If God had a face …
Sometime around 1993 (I remember it was my first year of high school), the singer Joan Osborne had a hit song “One of Us.” At one point in the song, Osborne sang
If god had a face,
What would it look like,
And would you want to see,
If seeing meant that you would have to
Believe in things like heaven, and in Jesus and saints,
And all the prophets.
If I remember correctly, the song was an especially big hit among young Evangelicals, although their interest in Osborne was short lived after it became clear that Osborne was not particularly interested in Christianity. As a top 40 hit in the days before Spotify and iTunes and Napster, the song was catchy enough. (I’d take the Fleet Foxes or Wilco over Joan Osborne any day.) I don’t know what happened to Osborne’s career after that.
Of course, Christianity makes the startling – and, to some, blasphemous — claim that God does have a face. But Osborn’s question remains: what did this face look like? A show currently up at the Philadelphia Museum of Art presents one artist’s answer.
Rembrandt van Rijn (1606 – 1669) was born in Leiden in the Netherlands and in 1631 he moved to Amsterdam. In 1639 he moved again in Amsterdam, this time to Vlooienburg neighborhood, which was home to Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jewish communities. This move was to have profound implications for understanding what God’s face looked like and how Christians understand Christ. As the exhibition points out, artists before Rembrandt tended to depict Christ based on three sources: the Mandylion, the image that according to Syriac legend Jesus sent to King Abgar; the Veil of Veronica; and the apocryphal Lentulus letter. Rembrandt broke with this tradition, but did so in a way that was arguably more traditional.
Unlike those artists before him, Rembrandt used a live model for his portraits of Christ. And the live model he used was Jewish. Jesus, son of David, son of Abraham, was a Jew. Rembrandt looked to his neighbors who were also sons of David and sons of Abraham to imagine Jesus’ face. Jesus’ Jewishness comes through in two distinct ways. The exhibition has a series of small paintings – all eight inches by eleven inches – of what Rembrandt calls “Heads of Christ,” which he painted between 1648 and 1649. Each represents Jesus’ face turned slightly. Christ has a brown beard, brown hair almost to his shoulders, and piercing brown eyes. Rembrandt achieves dramatic effect with the way he casts light on Christ’s face. The illumination focuses the viewer’s attention on Christ’s gaze. This gaze allows us to imagine Christ’s emotions. Some paintings seem to represent sadness, others joy or concern. According to the audio guide, these faces represent “a Jesus who loves.” All the paintings show a deep humanity, and all bear a striking resemblance to Rembrandt’s “Portrait of a Young Jew” from 1648.
To be human is to participate in a cultural context, and we see another aspect of Jesus’ Jewishness in the “Supper at Emmaus” of 1648. The painting depicts the central moment in the story (found in Luke 24:30) when Jesus blesses the bread he is eating with his disciples, breaks it, and gives it to them. The next verse reads: “And with that their eyes were opened and they recognized him, but he vanished from their sight.” One disciple has his hands folded in prayer, and the other stares intently at Christ’s face. The waiter, who has presumably never heard of Jesus, goes about serving. The bread Jesus breaks is challah. For Rembrandt, Jesus and his disciples must have been eating Jewish bread. (There is a small print in a book in the exhibition that shows the disciples just after Jesus has disappeared. Most unfortunately the original Rembrandt painting has been lost.)
I wish the exhibition had explained a bit more about Rembrandt’s cultural, artistic, and theological context. It made a bit too much about how Rembrandt broke from the Byzantine icon tradition, and in so doing set up a too neat distinction between the “godly icon” and the “human Jesus” that Rembrandt paints. (We see plenty of humanity in paintings of Christ before Rembrandt.) Yet these are minor quibbles. If you needed yet another reason to visit Philadelphia, you should come to see this exhibition. It is open through October 30. In seeing it, you’ll see what Rembrandt believed to be God’s face. As I left, pondering Jesus modeled on a Jewish man who lived in Holland in the middle of the seventeenth century, I couldn’t help but think of the last line of Herbert McCabe’s famous sermon on the genealogy of Christ. “He belonged to us, and came to help us, no wonder he came to a bad end, and give us some hope.”
