A Ramble About the Face of Christ

I first saw Mel Gibson's “The Passion of the Christ” not long after it first came out in 2004. Like many, I went with my wife and other members of a church we were attending at the time. Also, like many, I left the theater profoundly impacted and so traumatized that I couldn't remember details from large parts of the movie. I intentionally saw it several more times because these were details I didn't feel I could afford to forget.

I remember most strongly the face of the actor playing Jesus. As I understand it, he is a man of Jewish descent named James Caviezel (I hope I spelled that right). In those scenes during the movie where it flashes back to Jesus teaching His disciples I felt increasingly like, not only was I looking at the actual face of Christ, but that He was speaking directly to me. I have seen many dramatizations of the life of Christ, and I don't recall ever having that experience with any of them. But there was something about this face that stirred something within me to respond with nothing less than “Yes, my Lord” both involuntarily and also completely of my own conscious free will.

Recently, I came across two other sources for the face of Christ. The first is a painting done by a six year old girl from Lithuania in the year two thousand after she had a near death experience. She professed to have gone to heaven and seen Jesus. When she woke up again, the memory of His face was impressed so strongly on her that she painted it later on. What is interesting about this particular image of Him is that the appearance of Christ was corroborated by another little boy several years later, a three or four year old kid (featured in the book Heaven is for Real) who had also had a near death experience and professed to have seen Jesus during the three seconds he was dead. His father, by way of wanting to learn more kept showing the boy pictures of Jesus which had been done over the years, and the boy kept saying that there was something not quite right about any of them. Then he showed the boy the painting the girl had done and asked him, “what's wrong with this one?” The boy responded, “Nothing, dad. That's Him.” Once again, there was something about this picture which stirred something within me. It now sits as a widget on my laptop's desktop, where I cannot escape His eyes looking at me through it.

The second source is a relatively recent documentary from the History Channel entitled “The Real Face of Jesus from the Shroud of Turin.” This is a fascinating piece of work done which sought to recreate a realistic three dimensional image of the man whose image is imbedded in the Shroud. Along the way they demonstrate that the image, and all of its unique properties, could only have been made by radiant light emanating from the body onto the shroud in a manner similar to a desktop scanner or photocopier. Something which was of course impossible at any point in history for a human being to achieve, and even impossible to fully describe in terms of mechanism until the late twentieth century. They were able to successfully, graphically, and realistically recreate a detailed image of the Man who had been wrapped in the Shroud, who by the wounds alone could only be identified as Jesus Christ. They were even able to make a three dimensional mold and cast from that mold of His face due to those unique properties of the information encoded within the burial shroud. Once again, seeing the image they came up with there was that same stirring. That same almost instinctive urge to drop to one knee and deeply bow in reverence. I was in fact encouraged also by the way it had a seemingly profound effect on the people who did the recreation.

I'm not sure how to describe the feeling I felt when I compared these images side by side. They were virtually identical. From the actor's face to the image from the Shroud to the painting. If I hadn't known that the painting had been done years before the movie, I would have said the girl used the actor for the model. But neither would explain the image recreated from the Shroud of Turin, as the team working on it explicitly used the information from the Shroud itself apart from any other source. Three separate witnesses testifying to the same face. And then there's my own internal reaction to that face. One of profound reverence, love, respect, and devotion unconscious and uncalled for yet bursting to the surface. No matter how many times I see that same face, that same image, I experience the same internal response pulling me back from whatever else I had been thinking about or doing. I see it every time I open my laptop, and yet I can't tune it out or become desensitized to it.

Those who are baptized into Jesus Christ are joined to Him. I have to wonder if part of that is some kind of unconscious recognition of Him and what He looks like, even though we've never physically seen Him before in the flesh. We automatically recognize His face and respond accordingly as though it is the closest person to our heart that we are seeing. The One whose opinion matters most to us.

This would explain the unusual response which Gibson's Passion garnered when it was released in theaters. You can not be ambivalent about this movie. One person, after having seen it in the theater immediately turned himself in to the police for a murder he had gotten away with years before. When I saw it, so many tears came to my eyes that I think my tear ducts were completely spent by the end of it. My wife will not watch it again because of the effect it had upon her. Since then, I have used it when doing any kind of discipleship teaching as a litmus test for the sincerity of a person's conversion to Him. I have become convinced that no one truly joined to Him can respond in any other way than as one watching a close family member being tortured. I also make it a point to watch it at least once a year, and possibly more, to keep the details of it fresh in my mind, especially when celebrating the Mass with my family.

