The image

Pictures of Jesus abound on facebook.  Most of them resemble the devotional pictures my mother's parents hung on their wall.  Devotional portraits of a pale young man in longish hair looking serene and solemn against a pastel backdrop.  Line drawings of a sickly looking fellow, his head crowned with thorns.  A lanky berobed figure standing outside a door, knocking with a tentative, one-knuckled tap.

Many people find such images inspirational.  To the extent such pictures can be helpful in moving hearts to love and honor towards the Jesus of scripture, I am glad that they exist.  Somehow, most such pictures do not have that kind of impact on me. 

I don't know what Jesus looked like, so I can't feel quite comfortable with most pictoral representations.  No human being alive on this planet has seen him.  No human being who has ever wielded paint to depict him has seen him.  I am convinced that the most masterful images created by human hands could only fall far short of the reality of who Jesus is.  At best, they attempt to represent something that even the best artist could not have captured, not even if he had both the best tools ever conceived by man.  Not even if he had endless time to observe Christ himself at his work. 

But perhaps its just as well that pictures designed for devotional purposes are not staggering works of art.  It would be so easy for human beings to confuse the image with the reality, and direct their worship towards an object made by men rather than the Creator who made mankind.  To have real value, a picture of Jesus would have to draw you beyond its visual impact to contemplation of the spiritual significance of Jesus' life.

For such a purpse, the best images of Christ that I ever encountered were also the simplest.  They were found in a translation of the New Testament called "Good News For Modern Man."  My maternal grandparents kept a copy in their home, and when I visited them as a very young girl, I would sit on their patchwork quilt sofa reading the gospel accounts and examining the pictures.  It fascinated me how much the artists could convey in such simple line drawings.  Usually, facial features were absent or merely suggested.  Even the human shapes were composed of mere lines that subtly indicated gender, height, posture, gesture... but no identifying detail.

For a bookish child with a big imagination, such abstract representations were ideal.  I couldn't have explained it at the time, but these visual symbols were really just one step away from the verbal representations.  They reinforced the words of the stories I read.  The Lord Jesus was shown with strong vertical lines indicating his supreme authority.  Gentle curves pictured his arm reaching out to heal or to comfort.  Without gore, the reality of the crucifixion was still painful and weighty enough for a child to grasp in the sagging bulk of a human form stretched and straining against his human weight and the unyielding crossbar.  They helped make the words of the story more real to a child of 5 or 6 without rooting me to unnecessary visual details.  They made me hungry to understand what Jesus was really like.

Of course no humanly designed image ever satisfies that hunger.  But the Word of God does. 

The simple images and ideas that caught my attention as a child in my grandparents' home did not fully penetrate for a long time.  They gave way first to my own crude notions, as I remade Christ in my own image, turning him into someone I could relate to and appreciate.  It was only when I truly understood my own sin that the full glory of Jesus Christ could be realized for me.  Once again, that child-like hunger to know Jesus was awakened.  But this time, I had the best portrait possible for defining the infinite:  God's own self-revelation in scripture.

Now when I want to know better what Jesus is like, what pleases him, how he approaches weakness, sin, trials, love, and joy, I go first to the source.  Only an infinite wisdom can adequately reveal its own complexities to finite minds.  This is, I suppose, why YHWH first forbade images to his chosen people.  No human conception could ever reveal his image as perfectly as God's own word.