Have you ever wondered what Jesus looked like? When any of us picture Jesus, usually a particular image comes to mind. For some of us, it’s that classical fair-skinned European Jesus that hangs on the wall in many church fellowship halls. For others, he looks like the painting in Grandma’s living room, the one that when if it ever fell off the wall, foretold doom. Still others will always picture Jesus with the face of whatever crucifix hung in the church of their youth.
What Jesus looked like has been the subject of some controversy in recent years. Tired of Jesus being portrayed as a blue-eyed Northern European, many African Americans have sought to portray Jesus as a Black man. In fact, across the globe many people create art depicting Jesus to look like them or their own people.
A few years ago, some archeologists used the forensic science techniques we all know from CSI, to reconstruct a more historically accurate image of Jesus. Using a skull from a typical Judean man from the first century, they came up with a sculpture of at least the type of man that Jesus would resemble. Many people were deeply offended to discover that most likely, Jesus was a shorter than they imagined. If he were like his contemporaries, he would only have been a little over five feet tall, not towering over his disciples as he does in many Sunday School illustrations.
Overall, when reading the works of reputable archeologists or biblical scholars, one hears that we have no idea what Jesus looked like, a least in the physical sense. No Gospel writer, in fact, no New Testament writer, describes Jesus’ physical appearance. So the consensus is that we do not know what Jesus looked like.
Yet that statement can be misleading. In reality, the whole New Testament, and two thousand years of church history, emphatically proclaim what Jesus looked like. We declare it in our texts, our creeds, our songs and our lives.
Jesus looked like God.
We see this in the opening lines of a text called the Letter to the Hebrews. Although often attributed to Paul, I was written by an anonymous author, late in the first century. More like a sermon than a letter, it opens with what might have been the lyrics to an ancient Christian song, “Jesus is the reflection of God’s glory, an exact imprint of God’s very being.” Last week, we explored Jesus the Raconteur. Within the words of Hebrews chapter one, we move from Jesus the Storyteller to Jesus as the story told. Like many in the early Jesus movement, this writer cannot help talk about God without talking about Jesus and cannot help but talk about Jesus without talking about God.
Why in the world would people think that way about Jesus? In what are called the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) Jesus doesn’t really speak of himself that way. He doesn’t go around introducing himself as the second person of the Trinity. In fact in those books, Jesus speaks primarily in parables and teachings, not in long discourses about himself (as he does in John’s Gospel). In fact, over the past 150 years or so, the study of those Synoptic Gospels gave rise to a field of study called Historical Jesus research. Primarily a Modernist endeavor, it sought to separate the Jesus of Nazareth of history, from the Christ of faith. In other words, if we remove all the creedal and faith statements about Jesus, what can we know about him as a real flesh and blood important historical person.
I have two confessions to make here. The first is that I am a big proponent of historical Jesus research. Many people fear such scholarship as a threat to our faith. I do not. In fact, the historical Jesus is who brought me back to church. During my twenties, I rarely went to church, except for my wedding. It was in those years that I read books on the historical Jesus which helped me tremendously. They deconstructed, sometimes painfully, the confining nature of the Christianity to which I was previously familiar. Before that Jesus was to me an other-wordly figure who only appeared to be human (a belief called docetism which the early church labelled heresy). His ministry, life and teachings were like a foreward to a book, an add-on to the really important part of the story,the miracles or his death and resurrection.
At the same time, the Historical Jesus, especially those parables and the Sermon on the Mount, confirmed what I had previously encountered in the Bible, but much of my Conservative Evangelical past had ignored; things like his emphasis on the here and now vs the hereafter, his teachings, and his call for God’s justice (sorry Glen Beck).
Amidst this spiritual journey I took, I endured the condemnation of relatives and other fellow Christians, who made assumptions about the path I was taking, mostly based in fear. I was told the Historical Jesus a watered-down version of the true Christ. Yet I found this Historical Jesus made much more challenging demands on my life and behavior than did the invisible imaginary friend Jesus I had known previously. That Jesus invited me to do easier things like come forward for an altar call and accept him. The Historical Jesus demanded that I turn the other cheek, love my enemies and give away my money. The Jesus I had known previously called me to remove myself from the world, stay away from sinners, and basically just sit around and wait to die and go to heaven. The Historical Jesus ate with sinners and touched the untouchable. I was told that a Historical Jesus would destroy my faith and lead me away from God. In truth, just the opposite happened, which leads me to my second confession.
