Seeing Our Self

“During the war a soldier picked up on the battlefields of France a battered frame which had once contained a picture of Jesus. The picture had gone but the frame still bore the words Ecce Homo[1]. The soldier sent it home as a souvenir, and someone at home put a mirror in it, and hung it on the wall. One day a man went into that house and understood the startling words, Behold the man, and saw himself. We see ourselves only when we see ourselves in Jesus. Blots we barely knew were there come to view in his white light."

----

[1] Ecce Homo are the Latin words used by Pontius Pilate in the Vulgate translation of the Gospel of John (19:5), when he presented a scourged Jesus Christ, bound and crowned with thorns, to a hostile crowd shortly before his Crucifixion. The King James Version translates the phrase into English as Behold the Man.