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- Isaiah
53:2-3 (NRSV)
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- "He has a face..."
Whoever he was or was not, whoever he thought he was,
whoever he has become in the memories of men since and will go on becoming for as long as
men remember him –exalted, sentimentalized, debunked, made and remade to the measure
of each generation’s desire, dread, indifference – he was a man once, whatever
else he may have been. And he had a man’s face, a human face. So suppose, as the old
game goes, that we could return in time and see it for ourselves, see the face of Jesus as
it actually was two thousand years of faces back. Ecce homo, Pilate said – Behold
the man – yet whatever our religion or lack of it, we tend to shrink from
beholding him and play our game instead with Shakespeare’s face or Helen of Troy’s
because with them the chances are we could survive almost any thing- Shakespeare’s
simper, say, or a cast in Helen’s eye. But with Jesus the risk is too great; the risk
that his face would be too much for us if not enough, either a face like any other face to
see, pass by, forget, or a face so unlike any other that we would have no choice but to
remember it always and follow or flee it to the end of our days and beyond. Like you and
me he has a face his life gave shape to and that shaped his life and others’ lives,
and with part of ourselves I think we might turn away from the mystery of that face, that
life, as much of the time we turn away from the mystery of life itself. With part of
ourselves I think we might avoid meeting his real eyes, if such a meeting were possible,
the way that at certain moments we avoid meeting our own real eyes in mirrors because for
better or worse they threaten to tell us more than we want to know…
-The
Faces of Jesus by Frederick Buechner |