Others may argue with my conclusion on this matter. Maybe that is for them and Him to work out privately, or maybe I am just strange, and my experiences are unique to myself alone. But I do think that there is evidence, real evidence of an undeniable connection to Him that goes beyond mere intellectual knowledge and strikes deep within the psyche of those truly joined to Him.

This is the kind of evidence that many who profess to be Christian without the fruit to demonstrate it try their hardest to discredit, suppress, and bury. When someone begins to truly experience it or to at least see it experienced in or by others, they seek to explain it away or give them a nice pat on the head. Thus we have theologies which tell us that there are no more miracles, no more demonstrations of the powers which the ancient Church possessed. Stories about the wonders which were worked through historical Saints are laughed at and ridiculed by Christians because their theologies and pastors tell them they are ridiculous.

One case in point are the relics of St. Nicholas of Myra which, since he died and to this day, have produced a rose scented oil. This particular wonder has been documented for the past sixteen or seventeen hundred years since he died. It has been tested repeatedly by the clergy of the Church trying to expose it as a fraud and unable to for centuries. Yet when this is told to Christians who are not Catholic, and some who are, their immediate response is disbelief and ridicule.

Why are such demonstrations of the super nature of the relationship of Jesus Christ to His Saints (both big and little “s”) so frightening? Precisely because they are the marks that one does have that relationship with Him and is close to Him, and those who do not see them in their own lives are frightened that something is wrong with their own relationship to Him in contradiction to all the comforting reassurances they've been given by their respective churches or pastors. And what they're not being told by those self-same churches are that these kinds of Grace energized powers and wonders are the re-birthright of every brother and sister of Jesus Christ, those who hear the Word of God and obey Him. Instead they're told that either they no longer exist, they're only for those “special few”, or they're fed counterfeits through either Hollywood style special effects or outright demonic deception. And what these folks who seek so desperately to cover up and hide the Truth don't understand and don't want to understand is that the longer you remain in Christ, as He commanded and taught (John 15), the more these things will become visible in your life just like they did in the lives of the ancient Saints. And they don't want to acknowledge the truth of this because it shines a majorly uncomfortable spotlight on their own fruit or lack thereof. Like the agents and “asleep people” of the Matrix, they are fighting to protect the system which they know and understand and which holds them in thrall.

It is true that not all will be healers, and not all will work wonders. St. Paul said as much. But wonders will follow His family just as they followed Him because His family is marked by His Grace. The person joined to Jesus Christ and close to Him will be marked by the presence of Jesus Christ in some way as a signpost pointing to Him.

It is time we as the Church stopped hiding from the truth evident by the fruit we produce. We need to stop trying to explain this evidence, or lack thereof, as though it was something normal and appropriate and face the reality which it tells us about.

I know deep within that the sight of His face terrifies, inspires, and encourages me; and whatever else my relationship is with Him, it is real as I wrestle with my own failures and confess them to Him thinking of the judgment seat I, like everyone else, must stand before (as the Church has taught since the beginning, folks). I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is the face I will see and not dare to meet His gaze one way or the other. I see the wonders and miracles of His provision, and demonstrations of His power in large and small ways even when I am stuck in the darkness of my own fears. Especially when I celebrate the Mass and my wife is able to take it without a seizure or even feeling ill from it. All of these things speak to me of my relationship with Him regardless of my own lack of holiness or righteousness or any of those other nice theological words pastors love so much they don't even try to find modern equivalents for. (As a Greek student and translator, this is a pet peeve of mine; get out of the nineteenth century people! But I digress...)

Stop trying to come up with excuses as to why the miraculous can't be. Why the supernatural isn't. Or why the superficial is somehow rich in its depth of meaning. Stop trying to explain away your own lack of evidence by saying that it's somehow normal. It's not. A genuine Christian life looks, sounds, and acts like Jesus Christ and His Saints. There should be at least traces of this in your own life as you undergo the transformation process however fast or slow, if there isn't then something is wrong and you need to come to terms with it and admit it.

Those who follow Jesus Christ shouldn't be afraid of the unexplainable, the miraculous, or Mystery. These should be as natural to us as breathing the farther along we are brought in our transformation into what He is by Grace through faith in Jesus Christ. He said as much. If we profess to believe in Him, then we must start by actually believing what He said.

