One of my favorite places in the world is a lovely little chapel at Yale Divinity School. The chapel is in such an out of the way spot, hidden away beyond rows of dusty old books in the dark recesses of the library, that if you didn’t know it was there, you might think the door led to a broom closet.
Nouwen chapel, named in honor of the renowned Christian writer Henri Nouwen who taught pastoral theology at Yale for a decade from 1971 to 1981– is a stone room that is roughly the size of an average kitchen. There are a handful of loose wooden chairs that usually describe a small circle, and at the time that I was a student at Yale, there was a painting on the wall.
There was something about that painting. The face in the painting drew me in with the depth of its intensity. Its unfamiliar beauty. Most of all, its abiding dignity. I would look forward to opportunities to go down to the chapel, so that I could admire it.
One day I was down in the chapel, and one of my fellow students came in. It was, I think, the first time he had ever been in the chapel. After a few moments, his eyes settled on the painting.
“Who is that?” he asked, pointing at the painting.
“It’s Jesus,” I said.
“That’s Jesus?!” he responded. He sounded almost horrified.
“It is Jesus,” I insisted.
After a moment my fellow student responded doubtfully: “That’s a painting of someone,” he said “but it’s not Jesus.”
The painting was by Father John Guiliani, a Catholic priest and artist who paints startlingly beautiful portraits of biblical characters that are depicted as indigenous people. The painting in Nouwen Chapel, which was entitled “compassionate Christ” showed Christ as a young Navajo man.
You can see a detail of the face of this Jesus on the cover of this morning’s bulletin. It is number six.
But my fellow student was having none of it. To him, this was not Jesus.
Well, I thought… who is it then?
We might ask the question that Jesus asked his disciples in the scripture lesson that Deb read for us…
“Who do they say the son of man is?”
Who is this Jesus?
**
The image that most historians and archeologists consider to be the earliest known depiction of Jesus, is, ironically, subject to exactly the same defiance that was levied against the painting in Nouwen Chapel…
“That’s not Jesus”
But this time it’s really true…
The graffiti does not represent Jesus. It is a mockery of Jesus.
Known as the Alexamenos graffito, the image was scrawled into a wall in a building in Rome sometime in the 2nd or 3rd century.
The graffiti, which is also known as the graffito blasfemo, (or Blasphemous Graffiti) was clearly intended to mock a Christian named Alexamenos, who is shown worshipping a Donkey headed deity that is being crucified before him.
The Romans were in the practice of deifying people like Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus – conquerors, empire builders. People who manifested immense power.
How could anyone worship a person who was put to death like a common criminal?
The graffiti mocked Alexamenos, who must have been a Christian. Under the scrawled drawing of the donkey on the cross, are the words:
“Alexamenos worships his God.”
Drawing Jesus as a Donkey, the graffitti implicitly give the Roman answer Christ’s question:
Who do you say that I am?
A Donkey.
**
To Christ’s question:
“Who do people say that the Son of Man is?”
The disciples answer, saying:
“Some say John the Baptist but others Elijah and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”
In response to this, Jesus’ asks them the same question:
“But who do you say that I am?”
Who is Jesus?
This question has been asked times without number for over two thousand years.
Perhaps each of us, who call ourselves Christians, must answer this question.
I’d like to ask some follow up questions:
“Who is Jesus when we think about the world?”
And…
“Who is Jesus to me?”
Take a look, if you will, at the fourth depiction of Jesus on the top right corner of this morning’s bulletin. This famous Byzantine icon of Jesus is known as the “Christ Pantocrator,” or “Christ ruler of all.”
This image – dated to around 550 AD, is among the earliest known images of Christ. Interestingly, it is not rare because depictions of Jesus were not made during that time. It’s rare because the religious orthodoxy of the Byzantine period held that the use of icons in worship was idolatrous and hence most images of Jesus were destroyed. Ironically, this image was spared because it lived in the Egyptian desert at The Monastery of Saint Catherine, and when the waves of Byzantine Iconoclasm took place in the 7th and 8th century AD, Egypt was controlled by Muslims who had no impulse to destroy it.
You do not have to examine this image very carefully to see that Christ’s face looks weirdly off balance. The right eye is considerably larger than the left.
