Gen Z kids view selfies very differently than do the Millenials who purportedly invented them. I first noticed this while being instructed by my niece on a (then) new social media app called SnapChat. It was basically the anti-Instagram. Whereas I had grown accustomed to carefully curated and filtered digital galleries, these kids were producing and posting hundreds of thoughtless images that would disappear within the day. Terrible lighting, angles, and framing; all of it disastrous! This was so obviously one of those generational pendulum swings. Young people were (rightly) unimpressed with the gulf between online image and reality, and so they were primed and ready for its antithesis: unfiltered, unflattering, and ultimately ephemeral.

The Impressionist painter Vincent Van Gough mastered the art of the selfie long before this century’s influencers, and he managed to strike a synthesis. Of his over forty self-portraits, perhaps the most famous is one displaying his bandaged (lack of an) ear. He had cut the ear off himself after a fight with his roommate and then delivered it to a local prostitute as a gift. As one does. This was the same year Vincent painted his masterpiece The Starry Night, just before admitting himself to an asylum and eventually taking his own life. The troubled soul had somehow found the (un)happy medium between the idealistic aesthetic sensibilities of a master painter and a brutal commitment to transparency that would display his most profound struggles for all the world to see. The tension was just too much to hold.

That disparity between how we appear and what we long for others to see has haunted mankind since our first parents hid and covered themselves in the Garden all those years ago. We were made to be wise, but we don’t know everything. We were made to be righteous, but we fall short. We were made to be glorious, but we’re blemished. To make it worse, some of the same technologies that enable us to improve ourselves also allow us to cover over and obscure these deficiencies, living the deceptive lifestyle of “prosthetic gods.” How can we instead recover a right-sized image of ourselves that trusts in Christ alone to transform us into his likeness? Behold with us this Sunday.