Portrait of Jesus {it happened on a sunday} Day 4

When I was in elementary school, my family switched churches.  It was something that would continue to happen every few years, precipitated by some sort of divisive policy or personal affront.  We began to spend our Sundays at a Nazarene church, and I would only later realize, due to our brief time there, that my parents were using it as a place to hide out and rest before finding a community they genuinely liked.

This church was different from the last.  The smells of wooden pews and musty carpets were replaced by air fresheners and fresh paint.  There was a modern-looking auditorium in place of a stained-glass sanctuary.  And what stands out in my memory so many years later is the portrait hanging in the hall where we lined up to use the bathroom during Sunday School.

I can't remember if someone told me it was a picture of Jesus or if I somehow intuited it, but it was the first time I'd seen a visual representation of the man who told Zaccheus to come out of his tree, who walked on water, who died so we could have candy on Easter.  And it blew my poor literal 7 year old mind.

There were so many questions.  If Jesus lived thousands of years ago, did that mean the portrait was thousands of years old?  If so, how did our church acquire it?  Who painted it?  How had it been preserved for so long?  And, even more disconcerting, if it wasn't thousands of years old, if the Son of God hadn't spent part of his time on earth posing for oil paintings, then how did the artist know what he looked like?  How could we be sure that was Jesus?

I can remember staring so hard at the painting each week, hoping to gain some insight.  I hoped that I could solve the great mysteries that this artwork initiated.  Instead, it joined a growing list of things that confused me about church.  Why did we call Communion "the blood of Jesus"?  Imagine my surprise the first Sunday I was allowed to partake of the sacrament, holding the tiny plastic cup and hearing the pastor announce what we were all about to drink!  My eyes popped open, despite the solemn prayer that was coming from the front of the room.  I checked the grown ups' faces, freaking out that none of them seemed even the least bit concerned that we were apparently part of a vampiric cult.  This produced more questions.  The human body only contains so much blood, right?  And Jesus has been gone for a long, long time.  So where did this blood come from?  I couldn't wait for the prayer to conclude, I had to know right away what was in this cup, and so I drank it with a tentative sip and exclaimed, "OH!  It's just grape juice!"  Why didn't the pastor just say that?

It was probably about 10 years after I first saw the Jesus portrait that I learned a few things.  One, that artists create likenesses, that in painting historic figures for whom there is no recorded image they will often use their friends, family, even themselves as the model.  This is certainly what had happened in the image that my youth group friends referred to as "Swedish Jesus".  He looked so European and suave, like someone on his way to pick up Haagen Daaz wearing a thick cable knit sweater.

Medical artist Richard Neave drew this
image of Jesus based on forensic
anthropological research

I also learned the general physical characteristics of different racial groups, that hair texture and nose shape and skin color varied across a huge spectrum among human beings, and the Jesus born in Bethlehem under the authority of the Roman Empire probably looked more like the guys flying planes into buildings on September 11th than the man smiling benevolently outside my church's bathrooms.

All my previous questions were replaced by one pretty big concern.  Since the Bible tells us that Jesus is the physical representation of an invisible God, that those who saw Jesus in the flesh saw the glory of God revealed, why did Christian churches in the Western world (and maybe just the USA) choose to display portraits that were so obviously made in their own image, instead of the image of God?  If God created each of us, red, yellow, black, and white, and we were precious in his sight, then why were we so uncomfortable looking at a Jewish guy from the Middle East when we went to worship him?

Unlike my previous questions, whose answers had eluded me for years, this one seemed pretty obvious.  All I had to do was look around the auditorium, or sanctuary, or sancti-nasium (yes, that's a thing) on a Sunday morning to realize that very few people, if any at all, were painted with a darker shade of skin pigment than Sun-Kissed Honey.  The white men and women who made up the churches of my youth, and, sadly, still make up the churches I've been to as an adult, weren't interested in cultural diversity or ethnic accuracy.

Why is this?  Why in North America is Sunday the most segregated day of the week?  Why haven't we figured out how to integrate black and white and Latino and Asian and everything in between?  Why have we allowed the cultural institution of race to infiltrate our spiritual institution?  And what are we doing today, this very Sunday, to correct it?

**I feel the need to add that the second image from medical artist Richard Neave lends more truth to the prophecy from Isaiah 53: "He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him."  If Jesus looked like the white dude in a crowd of Israelites, I'm pretty sure they would have found his appearance both surprising and note-worthy.