A number of years ago during the Christmas season I saw an interesting full-page ad in each of our four cities' newspapers. Filling the whole page was a drawing of a man working at a wooden carpenter’s bench and a toddler playing on the floor beside him. The man wore a long, loose garment and was using a primitive hammer. Everything in the picture was clearly meant to show the setting in which the earthly Jesus lived.

The toddler was plump, blond, and light- skinned like the man. A circle of light was on top of the toddler’s head. He was playing with some huge metal nails. Two boards, one shorter than the other, were prominent on the floor beside him. The light from an open doorway spotlighted him and made his body cast a distinct shadow. The shadow, however, wasn't shaped like his body. It was shaped like a cross.

On the picture were these words— "Most of us spend our lives seeking our destiny. One man created His own. It began in a manger and led to a cross, and it included you.” At the bottom was the message “If you would like to know Jesus as Savior and Lord, call... ” and the phone number and address of Hobby Lobby, the chain of craft-supply stores.

I appreciated the fact that a large business corporation—especially one whose business depends a lot on people buying Christmas wrappings and decorations— had bought expensive ad space in a lot of newspapers to promote the true meaning of Christmas, but the portrayal of Jesus bothered me.

The words seemed to imply that Jesus created his own destiny and that we can create ours in the same way—by using only our individual human resources to become whatever we happen to want to be. To me that doesn’t seem an accurate portrayal, either of Jesus or of human beings. The picture bothered me even more, however. It gave Jesus physical characteristics that a native of Bethlehem two thousand years ago undoubtedly didn’t have. It made him look like a baby of Northern European descent.

Far too often, Christians of that descent smugly act as if Jesus were a member of their group alone. Too often, that keeps them from seeing the worth of others.

Picturing Jesus

Do you have a mental picture of Jesus? If so, what is it like, and where did it come from? Some of our mental pictures, like some paintings and printed pictures that claim to be Jesus, seem very different from what the earthly Jesus must have really looked like.

Especially if we’re Anglo-American, many of us think of Jesus as looking a lot like ourselves and the other people at our typical worship services, Sunday School classes, workplaces, family gatherings, and leisure activities.

That may be largely because many paintings and drawings that claim to be Jesus make him look Anglo-American. Portraying Jesus that way gives a false picture of him. More important, it can contribute to the unjust domination of other racial/ethnic groups by Anglo-Americans. Claiming Jesus as part of that group makes other groups look less valuable.

Picturing Jesus as looking like ourselves can be helpful in some ways but unhelpful or even harmful in others. It can help us remember that Jesus is accessible to us and cares about us, but it can keep us from remembering that Jesus also cares about the people who don’t look or act like us.

Two ways to portray Jesus?

If we want to portray Jesus visually, it seems to me that there are only two ways that make sense. One is to make our best effort to show what the human, earthly Jesus probably looked like, based on the best information available to us about Jewish natives of first-century Palestine. This wouldn’t include light-colored skin or blond, smooth-textured hair or the facial features typical of northern European ancestry.

The other way is to acknowledge that we are portraying Jesus metaphorically rather than literally, in order to show our belief that the eternal Christ is the personal savior, guide, and friend of all kinds of people. For this purpose we could show Jesus with African-American, Hispanic, or Asian features, for example. Some churches now do this. We might even dare to show a female Jesus, as a much-criticized art work did several years ago. We could picture a first-century Jesus in robe and sandals sometimes, and a Jesus wearing jeans and walking in a shopping mall at other times.

Doing that isn’t claiming that the earthly Jesus lived in this century or was female, Hispanic, African-American, European, or Asian. That would be ridiculous. Instead, portraying Jesus with different physical and cultural features is saying through visual symbolism that Jesus’ human physical characteristics weren’t what was important about him, any more than his typical-first-century- Palestine sandals and robes were. Features like those weren’t what made him the Christ who is our savior and is with us always. They were merely part of being human at a particular time and place.

We forget that the two ways are different

What promotes injustice is our failure to make clear to ourselves and other people the difference between these two ways of portraying Jesus. We don’t acknowledge that showing him with light skin and hair and European facial features is unrealistic. In addition, by using mainly one portrayal such as the Sallman portrait and putting it in so many church buildings, we create the false impression that it can be taken literally, as if it were a photograph of the earthly Jesus.

Maybe the only reasonable and honest route is either to use no visual images of Jesus or to use a wide variety. What leads us astray is using only one kind, especially if that one is unrealistic, yet that’s what we tend to do.

Viewers see what they need to find 

“Viewers see in the image of Jesus,” David Morgan notices, “what they need to find there.” They personalize the image and address the picture as if it were Jesus himself. For the people who do this personalizing, however, it brings the picture to life in a very valuable way, Morgan finds. For them, “The measure of Christ’s personal friendship is his constant presence, ... made more palpable in the image itself.” Even when pictures of Jesus are culturally or ethnically inaccurate, therefore, we can’t dismiss them as totally worthless or harmful.

The part that images of Jesus play in promoting personal friendship with him raises the question of what Christians mean when they talk about such friendship. That’s an important question, but it rarely is asked openly. Its answer evidently seems obvious to many Christians but baffles many others. 

Listen to this episode of The Crone of Temple, Texas.