It is truly amazing that a little girl painted a picture of a vision she had of Jesus and a young boy halfway around the world saw it and said that it was Jesus, the one he walked with. Could this be the true picture of Jesus? Or did it just happen by chance that this 12 year old girl drew a similar Jesus that the boy saw. Its safe to say we will not know the truth until we actual meet our King.
That story brings me to what I am wanting to get at with this post. We talked about and looked at many paintings of Jesus today in class. The paintings were amazing, but sometimes I think we put too much into what we think Jesus looked like. Does it really matter? Our faith will be the same, nothing about Christianity will change if Jesus was attractive or ugly, so why does it matter? We will meet Jesus one day and He will be the most beautiful thing we ever have seen, until that time I think we can be patient. We better hope we are not insulting Jesus with the attempt of creating images of Him. Although I bet Jesus is a little amused by seeing all the art we have of Him. Overall, I think art is beautiful and art of Jesus is beautiful, but sometimes I think admirers of the art might start believing that the image is actually what Jesus looked like, and I think that can become dangerous. Patients, my friends. I think God purposely does not want us to know what Jesus looked like, because then we might start worshiping an image, although it would be an image of Jesus, I think that can become sketchy.
I agree that we should not focus on what Jesus looked like. I think the pictures of Jesus that we looked at are about how we see him. That sounds like "what he looks like," but it's different. It deals with perspective on why and how he interacted with us here in our little limited world. The different ways people and culture interpret his life tell us a lot about what was understood to be important. It's also a way to communicate without the barrier of language. These principles are probably more easily understood in the abstract works, but I think they apply to most (if not all) artistic pieces.
ReplyDeleteThe last book in the Chronicles of Narnia ends with (SPOILER ALERT) the world of Narnia coming to an end, and all the people who came to Narnia from our world dying in a train accident. They go to Heaven and see Aslan there and the last paragraph of the series begins, "And as He spoke, He no longer looked to them like a lion;"
ReplyDeleteThis isn't gospel truth of course; it's just Lewis's guess as to what it would be like. But I'm pretty sure it's true that Jesus can take on any form he wants. I mean, He's like actually a man. Whatever form He appeared in to the first-century Jews was only temporary and probably unimportant. He's not a biological organism like we are. We don't have the slightest idea what He looks like.
So, kinda like Taylor said, our depictions of Jesus are more meaningful as representations of how we see Him, than as representations of His appearance.