The Muslims aren’t even allowed to depict Muhammad’s face. He is pictured with a green veil over his face, green being the color reserved for depictions of him.
I suppose that has its advantages — people can supply whatever image they have of him. But I wonder if they are even supposed to imagine what he looked like. In some ways Islam seems a a highly impersonal religion to me, and this is one of them.
Catholic art must be blasphemous to them.
The Forward, while generally positive about the exhibit (a “must-see”) considers some of the catalogue’s claims about Rembrandt’s introduction of Jewish elements into his paintings to be overblown. The idea that the painting depicts challah was debunked a while back, for instance. http://forward.com/articles/142039/
Are there any historically reliable descriptions of Jesus?
Hmm. I just submitted a comment with several links to articles on the internet on the subject of the various depictions of Jesus in art – and it disappeared as soon as I clicked “submit”. I’ll bet the software used here checks to see how large a proportion of a post is just URLs’ and discards the post if the ratio’s too high. Will try again, this time with dummy text to, hopefully, get around that.
It’s an interesting subject – to whom have people prayed over the centuries?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_appearance_of_Jesus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depiction_of_Jesus
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/forensics/1282186
http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Christianity/2000/05/Images-Of-Jesus-Through-Two-Millennia.aspx
http://picturesofjesus4you.com/
Last one – a little document from Seton Hall for teachers:
http://tltc.shu.edu/vml/tools/JesusDepictedArt.doc
As long as we’re playing bombardo with links, I know of no better picture of God than this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lange-MigrantMother02.jpg
In an old episode of St. Elsewhere (a hospitall) one of the residents (the one played by Howie Mandel) is in an accident which causes a coma. The story then shifts to Howie’s experience in the coma.
It’s a near death experience in which he finds himself in a lovely setting — on a large lawn with lovely people around him and a mansion up on the hill. He is told that is where God lives. Curious, he wants to find out what God looks like, and he is accompanied into the mansion. He’s told that that is God over there by the window. He looks and sees someone who looks exactly like himself.
It’s evidently both fashionable and fun to define God down. I suppose the trick would be a lot more popular if God hadn’t already been defined down to irrelevance. I’d think the thing now would be to try to raise the level of the definition. Where’s Rembrandt when you need him?
David –
The point of the story was not to define God down. It was to emphasize that God’s children are images of Him. God is infinite and indefinable. The main point of the Book of Job is that we mere mortals can never comprehend His immensity and His ways. Yes, we can know that we are like Him. But Aquinas even goes so far as to say that though we are like Him, He is not like us.
I wasn’t referring to the story, Ann.
Is not Jesus the face of God? In the Old Testament there were no images of God. In the New Testament there is only one: Jesus. Any image (not metaphor – but image) of God that is not Jesus is an idol. Moses was not allowed to see the face of God but we have. I know nothing about God except the Son in whom He has been revealed. The Son does perfectly the Father’s will and can only be known through the Spirit. I know God only as He has revealed Himself in this world. In the Old Testament the Jews had the law but that was a negative revelation of God. God revealed himself through “Thou shall nots.” But Christ is the positive and full revelation of God. Here we are not just told what not to do but we are given a person to follow. The essence of Christianity is not uniting our spirit with some spirit in the sky but following the person of Jesus Christ. This person comes to us daily at mass in the Eucharist. It is God in flesh whom we know and whom we worship. We cannot ask to see the Father, Jesus says. Jesus answered: “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?” (NIV) It is enough that we have seen the Son. I don’t think mysticism/certain monastic meditations are compatible with Christianity.
I think the question ” to whom have people prayed over the centuries?” is a mistake. When we pray to Him, when we receive Him “under our roof” as bread and wine, it is the eternal Word. When He was a baby and a boy and a grownup in tha Holy Land, He was subject to the genetic and cultural limitations of his genome and of the place and time. None of those limitations exist now in his eternal glory. Maybe that is why no reliable graphic image of Him was permitted to exist.
Artists may attempt to present us with a face of Him as his contemporaries of two thousand year ago saw him. The result will reflect the artist’s ideas, limited by his/her own limitations. The artist may try to present us with a picture of a “perfect” human. The problem is, there are no examples of perfect humans around.
