Second Tuesday after Pentecost
St. Columba's Day. Color: White
Thanks to Joe, Jerry, and April for their comments. Keep them coming
In keeping with my blog last week on "Seeing Red," I am noting Saints Days, not all of them, but those that have some significance for me and I hope will for you. St. Columba (520-597) is most noted for bringing Christianity to Scotland from his native Ireland. Scotland was variously pagan with no Christian presence until this Irish monk came with twelve of his followers. He spread Christianity all over Scotland. He also founded the monastery on the western Scottish Isle of Iona. I am wearing my Iona t-shirt as I write this. Iona is a very sacred space, and could be called the center of Celtic Christianity. Christians from all over the world retreat there. Last year Bishop Hope Morgan Ward took all the District Superintendents of the North Carolina Conference there for a week long retreat. Marianne and I have made two brief visits there. The 9:00 pm service there on July 29, 2018 was one of the most moving services I have ever been to.
Tuesday is Review Day. Today it is an art review. I had two Art History courses in college. Though I am far from being an Art Historian, these two courses have brought me a lifetime of joy in art, taught me ways to discern the qualities of art, and showed me an enormous amount of art. Since that time Marianne and I have had the pleasure of going to many of the great art museums in America and Europe.
Today's review is not about great art but about one bad piece of art. It is one of America's most widely viewed works, with representations of it in a large majority of white churches in the United States. All of you have seen it, though few people know its painter, Warner Sallman (1892-1968). Sallman was an American from Chicago. He did take some night classes at the Chicago Art Institute. His best known work is his Head of Christ (1948). It portrays Christ as a bronze-skinned European American in appearance with long dark blond hair and a slightly darker beard. Both hair and beard are beautifully styled. He is wearing an off-white robe that goes perfectly with his hair and skin.
The problem is that the historical Jesus looked nothing like this. Although the Bible gives us no description of Jesus, we know that he was a first century Semitic Jew. We have enough pictures, though not an abundance, of turn of the era Palestinian Jews to have a good idea of their basic features. They had black curly hair. The men had black beards. They tended to have round faces, dark eyes, and broad noses. They normally wore black robes with black head scarves. Robes had fringes on the sleeves and at the hem. Headscarves had fringes. Many wore phylacteries, which were black head bands with a black box attached the the forehead. The box contained the Shema, the Jewish prayer from Deuteronomy 6:4.
For me, as for most white American Christians, Sallman's head of Christ is the picture of Christ we have in our minds when we think of Him. I have for many years tried to get this erroneous picture out of my mind. I have finally succeeded, though I have no single work of art that I base my picture on.
Sallman's Head of Christ does show us that we want Christ to look like us. I have scene hundred of Greek Orthodox icons and own a few. The Christ in them looks like a Greek, which at least puts him a little closer to what he really looked like. Likewise, Ethiopic Christian art, some of it very ancient, portrays Jesus as black.
When we portray Jesus to look like us, it leads us to believe that Jesus thought like us, acted like us, and fit our ideals of the American success story. Bruce Barton's 1920's best selling book, The Man Nobody Knows, portrayed Jesus as "The World's Greatest Business Executive" (Barton's exact words). The historical Jesus was born poor and died poor, never owned his own home, never married and had a family, and relied on the charity of women, like Peter's mother-in-law, Joanna wife of Herod's chief steward Chuza, and Susanna (Luke 8:3) for his financial support, and was eventually executed as a common criminal.
Perhaps we need to get to know Jesus better.
Faithfully,
Christian
1 comment:
I know this is weird (I'm the weird kid, for the record), but Jesus really came to me in the form of our golden retriever, Sunny, who went to be with God two days ago, on June 8. She was almost 16, ancient for a golden, and lived her entire life on a beautiful 44 acre Christmas tree farm. She was the dog of Jean, my mother's landlady and dear friend, who was the third generation owner of the farm and became ordained as a pastor in the United Church of Christ at the age of 65. A year and three months later, Jean was dead of aggressive rectal cancer, just four months after diagnosis.
Sunny was Jean's son's puppy when he was in high school. She was a farm dog who didn't understand the concept of a leash, a fierce lover of her family and anyone who came to the farm, an excellent salesdog of Christmas trees at the season until she got a little old and confused and tried to get into the customers' cars. She loved hiking with me all over the beautiful hills of trees here. I was the only one young enough to hike with her, and we would do hours and hours. She also loved to swim in the pond, and my mother and I spent a great deal of trying to turn her back into a golden retriever when she had gone for a swim in the algae covered pond and come back a green retriever.
Sunny, to me, was absolute love. She had no evil. She stood by her humans. She knew who was sick, who was sad, who was dying. She slept by my mother's side. She hiked with me when I was at one of the lowest points of my life, and she showed me that I could literally, not just metaphorically, climb straight up hills that most people wouldn't even dream of tackling.
She was with Jean until the end, and Jean entrusted my mother with the care of Sunny and Georgia Kitten (who is now three but will always be our kitten.) Mom will have to move out sometime soon, and for Sunny to have to leave her farm or my mom, who had become her human, would have been heartbreaking.
Sunny made her own choice of when to die. On her own terms. She went to sleep peacefully as kidney failure caused her body to shut down, peacefully in the garden at the vet's office, as my mom and I held and petted her and cried. There was no pain. We saw her run across the Rainbow Bridge to meet Jean, her grandfather Tom, and all the generations of farm dogs who came before her here.
Sunny was love. She still is love. She knows no blame, no anger, no revenge. She knows chicken thighs and turkey skins, and she knows ear scratchies and how to sit at the foot of the steps if someone upstairs is feeling sad or ill. She is God's love made flesh, even now that she's not flesh.
So to me, Jesus does not look like a man. Jesus is a golden retriever.
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