A Ramble About Extremes

The “middle path” is a foundational concept of Buddhism. It comes from an epiphany which Gautama Siddharta had after having first as a youth experienced unrestricted wealth and hedonism, and then later as an Indian ascetic years of intense, extreme fasting and denial of the body. As he was fasting and near the point of death, and coming no closer to the enlightenment he was seeking, he heard a man instructing someone on the use of a sitar, a one stringed guitar-like instrument. The man said, “If you wind the string too tight it will snap, and if it is too loose, it will not play.” From this came Siddharta's foundational revelation of the middle path, the point which lies between all opposite extremes, as leading to enlightenment.

Unbeknownst to many, the middle path is not just a Buddhist concept, but it is a very Christian one as well. Proverbs 30:8-9 (ESV) says:

Remove far from me falsehood and lying;
give me neither poverty nor riches;
feed me with the food that is needful for me,
lest I be full and deny you
and say, “Who is the LORD?”
or lest I be poor and steal
and profane the name of my God.

I've been contemplating these things since we returned from Arkansas to Southern California. My family and I have spent the last five years living in isolated rural areas in Tennessee, Idaho, and Arkansas here in the United States (Yes, we lived in Arizona for a few months too). Most of that time, we've been living in what most people would consider poverty, even extreme poverty, but over those years we adjusted to each new challenge and it just became the way life was as we learned to give up the things we didn't actually need. Depending on who reads this, you might be surprised about what you don't actually need and what are luxuries. Things like running hot water, constant electricity, flushing toilets that run into a sewer system all became luxuries that we learned to do without and to live more or less happy regardless.

Now, my family and I are having to adjust back to “civilization.” To say the least, we are in culture shock and are feeling overwhelmed. For me, it is actually very strange to have constant, regular internet access again. Or to be around so many other people, or cars, or going from a few choices of food at a grocery store to thousands of choices at the grocery store. And the pace of life in SoCal is much, much faster than where we've been living. I feel like I haven't been able to just stop and breathe since we got here two days ago (after spending two days in transit on Greyhound buses). I grew up here and yet it now feels foreign and strange.

The thing about the middle path is that, in order to avoid all opposite extremes, you have to be aware of what those extremes are and where the boundaries lie. Is a poor man who doesn't realize he's poor by other people's standards really poor? Is a wealthy man who believes he's in poverty because he doesn't possess as much as his neighbor really wealthy?

One of the problems with most Americans and Westerners is that we as a civilization are so wealthy we don't know what are really necessities and what are luxuries, or what are basic needs and what are mere conveniences. Food is a basic need, but heat and serve meals, fast food and pizza are not. Clothing is a basic need, but binging at Macy's or two closets full of nothing to wear is not. It is hard to really understand what the middle way is when you think luxuries are basic needs or when you believe basic needs are luxuries.

So is the middle way then relative? No, not necessarily. St. Paul writes in 1 Timothy 6:6-8 (ESV):

“Now there is great gain in godliness with contentment, for we brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world. But if we have food and clothing, with these we will be content.”

As I was contemplating all the changes which have happened to us in the last week, the thought struck me that the key to the middle way is being satisfied with what you already have access to, whether or not you can claim ownership of it. If you should lose that access, just let it go. If you should gain access to more than you previously did, only use what is offered and do not desire more.

St. Paul also writes in Philippians 4:11-13 (ESV):

“Not that I am speaking of being in need, for I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me.”

Finding the point between all opposite extremes for the follower of Jesus Christ means being satisfied with what you already have access to in any given moment, no matter how much or how little, by Grace through faith in Jesus Christ. It means seeking neither more nor less than what God gives you to work with at the time. If you have nothing but the clothes on your back, then this is what you need at that moment. If you have been entrusted with millions of dollars, then God has determined this is what you need to accomplish His purposes in that moment (and be warned, the money is His and not yours to do with as you please).

Be neither attached to wealth nor averse to it. Be neither attached to extreme poverty nor averse to it. Both conditions are useful to God in our personal, individual processes of deification (and often extreme poverty is extremely useful to Him for our instruction). Ultimately, neither condition will be permanent in our lives as God uses both to transform us by His energies through faith in Jesus Christ into what He is.