I am a very old man, and have been regularly shocked by the kitchiness or downright pathological character of the available images (my blog “religiousmatters.blogspot.com” tries to say more). Rembrandt is neither kitschy nor pathological; but his Christ is Rembrandt’s idea of Christ, not He.
The point has been made before, I forget by whom, that no one image of Jesus could possibly convey all of His humanity. Much less His divinity. But each image can tell us something — as Rembrandt’s certainly do.
My favorite image of Him is a stone head of Jesus in a churchyard in Mexico. Beautiful as no other image of Him is that I’ve ever seen. At least to me it was. Such reactions are of course subjective, but that doesn’t make them less valuable to us as individuals.
Ann, do you have a link?
Jean –
Sorry, I don’t. I just saw the sculpture when on tour outside of Mexico City many years ago. I tried Googling for it under MExican religious sculpture, and other stuff like thatt, but no luck. It seems to me I have seen pictures of it since, but I don’t remember where.
I love contemporary Mexican art, especially the religious kind. Oh, the creativity and insight of the Mexican people!! They make art out of trash. Years ago my brother got a couple of amazing crucifixes there made out of sticks and straw. The corpus is woven out of straw and attached to the crossed sticks. Amazingly expressive of the humility and suffering of the abandoned ones.
I kept looking for a picture of it, didn’t find one, but here in Wikipedia’s article about Mexican baby Jesus figures is a most suprising image — of the boy Jesus as a Futbolista, i.e., a soccer player. Scroll down to the end of the article to the picture of a boy in soccer uniform seated on a mini-throne.
“In Tacuba, there is on image called the Niño Futbolista (Child Football/Soccer player) although its real name is “Santo Niño de los Milagros.” It is considered to be generous in granting miracles and is in a glass case surrounded by toys given by the faithful to favors received. Every four years, when the FIFA World Cup is played, this image is dressed in the uniform of the Mexico national football team, in the hopes that Mexico wins the cup.[13)”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niño_Dios_of_Mexico
I really shouldn’t think this is too strange. My hometown football team is called “the Saints”.
Ann, that page also has a photo of El Nino de los Suertes, which I have always liked despite the associations with Santa Muerte. I like the milagros nailed behind the Nino. I bought a bunch of these and nail them to a wooden cross with prayer intentions. There’s something satisfying about hammering one’s prayers home …
Sorry, off topic.
Jean,
What does “Suertes” mean? Checked my dictionary and it says “chance” or “fate”. And what are these “miracles” hat you nail to the cross?
Milagros are small little metal shapes, like what you’d see on a charm bracelet, only flat, often body parts, animals, hearts, crosses, pilgrims. They’re usually made of tin.
You pin them up on a plaque or cross or in a niche you have for a saint. They represent your intentions. For instance, I might nail up a heart for a friend who has heart trouble, or someone who is grieving (heartsick), or someone who want to find a good husband.
You can also pin them up to represent a prayer answered as an act of thanksgiving.
Let me know if you want me to add one for you!
“Suertes” is often translated “luck” or “good fortune.” Maybe colloquially it could mean “blessings.”
Jean,
What a fine sort of prayer :-) Indeed, I’d appreciate it very much if you’d pin one up for me. Thank you.
I”ve often thought that it would be fine to have a sort of praying places in our houses. My ancestors, the women anyway, used prie dieus — the little sort of kneeling benches which they kept in their bedrooms and which were placed before crucifixes which were pinned to the wall. But that always seemed too limited to me. Sort of restricted to penance and the Cross. There is more to Christian belief than that, so there should be more to personal piety than prie dieus and Crosses, I should think.
When I was about 7, probably abut the time my Catholic friends were going through First Communion, I made a prie dieu out of a kitchen step stool. I put my mother’s best bathroom towels on it and my Bible story book and pictures of my cats and things. This lasted about a week until my mother missed the stool and gave me hell for taking her towels.
I have a milagro in the shape of a plant I will put on there for you because you like gardening, and because you also like to plant seeds of thoughts on this here blog!
Awww. Get Raber to make you another one.
Thanks so much for the milagro cum prayer :-) I will remember you in mine.