the Original
“Therewith bless we God, even the Father; and therewith curse we men, which are made after the similitude of God. Out of the same mouth proceedeth blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not so to be.” (James 3:9–10, KJV)
Tear the Photograph
Try a small thought experiment. A friend sits across the table from you, and between you lies a photograph of her late mother. Reach over, look her in the eye, and tear the photograph in half. Nothing has happened, physically speaking, to anybody: paper and ink have parted, chemistry on card. Yet every person alive understands that something grievous has just been done to your friend, and possibly to her mother’s memory, and certainly to the friendship. We all carry, deeper than argument, the knowledge that an image participates in the honour of its original, that contempt poured on the portrait lands on the person. The ancient world carved this instinct in stone: a royal statue from the ninth century before Christ, unearthed at Tell Fekheriye, bears an Aramaic inscription describing itself with the very words tselem (image) and demut (likeness), the standing representative of the king, to be treated as the king’s own presence. Hold that instinct steady, because James is about to apply it to every face you will meet today.
Seven Cuts in a Canvas
On the tenth of March 1914, a woman named Mary Richardson walked into the National Gallery in London with a meat chopper hidden in her sleeve and slashed Velázquez’s great Venus repeatedly before the attendants could reach her. She was protesting the arrest of Emmeline Pankhurst, and she said afterwards that she had tried to destroy the most beautiful woman on canvas because the government was destroying the most beautiful character in public life. What interests me this morning is the nation’s reaction. Nobody had been touched; oil, pigment, and cloth had been cut; and yet the newspapers reported the event with the vocabulary of assault, the gallery closed as though for a bereavement, and restorers laboured over the canvas the way surgeons labour over a body, until the painting hung whole again. A society that shrugs at a torn bedsheet grieved over a wounded image, because the canvas carried a presence larger than its materials. Every reviling word spoken about a human being wounds a greater canvas, painted by an older Master, and heaven reacts the way London did.
Up-Speech and Down-Speech
James built the verse on a mirrored pair of verbs, and their anatomy tells the story. With the tongue, he wrote, we bless, εὐλογέω (eulogeō, to bless, to speak well of), welded from εὖ (eu, well) and λόγος (logos, word): up-speech, well-wording, the verb English kept in “eulogy”. And with the same tongue we curse, καταράομαι (kataraomai, to curse, to call down), built on κατά (kata, down) and ἀρά (ara, an imprecation): down-speech, harm called down upon a head. Two verbs, two directions, one door. The scandal James exposed is a mouth that sends traffic both ways, singing upwards to the Lord and Father in the morning service and striking downwards at His creatures by lunch. Then comes the clause that carries the theology, and it hides two of the rarest words in the New Testament. We curse people, James wrote, γεγονότας καθ’ ὁμοίωσιν Θεοῦ (gegonotas kath’ homoiōsin Theou, having been made according to the likeness of God). That noun ὁμοίωσις (homoiōsis, likeness, similitude) appears here and nowhere else in the New Testament, and it walks in straight from the Septuagint of Genesis 1:26, where God resolved to make humanity in His image, tselem (image), and after His likeness, demut (likeness), rendered by this very Greek word. James embedded the creation text in his rebuke. And the participle γεγονότας (gegonotas, having been made), a perfect, describes a state entered once and standing still: made, and remaining made. The likeness has survived everything, the fall included; you have never met a person in whom the similitude has lapsed. James then closed with his quiet thunder, οὐ χρή (ou chrē, it ought), the verb χρή (chrē, it is fitting) making its single New Testament appearance to say that this, of all things, has no business existing: my brothers, these things ought never to be so.
No One Is Discussed Behind His Back
Now assemble the logic, because it reorganises a whole day’s talking. To bless God while cursing His portraits is to tear the photograph in front of the Father, and the direction of the injury needs stating carefully. Our up-speech adds nothing to Him and our down-speech subtracts nothing from Him, for He is complete, self-sufficient, and unchanging; the blessing enriches the blesser and the watching world, and the cursing wounds only creatures, the speaker chief among them. Nor is the likeness a matter of face or frame, since God is Spirit, without body or features; the homoiōsis (likeness) He stamped on us is capacity: reason, moral aptitude, dominion, the ability to love and answer Him, a resemblance of soul rather than silhouette. That is why Jesus placed contempt-speech under judgment, warning that whoever says to his brother raca (Aramaic rêqa, empty-head, worthless one) stands in danger of the court: the sneer prices a divine portrait at nothing. And here omnipresence turns intensely practical: since the Father fills every room, no colleague is ever shredded in a safely empty office, no driver damned in a sealed car, no name dragged through a group chat out of His hearing. No one, anywhere, is ever discussed behind His back. So run today’s speech through the gallery test. The person who exasperates you wears the family resemblance as surely as the person you adore; speak of the absent as though the Original stood beside His portrait, because He does, and let the mouth become a room with one-way traffic, up-speech only, blessing the Father and blessing His likenesses in a single consistent grammar.
Declaration
Every face I meet today is a portrait, made and still standing in a likeness older than its owner. My mouth is one door, and everything leaving it will carry one family crest. I refuse to sing upwards and strike downwards with the same instrument. The people who try my patience wear the resemblance as surely as the people I love, so my words about the absent will sound as they would if the Original were in the room, because He is. I bless, and I keep blessing, and I honour the Original in every portrait I pass.
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