Stained glass windows in medieval churches served as instructional devices for a largely illiterate society. They were vivid visual enhancers of imagination and memory, sort of precursors of illustrated books. Each window illustrated a Bible story that teachers would tell to the observers. Thus elementary level religious education consisted of looking at windows while hearing about the person/event/truth the artist sought to depict.
What Abraham, Moses, John the Baptist, the apostles and martyrs “looked like” in the mind of the artist was indelibly etched on the minds of the faithful viewers as they observed the windows year after year.
None of them portrayed an ugly Jesus.
No one has a remotely accurate idea what Jesus looked like. Nowhere is there even a verbal description of him. The earliest efforts to portray him visually were those stained glass windows, followed much later by artists’ depictions of a handsome man with a shapely Semitic nose and strong beatific expression. Even the Jesus in theatrical productions like "Godspell" and "Jesus Christ Superstar" were handsome hunks.
We have no idea what Jesus said or did, how he felt or what his opinions were. Even traditionalist conservative Bible scholars agree that the words and activities attributed to him in the Christian Bible are selected excerpts which were not written down until about 60 years after his death, and a lot of it was not original with him.
Do you remember the years-ago TV program, “To Tell the Truth”? A panel of celebrities put questions to three persons, all pretending to be the same individual and the panel tried to guess which one was “real.” Then the moderator instructed, “Will the real (whoever) please stand up”, and the mystery person was identified. It might be helpful, albeit image-blowing, if a similar venue were available to us. Will the real Jesus please stand up?
Nah . . . We don’t want a real Jesus. Christian theology has always insisted that he was fully human, but humanity is so messy; a stained glass Jesus is much more attractive.
E.J. Montini, columnist for The Arizona Republic, is a serious Roman Catholic who once described a childhood episode in his parochial school. One day, standing in line waiting for his turn to enter the boy’s room, he asked the ubiquitous nun in charge of bursting boyhood bladders if Jesus ever had to pee; his answer was a powerful thwack of the nun’s very heavy ruler. The spiritual lesson he learned that day was that some things regarding Jesus you dare not think about, much less speak about.
Can you envision Bethlehem’s baby Jesus screaming with colic, or a teenage Jesus sobbing over a game-losing missed field goal? Or cruising Main Street in a low-rider convertible, or cuddling in the convertible with a nubile Nazareth nymphette, or haggling with a dissatisfied customer over a piece of carpentry work?
If you can, your understanding of Jesus is more honest than most folks. While creedally declaring that Jesus was human, religious thinking and practice mostly ignore the humanity but make much of his divinity.
The influential 17th century philosopher René Descartes taught that material things are essentially different from spiritual things, so life got divided into secular and sacred, and the reality of Jesus as a flesh-and-blood man became inconveniently confusing. To keep religion neat, tidy, mentally manageable and “holy,” Jesus was left in the stained glass window but kept out of the convertible.
It would be much more helpful if we heard less about a heavenly Jesus “sitting on the right hand of God,” whatever that means, and more about “he was a man in every way, like us,” whatever that means.
Thinking that way about Jesus could get you thwacked by a ruler: Protestants have them too, you know, big ones. But that is the only way that anything he said or did can have anything to do with me.
Syndicated columnist Jack Wilson may be addressed at jackscolumn@jwco.us.