My second confession is this; the Historical Jesus, although revolutionary, was not enough for me. When I thought about it, his counter-cultural ideas didn’t make a lot of practical sense. They fly in the face of everything I know about the world and how it works. I imagine his original audience thought the same thing about him. This stuff he was saying and the things he was doing were so different from the conventional wisdom of the day, that one could easily dismiss them as wrong. Yet they seemed so right. They were counter-intuitive and yet resonated with the deepest human intuitions. So much so, that those who followed him gave up everything, sometimes even their lives. How could that be?
The insight dawned on me that, if Jesus of Nazareth were just another rabbi among many others, or the fictional creation of his followers, his teachings would have been based more in self-service than self-sacrifice. Ideas, a life and a death that ordinarily I would consider to be hopelessly naive and idealistic, instead became wise and realistic. How was it possible for a merely historical figure do that?
It was as if my faith had previously been a cluttered attic, filled with antiques; old suitcases and trunks, the baggage of oversimplified theology and judgmentalism. My encounter with the Historical Jesus, cleared the clutter and left just one antique standing in the corner; a mirror. When I looked into that mirror of what Jesus said and what he did (even without the miracles), I saw not myself, not a human, but God. For me, no longer was there just a Jesus of history and a Christ of faith, but now also a Christ of history and a Jesus of faith.
A couple of decades ago, Mainline Protestant churches were big on modifying religious language. Sometimes, instead of using the phrase, “Father, Son and Holy Spirit” they would and still do use the more gender-neutral “Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer.” I’m not suggesting we conclude our prayers with it, but based on Hebrews 1, it might be helpful to think in terms of Source, Reflection and Ray. God the Source, Jesus the Reflection, and the Holy Spirit the Ray.
The author of Hebrews tells us that God has spoken to us throughout history, but the Word has always come in fragments. The Wisdom of God, present at Creation, had previously been spoken throughout the centuries in dribs and drabs. There would be incredible displays of God’s presence in history, followed by decades or centuries of silence.
Sometimes your life and my life are like that. We have passing glimpses of the bright light of God, followed by years of darkness. For some of us that darkness may have extended our whole lives. We want to see God, but sometimes, the hardships of human life make it so that we just have no idea where to look anymore. The good news is that if we want to see God, if we want to know God, if we want to know what God looks like and who God is, we need only look at Jesus. “Jesus is the reflection of God’s glory, an exact imprint of God’s very being.”
The Bible says no one can see God and live. That’s because once you’ve seen God the old you has to die. Seeing God shows us who we are supposed to be. When we look into that mirror of Jesus, not only do we see God, we also see ourselves as humans. I think that’s why so many different types of people try to make the physical Jesus look like themselves, from various ethnic groups painting him with their facial features to Elton John trying to make him gay. (I don’t believe Jesus was gay, but why is it so important to Elton John that he be made so?) There’s something about Jesus in which we recognize ourselves. When we can’t be like him, we make him more like us. To my knowledge, humans don’t do this with any other major religious figure.
I believe that’s because of who Jesus is. Jesus didn’t get half his DNA from Mary and half from God making him hybrid half-human half-divine being. Our historic Christian faith declares the mystery that Jesus was fully divine and fully human. So when we look into that mirror of Jesus we see a reflection of ourselves. We all carry the image or reflection of God with us. But the image we discover in the mirror of Jesus, is of ourselves as finite and broken human beings who need to change. At the same time we see what is possible for us, who we could be, and who God wants us to be.
An old criticism of the search for the Historical Jesus, was that a scholar were merely like a person staring down a well, gazing at their own reflection. If they were conservative, they discovered a conservative Jesus. If liberal, a liberal Jesus. It was a thoroughly modern critique. Not to be too postmodern but my answer to that criticism is. “So what?” So what if the Jesus we find, often resembles our own context? That is the genius of Jesus. That is a clue that he is more than just a figure of the past, but a reality in the present.
Historical Jesus scholar Marcus Borg put it this way, “Jesus is what a God-filled life looks like.” The apostle Paul put it this way in 2 Corinthians 3, “all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.”
Jesus is a reflection of God’s glory and that reflection transforms us into the same image from one degree of glory to another. As we all know mirrors flip an image around. Like any mirror, Jesus reverses our image. He turns us around. The Biblical word for that is repentance.
You want to see God? You want your life to change? Look at Jesus.
The images from "A Scanner Darkly" popped into my head while reading this sermon. But instead of Jesus showing multiple images to blend in - to be unrecognized as in the movie/story - the images Jesus is putting out are reflections us ourselves in our many selves. Which, ultimately, was part of the Philip K. Dick story too. Even the title of the story is from "a mirror darkly' in the Bible.
Thank you again, for posting your sermons and blogs.
Posted by: Lisa Michelle Schoelles | April 12, 2010 at 02:35 PM