This was not the result of an unskilled iconographer. Nor is the unbalanced face an intentional aesthetic decision. The unbalanced face of Christ Pantocrator is a theological assertion of Christ’s dual nature as expressed in pigment. One side of his face represents his human side, and the other is his divine nature.
In the visual arts, as in the gospel stories of Christ’s life, the Apostle Paul’s letters to the early church, and millennia of worship and theological speculation, our tradition has forever been tasked with the burden – or the opportunity (depending on how you look at it) – presented by the paradox of Christ’s dual nature.
Christ’s divinity is at core to our understanding of his significance. And in equal measure, his humanity defines him.
Without a doubt, it is the mysterious co-existence of the divine and the human in Jesus that makes him unique.
And our bold proclamation of this unique character is what makes our Christian faith real.
Real?
There are plenty of people who say the opposite – that Christ’s divinity is what makes Christianity “unreal.”
But, my spirit informs me otherwise. Our faith is real, because the very person we recognize as essentially Divine is the same person who is essentially human.
Real because our humanity – our experience, our consciousness, our moral struggles, and most of all, our pain, these things are not excluded from the Divine nature.
Real because our savior may have had his heads in the clouds, but his sandals were worn thin on the dusty roads of Galilee. Jesus was both physical and spiritual. He led us toward God’s kingdom, but never straightened his back from the task of tilling the fertile soil of the human soul.
This messiness forms part of our answer to Christ’s question.
When we are asked: Who is Jesus?
We recognize the mystery of his double nature, and we affirm the Donkey – craziness of our part of the bargain – our humanness, and we thank Jesus for humbling himself enough to know us.
To physically be us.
“God among us”
Our kin.
Our flesh and blood.
**
John Quincy Adams was the first American president to be photographed, in 1843, long after he left office.
So we know what John Quincy Adams looked like.
But there are no photographs of Jesus.
Nearly 2 thousand separate Jesus from the earliest Daguerreotypes.
How, then, can we recognize him?
Well. one might say that there is a “type” that is recognizable as Jesus.
Jesus was a young man – he had the privilege of growing old.
He is usually depicted with a beard.
He is pretty healthy looking. Not too fat or too thin.
He often is depicted in flowing clothes but not the robes of a wealthy man.
He was not rich.
For some reason, I think he is also wearing sandals.
This is how we have been taught to think of Jesus. How he appears in everything from Medieval illuminated manuscripts to Sunday school coloring books.
It is the Jesus we see.
But how do we recognize Jesus?
That, I think, is another question entirely.
In a sense the fact that there were no cameras in Jerusalem in the first century is fortunate, because we, like all our ancestors before us, are free to depict Jesus in our terms.
His visage becomes an expression of our faces.
Hence, we see, presented on the cover of today’s bulletin, the earliest Roman Jesus (number 2 and 3), the Dual natured Christ of the Egyptian desert (4) the aforementioned Navajo Jesus (6), the black Jesus (7) the omnipresent American Jesus (8), the Ethiopian Jesus (9); the Italian Jesus, by Modigliani (10) The Dutch Jesus, by Rembrandt (11), the French Jesus, by Chagall (12), the anthropological reconstruction of a Middle-Eastern Jesus (13), the mod Jesus (14) and the Japanese Jesus, by Watanabe (16).
These, perhaps, are the Christ’s of the world – the Divine ideal expressed in the cultural language of time and place.
But none of these depictions can be separated from the narrative – the beautiful and tragic, undisguised reality of the story of Christ’s life.
Each depiction reveals a face that has an intense grasp of human existence – a clear recognition of beauty, and an undeniable knowledge of pain.
To take a person or thing and make it a Golden Calf – place it on a pedestal and call it “God” – this is the greatest danger – the biggest mistake that we can make as people of faith.
We must be ever vigilant against such idolatry. Time and again throughout human history, people who made the claim to be divine, have been responsible, not for our salvation, but for crimes against humanity.
We cannot call ourselves God.
But we can recognize Jesus.
Recognize Jesus in each other.
How do we recognize Jesus?
You may have your own answer to this question.
My answer is this:
We recognize Jesus in the faces of those who have suffered, and have not given up, but have transformed their suffering into compassion for others.
Always for others.
Amen.