My Jesus Poster

In college, I lived with seven of my best friends in apartment Nu 8, “The Ocho.” Our living room was placarded with posters displaying our various passions: a Pulp Fiction scene with John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson pointing pistols at a hapless victim, an atomic mushroom cloud, the album art of favorite bands like Metallica’s “And Justice for All,” Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon,” and Green Day’s “American Idiot.” And then… there was my poster. Now twenty years later, I am certain that my contribution to our dorm decor was the most offensive image on our walls. It was a picture of a robed and sandaled man playing an electric guitar between the words, “Jesus Rocks!”                                             

I was eager to share my faith, and I thought a picture of Jesus was a great way to do that. But like the Jews of Paul’s day, I had a “zeal for God, but not according to knowledge” (Romans 10:2). I never stopped to consider how God felt about my poster, or the other images of Jesus I cherished. I never considered the Second Commandment: “You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them… (Exodus 20:4-5).

God used Calvin’s Institutes[1] to open my eyes to his law and my sin; an argument crystalized by the Westminster Divines who listed among the sins forbidden in this commandment, “the making of any representation of God, of all or of any of the three persons, either inwardly in our mind, or outwardly in any kind of image or likeness of any creature whatsoever…” (WLC 109). But one does not need to be a 5-point Calvinist, or a confessional Presbyterian to recognize two of the many ways images of Jesus subtly but surely rob him of the glory of his humiliation.

First, Jesus wasn’t comely.

In 2004, I embarked on a pilgrimage with many other earnest evangelicals to the local movie theater to watch, The Passion of the Christ. I wept my way through the scenes of torture and crucifixion. At the end, when the stone was rolled away, I cheered with the rest of the audience. The film felt like a big win for Christianity. Even the Pope canonized it, saying of Gibson’s movie, “It is as it was.” But the Pope was wrong.

What little we know of Jesus’ appearance comes by way of three prophetic allusions in Isaiah. We know that the Servant had a beard that was plucked (50:6) and that his suffering would leave him “marred, beyond human semblance” (Isaiah 52:14). Isaiah also saw that, “he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him” (Isaiah 53:2). That is no throw away detail.

The Bible is filled with pretty people (some, pretty enough to get into trouble!). Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, Bathsheba, Abigail, Tamar, and Esther were all head turners. Joseph was “handsome in form and appearance” (Genesis 39:6). Saul was the most handsome man in Israel (1 Samuel 9:2). David “was ruddy and had beautiful eyes and was handsome” (1 Samuel 16:12). Much of Solomon’s Song is dedicated to describing his own good looks! But not Jesus. He didn’t look like a man people would naturally love and follow. Jesus wasn’t handsome. And that matters.

To my knowledge, Jesus is the only person in the Bible described in this way: “no form or majesty… no beauty” (Isaiah 53:2). But very film, painting, storybook bible, stained glass mosaic, statue, and crucifix I have ever seen depicts a handsome man. The real Jesus would never be cast to play himself in his own movie or model for his own portrait! When Mel Gibson cast Jim Caviezel, one of People’s “Sexiest Men Alive” in 2004, to play Jesus, he wasn’t just taking artistic liberty, he was unintentionally distorting the gospel. Jesus’ unattractiveness is an important, even endearing aspect of his humiliation. He didn’t just become man, he became an uncomely man, that those who behold the beauty of his holiness could only see it, then as now, by faith.                                                             

Second, Jesus wasn’t clothed.                                           

Corrie ten Boom was a Dutch Christian who, with her family, harbored Jews on the run from Hitler’s Gestapo. For their courageous love, the ten Booms, “were mistreated with the people of God” (Hebrews 11:25) and condemned to concentration camps. Among the miseries Corrie and her sister, Betsie, experienced in Ravensbrück, was a medical examination each Friday in which they were forced to stand naked before an ogling troop of guards as they were poked and prodded. She wrote,

“But it was one of these mornings while we were waiting, shivering, in the corridor, that yet another page in the Bible leapt into life for me. He hung naked on the cross. I had not known- I had not thought… The paintings, the carved crucifixes showed at the least a scrap of cloth. But this, I suddenly knew, was the respect and reverence of the artist. But oh- at the time itself, on that other Friday morning- there had been no reverence. No more than I saw in the faces around us now. I leaned toward Betsie, ahead of me in line. Her shoulder blades stood out sharp and thin beneath her blue-mottled skin. ‘Betsie, they took His clothes, too.’ Ahead of me I heard a little gasp. ‘Oh Corrie. And I never thanked Him…’”

In fulfillment of the messianic promise of Psalm 22:18, “when they had crucified him, they divided his garments among them by casting lots” (Matthew 27:35). This heartbreaking detail is bursting with theological significance. As the covering of nakedness is a sign of God’s covenant love (Ezekiel 16:8), the uncovering of nakedness is a symbol of sin’s shame and a sign of God’s judgement. To faithfulness Israel, God said, “I will gather [your enemies] against you from every side and will uncover your nakedness to them, that they may see all your nakedness” (Ezekiel 16:37).             

Jesus died, naked and alone, on the cross so that you and I would know that he died not only to remove the guilt of my sins, but also to remove the shame of my sin, that feeling of uncleanness which robs us of the joy of our salvation and causes us to run and hide from God instead of running to him to “receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Hebrews 4:16).

Like Betsie, I had never thanked Jesus for these two precious details because my understanding of the gospel had been partially clouded through images. I realized that images of Jesus aren’t just biblically inaccurate. Though they may be well-intended, they perpetuate lies, deceive believers, and subtly but surely rob Jesus of the glory of his humiliation. Christian, images of Jesus should grieve and offend you not only because they grieve and offend God, but because they minimize what Jesus endured to save you from your sins. May we be content to look upon Christ as he reveals himself to us via his chosen medium: not film, painting, sculpture, sketch or glass, but the pages of sacred scripture.  

Jim McCarthy is the Senior Pastor of Trinity PCA in Statesboro, GA.