On this day, Good Friday, when we remember and reflect upon the death of Jesus on the Cross, I am going to imagine that I am standing near the Cross and gazing in sorrow at the body nailed upon it. A body that is close to death. It is the body of a man who has been severely flogged and whose head is bleeding from the Crown of Thorns placed upon it. This tells me all I need to know about the acute suffering of Jesus on the Cross, a suffering that was given to us by God, through his son Jesus, to save us from the power of sin and offer us the promise of eternal life in his Kingdom.
While I stand by the Cross, I have a longing to see the face of Jesus which I cannot see because his head is drooped as life ebbs away from his body. Such a vision would, I believe, give me a glimpse of the divine.
Emerging from this act of my imagination, I have studied texts written by a PhD student and authors of commentaries which affirm that we cannot in any event say for certain what Jesus looked like, either in face or body. The PhD thesis attempts to explain this absence in a variety of ways and I will mention a few.
One explanation is that Jesus is a boundless character for whom a physical description would not be apropos to his characterisation. Another is that physical descriptions in Jewish scripture are rare. This in contrast to the description given by ancient biographers of the physical appearance of kings, slaves and philosophers in the Graeco-Roman world. The author of the thesis writes that Jesus can be described as a king or a slave but not physically described as such because his kingdom was not of this world, and he is only a slave in the sense of being a slave on the Cross. He shares with philosophers a description of the simple attire that they wore but the ancient biographers were less concerned with the physiognomy of philosophers as the emphasis with them was upon their souls. Nor was the image of Jesus well known in iconographical representations as the evangelists lacked the motivation and capacity to manipulate the distinction of Jesus’ ‘public’ appearance and reality which was one of the main functions of kingly descriptions in ancient literature and, as the thesis gives it to us, a ‘kingly’ appearance might not have been able to convey the kingship of Jesus which was not of this world.
Can we then have any indication of what Jesus looked like? We could make our starting point using the statement made by Pontius Pilate to the crowds when he presented Jesus, scoured and crowned with thorns. He said ‘Ecce Homo’ meaning ‘behold the man’. This is a start, but it does not give us any indication of what Jesus looked like beyond the fact that he was a man. We do have a description of Jesus in Isaiah chapter 52 as having a ‘marred appearance’ beyond that of human semblance and his form beyond that of mortals’. This dramatic description is given for Jesus as ‘the suffering servant’ and was popular amongst the Early Church Fathers but to my mind it sits at odds with the presentation of Jesus to the crowds by Pontius Pilate. How could a ‘form beyond that of mortals’ be presented as ‘the man’. It also sits at odds with the fact that Jesus went unnoticed to the Festival of Booths, as given in the Gospel of John. How could he have done this if his appearance was out of the ordinary? The implication here is that Jesus was average looking and I favour that conclusion as I find it hard to believe that the disciples and the people Jesus encountered in his ministry would have done so if his appearance was beyond that of human semblance.
What I do believe is that in an ordinary looking man we are given a glimpse of the divine in his appearance at certain moments in the Bible. One such is the Transfiguration when the face of Jesus ‘shone like the son and his clothes became dazzling white’. In Revelation, Jesus is described as ‘the Son of Man, whose head and hair were white as white wool, white as the snow; his eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined as in a furnace’. It was this divinity that enabled him to perform miracles and to rise from the dead.
We may not have a description of what Jesus looked like, but we could say that the silence about his appearance is there to give us a full understanding of who he was and how we can perceive ourselves in relation to him and to God. My view is that, as given in the opening sentence of John’s Gospel, ‘in the beginning was the Word’. The Word was with God and the Word was God’. In Jesus, as the Son of God, the Word became flesh. It became flesh but the Word came first. The flesh signifies because it was crucified on the Cross but as the Word came first so the Gospel writers draw our attention to the words of Jesus, and his actions, rather than his appearance. We need primarily to hear his words. For example when says: ‘I am the way, the truth and the life’. This statement reflects his boundless character. Also, we, as Christians, need to see ourselves, as St Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans, not walking according to the flesh but according to the spirit.
Let me finish by returning to the realm of my imagination to hear the words of Jesus saying ‘it is finished’ and watch his body being taken down from the Cross in the sure knowledge that his death is not a defeat but a triumph over the power of death and a prelude to the glory of the Resurrection.
AMEN