Do you believe in ghosts?  I ask because I recently read a short piece about how the ancients (people who lived up to the fall of Rome) perceived the notion of ghost.  In it, the author makes the point that the ancients used the same word to describe ghost and image.  A ghost is therefore an image.  So it is real?
     Moreover, the author (Patrick Crowley, a scholar of the art of the Roman world) goes on to say, for the ancients to develop an image of a ghost was to make an "image of an image."  Deciding how this might work raises interesting questions about how we moderns view the idea of image.
     To begin, we note that in the world out of which Rome was born, the only people group that believed humans to be the direct image of God were the Hebrews.  When they looked at themselves, the Hebrews therefore saw evidence of God.
     How do we make an image of an image of a divine image?  For this, we need to look past the Hebrew scriptures to the writings of the New Testament.  In these, we see that, as John puts it in the first chapter of his gospel, in Jesus, God became flesh, a living human being.  In Jesus, we therefore see not just an image of an image of the divine image, but a physical picture of an image made real in our reality.  Not an image of a memory, not an image of an image, not a ghost, but rather a living vision of what those who are made in the image of God can one day be.