Last week the much-anticipated exhibition ‘Imagining the Divine: Art and the rise of world religions’ opened at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, running until February 2018. The visitor is offered mosaics, statues, icons, bowls, amulets, manuscripts, books, and monoliths: artefacts of expression and imagination from the antiquities of current major world religions.

The exhibition frequently highlights the fluidity of ideas and images of the divine in the ancient world, and rightly so, but the questions this begs are never explored. Such fluidity of religious imagination – whether in depicting divine figures or telling religious myths – might be thought to be a problem for a faith that wants to insist on a distinctive and final claim on truth (if, indeed, it does). Yet if a religious faith is truly committed to the discovery and articulation of a truthful account of reality, then it must have the willingness and openness to embrace truth wherever it may be found, and to allow such engagement to enrich and enliven a developing faith. St Mary’s has a rich and established tradition of precisely that, and it is one of the reasons many of us have found a home here: we enjoy a lively engagement with and openness to all those who are searching for truth, and we try to discover together how to live more truly in a complex and demanding world.

‘I believe in God, but...not as an old man in the sky’, said John Lennon, catching the mood of the times. That image – the crusty caricature of a heavy bearded old man lounging on a cloud – has haunted our popular religious imagination. We need a new fluidity, through art and image, poetry and music, to help us to explore and express the divine mystery that we long to discover at the heart of all things. There is an experimental playfulness about the arts that helps us to do this in lively and powerful ways, keeping alive a healthy sense of elusion about grasping reality (God included). In an exhibition focussing on imaging God, I was surprised that the common problem of that task was not highlighted more prominently – in many mainstream religions, God is not to be imaged at all; the divine lies well beyond the capture of the imagination. At the heart of the Christian faith, though, is a paradox: that in Christ, we are shown the image of the invisible God (Colossians 1.15). In Christ, God takes our own form in order to show us his very self. And yet, thank God that no-one managed to take a photo of Jesus – captured on an iPhone so you can put him in your pocket.

In the incarnation, Christ shows that the atoms and cells and words and smiles with which he made the world can be a means of God’s revelation and glory. His own human life demonstrates how a life lived with compassion, contemplation and courage can foster the kingdom of God in our very midst. We are not shown a definitive blueprint on how to be the perfect person, carbon-copied, but are invited to live with creativity and imagination to respond freely and joyfully to the call of Love that echoes through all God’s creation, and that resounds so piercingly in the life, death and resurrection of Christ. In doing so, we may well find that we encounter, and show to others, the love, glory and beauty of God, ever-surprising, ever-free.