Jesus' face

It was not an accident that Jesus' incarnation happened at a time and in a culture where there were no portrait artists, and no cameras. Jesus came for all people - so the fact that we can give him a Middle Eastern or British or African or American or Ethiopian or Russian or Japanese appearance is good and important - he is incarnated into all our cultures. But sometimes I really do wonder what Jesus actually looked like - the historical Jesus. The face above was an attempt to reconstruct the face of a 30 year old Palestinian man from the first century AD, by building up layers on a skull. It doesn't quite work though - because he looks vacant maybe? And I am pretty sure the hair is wrong.

Below is a painting based on the image of the face on the Turin Shroud - for a very long time this was thought to be the real shroud Jesus was buried in, and so the marks on it formed a picture for us, if we believed it,  of the real Jesus. But the Turin Shroud was proved by carbon-dating to be a fake.

















So we are left guessing. I began to think about this again when reading Silence, by Shusaku Endo. The priest in the book spends days and even weeks on his own, in hiding, secretly meeting Christians, then being arrested and paraded through a town in chains, then imprisoned in solitude, hearing others being tortured - and what gives him the courage to keep going is an image of Jesus he had in his mind, from a portrait of him he had back at home. The memory of the face stayed constantly with him, and through it, Jesus helped him endure.

I realised that when I think of Jesus, I am left without a face - or it is kind of vague. I do think of him as he is portrayed in famous pictures, or as the shepherd with lambs in his arms as in a childhood painting we had, or sometimes as one of the movie Jesus-es. But none of them are quite right. One friend not long ago said when she sees Jesus, he is in jeans. Hmm. That made me think of the very American bro Jesus with the tool belt and jeans of William Young's The Shack. But that isn't quite my Jesus.

Maybe I should settle for the image that was on my laptop long ago when I was first in Uganda... I was in the old tiny computer-room at UCU (which is now the Archives), where we all went to send emails back then. I had a picture of Aragorn from Lord of the Rings as my screen saver. Emmanuel Gatera came in and glanced at my screen over my shoulder - "Ahhh, Jesus!" he said. I didn't feel like putting him right!

I think this could work don't you?

As always, open to any other ideas or suggestions...