Disguising Jesus

A scene from Walter Miller’s dystopic novel A Canticle for Leibowitz depicts a conversation between a great physicist and a Catholic priest. The scholar argues that the current version of humanity, struggling to survive in a second Dark Age brought on by nuclear holocaust, cannot be related to the Anakim who lived in ancient times and built airplanes and computers. The egghead points out a peasant who trundles by in the muddy street below.

“Look at him! No, but it’s too dark now. You can’t see the syphilis outbreak on his neck, the way the bridge of his nose is being eaten away. But he was undoubtedly a moron to begin with. Illiterate, superstitious, murderous. He diseases his children. For a few coins he would kill them. He will sell them anyway, when they are old enough to be useful. Look at him, and tell me if you see the progeny of a once-mighty civilization? What do you see?”

“The image of Christ,” replies the cleric. “What did you expect me to see?”

It is a powerful exchange and reminds me of something I read somewhere (Richard Foster, maybe, or Eugene Peterson; I’ve tried and failed to find the reference) about a German pastor who went to hear Hitler speak. A colleague asks what the Fuhrer looked like, and his friend replies, “Like all men - like Christ.”

Stories like that challenge me because I do not, on the one hand, imagine Jesus as a syphilitic troglodyte and I cannot, on the other hand, find him in the face of a madman who waged genocide against Jesus’ own Jewish race. Great saints may trace the physiognomy of the Redeemer in the crude features of fallen humanity but I cannot.

Yet it occurs to me that this concept may hold hope even for a spiritual tadpole such as I. If I do not necessarily see Jesus when I look at others, I at least see in others what I would see if I looked at Jesus. I’ll try to explain. I may fail.

I have a concept of the face of Christ. We all do, of course. Mine, inevitably, centers around the Warner Sallman image which gazed out from countless Sunday school classrooms and Bible fly leaves of my childhood - a sort of WASP and slightly sissy Jesus, but imprinted early in the receptive ooze of my psyche and now fossilized there for all time. (Which makes one take comfort that time is not for always.) The postmodern perspective threatens this hegemonic Jesus. At the turn of the millennium artist Janet McKenzie won a paint-the-new-Jesus contest with her depiction of the Savior as a black man - or sort of a black man; the model who sat for the picture was a woman. Pop-artist Stephen Sawyer favors a hunky Jesus, a sort of Nazarene Fabio who reclines on the ropes of a boxing ring, pecs a-flex and long biker locks flowing down his broad back.

My point is that nobody knows what Jesus looked like, but my deeper point is that nobody in Jesus’ day knew what the Son of God looked like. So when they looked at Jesus, they just saw what they were used to seeing when they looked at people in general.

The holy people, for instance, looked at other people as potential competition in an endless game of religious roulette. They probed a new acquaintance for weaknesses, gaps in the cliff-face of the other’s righteousness which would provide them with handholds for scaling the summit and thus standing higher and closer to God. They looked at other people in order to find flaws, so they saw a flawed Jesus who ate with the wrong people and healed at the wrong times and didn’t wash his hands the right way.

The Romans saw everyone in terms of empire, a viewpoint which left them only two categories: threats and assets. Pilate looked at Jesus and saw a destabilizing factor in his powder-keg of a kingdom. He thought something else might have been stirring there, under those calm, brown eyes, but he had no file folder for that so he walked away with his scrubbed hands held aloft like a surgeon too sterile to perform the operation and waited for the family to claim the body.

The lepers and beggars and hookers, interestinglly enough, saw people as resources. They had learned to read faces and find out which ones might be good for a few bucks. They looked at Jesus and saw a soft touch - so they touched him. To their amazement, he touched back. An old story tells of a tramp who asked Thomas Jefferson for a ride. Jefferson granted the favor. When questioned why he bothered the President of the United States with such a request, the man answered that he had no idea who his mark had been. Some men, he explained, have “yes” faces and others have “no” faces. He’d picked the guy with the “yes” face. Social scum looked for “yes” faces and that is what they saw in Jesus.

So the question becomes: what am I in the habit of seeing when I look at others? Because that is what I would see if I came across Christ. More soberingly, it is what I WILL see when I DO come across him. Do I look for weaknesses so that easy criticism can shore up my unstable sense of security? Then all I will see in Jesus is weakness. Do I look for sin so that I can feel affirmed in my spiritual superiority? Then I will see sin when I look at Jesus. If I approach people hoping to find the face of God, looking hard for any sign of good and filtering out (without denying) the flaws and failures - then when I see Jesus I will be able to discern those traits.

But if I look for wrong, for failure, for weakness, for vulnerabilities to exploit and secrets to explode, then when I see Jesus, that is what I will find. Of course, someone will point out that Jesus has none of those things, but that won’t save me, and for one or both of two reasons. First of all, those things don’t have to be there in order for me to see them. Christopher Hitchens, a fundamentalist atheist, has just published a book, The Missionary Position, which rips into Mother Theresa. If you can see evil in the face of the Saint of Calcutta, you can see it even if it isn’t there. Secondly, we must consider the possibility that if I’ve trained my eyes to see only evil and I gaze on Jesus where evil is completely absent, I will see . . . nothing! Those who choose to ignore good and then find themselves surrounded by it will simply be struck blind because there is nothing for them to see.

Speaking of Mother Theresa, I love the story she tells of sending a novice nun to the House of the Dying. “You saw the priest during the Mass,” she tells the neophyte, “with what love, with what delicate care he touched the body of Christ. Make sure you do the same thing when you get to the home, because Christ is there in a distressing disguise.” I don’t see Jesus in the people around me because he hides behind their distressing disguises. If I learn to love the disguise, to rejoice in the distress because I do not share it, I will never see Jesus - and will never want to. If I recoil from it in disgust, I will never see Jesus, because I’m looking somewhere else. If, instead, I discipline myself to look through the disguise (and some of them are pretty clever!) trying to find even the best-hidden flash of my Lord’s real face, I will get so good at it that I can see him anywhere, perhaps even in my shaving mirror. Eternity for the Christian, in an important sense, consists of endless adoration of the Trinity, and it is the Son who shows us the Father. What a shame to get to Heaven and think it is Hell because instead of God all I can see is the same face of failure which sparked my delighted disgust on Earth.

Does that person beside me look like Jesus? Not yet, perhaps, not yet. Keep looking.

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