Like an apocalyptic vision, this mystery-revealing poem offers a glimpse of another world, a truer world than the violent and brutish world of paganism then and now. It was a Jewish world, but with a difference—a Jewish world made sense of at last by the coming of the Messiah, the true son of David, the truly human one (the “image”), for whose reality and meaning even the Jerusalem Temple was the advance signpost. “All the Fullness”—the full divinity of the One God—“was glad to dwell” in him. This is Temple language. It offers the highest view of Jesus one could have, up there along with
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