…for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.
Galatians 3:27 (NIV)

The statement ‘Clothes make the man’ is attributed to Mark Twain but he actually wasn’t the first. In the sixteenth century, Shakespeare has Polonius declaim ‘apparel oft proclaims the man’, in Hamlet. Or go one century further back and you could quote Erasmus: ‘…vestis virum facit’.¹   If you prefer to keep to English, from the same century, you could quote a proverb: ‘Euer maner and clothyng makyth man’. Or if you really want to sound erudite and clever, tell someone that the thought was first seen in Homer’s poem, the Odyssey in the 7th or 8th century BC.

But really it’s just a commonsense observation that could be made by anyone. You can tell a lot about people from the clothes they wear, and we often sum up people by how they appear. Of course even today some cultures give little or no freedom of choice. But in the West, within bounds, our clothes can express who we are – or who we think we are, or would fancy we are. 

Clothes can tell us a person’s status and also identify us. For example, back in Roman times purple was a restricted colour so you could spot a senator because they were allowed to wear togas with purple stripes. You could pick out the Emperor because he wore full purple. Nowadays the Army, Navy, Air Force, the police, and the emergency services are all easily identifiable by their uniforms. Construction workers and those who work on the roads or railways can often be identified by their hi-vis jackets, with the name of their company on the back.

We may have to think about what to wear when we get up in the morning, but we don’t have to think about wearing Christ, as scripture says, baptised members of the body of Christ have already put on Christ. But it is still something to think about. Look at it this way – it is as if we go out wearing a hi-vis jacket that in bold letters on the back proclaims that we are Christ’s. Or think of a T-shirt – they often have slogans or logos on the front. Maybe ours states ‘I belong to Jesus’ in bold lettering.

The world sees us and makes a judgment on how we wear Christ. So let us pray:

¹ The original saying by Erasmus includes the word ‘‘Divitiae’ – ‘Divitiae vestis virum facit’.

Prayer
Lord, may I, through your Spirit prove a worthy advertisement of who you are as I live this day. Amen.