A Beautiful Portrait

The hair on his head was white like wool, as white as snow, and his eyes were like blazing fire. His feet were like bronze glowing in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of rushing waters. Revelation 1:14-15

I am thankful Jesus chose a time in history when his disciples couldn’t pull out their iPhones and snap a selfie with him. The Bible doesn’t say a lot about Jesus’ physical description. However, his good friend John wrote this compelling description of Jesus in Revelation. Equally powerful is John’s follow-up description of Jesus. “When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. Then he placed his right hand on me and said: “Do not be afraid. I am the First and the Last. I am the Living One; I was dead, and now look, I am alive forever and ever! And I hold the keys of death and Hades. Revelation 1:17-18

We now live in a very ego-centric age that is totally self-absorbed with ourselves. We have at our fingertips information about anything and everyone. We have access to more books, more pictures, more video clips than all the combined generations who lived before us. We are information-saturated but drowning in self-righteous indignation over the events of the past.

Jesus tells his followers in Matthew 7 to take the plank out of their own eyes instead of focusing on the tiny speck in their brother’s eye. Jesus was aware of how easy it is to focus on other’s failures because they look at the world through filters of unconscious biases and unexamined judgments that cloud their perception. “The unwounded life bears no resemblance to the Rabbi.” (Brennan Manning)

How would I have pictured Jesus if I had been an artist living in a bygone age without access to the internet, TV, or modern printing capabilities? How would you? In our modern era of travel and instant communication, we have the beauty of seeing and living among the rich interrelationships of other cultures, ethnic groups, and languages. How would you picture Jesus if you had never had the opportunity to leave your hometown?  How would you capture a picture of Jesus to show to your community and family that reflected him for others to see? Somehow the finished picture of Jesus would most likely resemble the characteristics of the people in your world.

Connie and I have a fairly extensive collection of nativity sets from around the world. They are sets collected from the Maasai, Kikuyu, Shona, Batswana, Thai, European, Chilean, Peruvian, and countless other people groups. A most interesting feature common to each Nativity Set is that they picture the baby Jesus looking just like them. As I take each set and unwrap each piece at Christmas I never get tired of marveling at the beauty and variety of the cultures of the world that call Jesus their Savior.

Billy Graham once shared a story from Cecil B. De Mille, a movie producer from an earlier era.  Graham wrote that “Cecil B. DeMille once told me that his picture “The King of Kings” made during the silent-movie era, was seen by an estimated 800,000,000 people. I asked him why he did not reproduce “The King of Kings” with sound and color. He replied, “I will never be able to do it, because if I gave Jesus a southern accent, the northerners would not think of him as their Christ. If I gave him a foreign accent, the Americans and the British would not think of him as their Christ.” He said, “As it is, people of all nations, from every race, creed, clan, can accept him as their Christ.”

The writers of scripture didn’t concern themselves with describing the physical qualities of Jesus. They only focused on his character, his nature, and his message to the world.  The problem comes when we expect every Jesus to look like us instead of us looking like Jesus.

C.S. Lewis writes, “Putting on Christ…is not one among many jobs a Christian has to do; and it is not a sort of special exercise for the top class. It is the whole of Christianity. Christianity offers nothing else at all.” How do we begin to look like Jesus?

We look like Jesus when we wash the feet of others who are struggling, broken, and defeated.

We look like Jesus when we bring peace into the midst of conflict.

We look like Jesus when we take a loaf of bread to our neighbor.

We look like Jesus when we care for the sick and offer comfort to the dying.

We look like Jesus when we tuck our children into bed at night and pray over them.

We look like Jesus when we share His love with a lost world.

Rick Warren in The Purpose Driven Life says, “Christlikeness is not produced by imitation, but by inhabitation.” Therefore, we look most like Jesus when we let Jesus take the brush from our hands, and he paints the picture of us so that the world can see him through us. A portrait where “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28)

God is great!