The Image of Christ.

I've been thinking quite a bit about the subject of my post from last Friday. I've come to the conclusion that the thing that offends me most about the subject is the whole idea of the 'depiction' of Christ.

The argument about whether Sallman's "Head of Christ" should hang in a West Virginia High School has become quite silly in my mind because, let's face it, there's no way that Jesus looked anything like Sallman's depiction.

That means that the people involved in the controversy are fighting over something imaginary.

Which is what most fights are over.

But how should we 'depict' Christ? What did Jesus really look like?

There's a very good article on the subject here which includes this picture showing three very different interpretations of what Jesus might have looked like:


People have been trying to do this for almost 2000 years. Unfortunately, the folks who lived in the ancient near-east roughly two millenia ago were not blessed with digital cameras.

Maybe that should be 'fortunately'.

One of the great mysterious blessings of having Jesus as our Lord is that he is and was one of us.
"Just a slob like one of us", as Joan Osborne sang.

O.K., not a slob, but definitely one of us.

It's actually a good thing that we don't know exactly what Jesus looked like. If we did, we might be even more eager than we already are to make him into exactly what we are. In my case that would be a tallish English speaking WASP with blonde hair and green eyes and a genetic predisposition to put on weight by even looking at food.

All of which, common sense tells us, Jesus of Nazareth could not have been.

And therein lies the problem: we as a human race want a god that is very much like us. We want to create God in our image instead of the other way around. And it's always been this way and probably always will be this way.

A half millenium before Jesus walked the earth, Xenophanes observed that the Ethiopians have dark-skinned gods and the Thracians have red-haired ones: "And if oxen and horses or lions had hands and could paint with their hands, and produce works of art as men do, horses would paint the forms of the gods like horses, and oxen like oxen..."

Suffice it to say that I have no idea what Jesus really looked like, but I don't think He looked very much like Warner Sallman's painting.

And maybe that's a good thing. Maybe it's good that an Ethiopian's Jesus has dark skin and a Thracian's Jesus would have red hair. Maybe it's good that Warner Sallman's Jesus looked like he did while my Jesus looks rather more like me.

Jesus is (or can be) LORD for each and every one of us and our mind's eye just has to create a visual depiction of that Lord.

I think it's a good thing that there were no cameras around in Jesus' day because that would exclude all the people who didn't look quite right by comparison.

I think that is what really bothers me about Sallman's painting hanging in that High School: It tells us what Jesus must be to us and it excludes all the people who don't measure up in whatever way to that image.

Does this really speak to the debate over whether that painting should be handing in the halls of a high school in West Virginia? Well, ask yourself this: Would the uproar on either side have been the same if that depiction of Jesus had looked African or Asian or whatever? For that matter, would the picture have been displayed in the first place if it had shown Jesus in that way? And would any of those imagined images have been closer to what Jesus really looked like? And does it really matter anyway?

The true depiction of Christ is not a visual representation at all. The only depiction of Christ that matters is our depiction of Him in our actions. The way that we live our lives - what we do and say, the very way that we think - is how we should 'depict' Christ. Not though a painting - no matter how much it looks like us or where it hangs.