“Between the Shock and the Schlock”
It is 1,233 miles from Heart of the Rockies Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Fort Collins, CO, to 3085 Montavesta Road in Lexington, KY. Jennie and I drove every one of them last week. Innumerable snide comments have been made about driving through Kansas (424 miles from Kanorado to Kansas City). I’ll not rehearse them other than to say that what stands out from my most recent trek across the Sunflower State (of which I saw none) is Jesus. Let me explain.
As we rolled across western Kansas last Sunday, cruise control set at 75+, nothing but a long, straight ribbon of highway stretching before us to the horizon, I saw Jesus. Numerous times. He appeared on several modestly proportioned billboards at the edge of the highway above a caption that read Jesus, I trust you.
I have no qualms with the message. I’m all for trusting in Jesus. My beef is with the image that accompanied the caption. Silky brown hair. Tanned complexion. Well-manicured beard and mustache. Shimmering gold gown with rays of red, white, and blue emanating from his chest. A pink lesion with a maroon center on the left hand – a scar from the cross. Airbrushed. Standing on a cotton ball cloud.
You who know me know I’m not one to demean others’ faith. One of my favorite psalms warns against “sitting in the seat of scoffers” (Ps 1:1). Since returning to Lexington, I have learned that the image and phrase are central expressions of faith found in the Divine Mercy Chaplet, a Roman Catholic devotional practice rooted in visions of Jesus given to St. Faustina Kowalska (1905-1938), known as “The Apostle of Mercy.” I’m all for mercy, too, and I have great respect for Catholic spirituality. Kansas born Franciscan Richard Rohr enriches my soul beyond measure. It's just that I saw that rendering of Jesus a dozen times on the highway and when Jennie and I stopped for gas at a truck stop in WaKeeney, I walked into the men’s room and there, perched atop the urinal as if on a tripod, was a wallet-sized card featuring the technicolor Jesus in his airbrushed glory. Sheesh.
I hope Jesus doesn’t look like that. There are no descriptions in the Bible of what Jesus looked like. None. Zero. That’s a good thing, I think. Inspired by God. I file “no description of Jesus’ looks” in the gospels alongside “no graven images” in the Ten Commandments. Why? Because if you give human beings half a chance, we’ll create God in our image, make God just like us only bigger (brown-eyed, brunette, tanned, red, white and blue), to the exclusion of others not like us and therefore smaller (in our eyes and God’s). Hence my objection to the I-70 Jesus. The Yiddish word is schlock.
I suspect my sensitivity to the way Jesus was rendered by the Kansas signs was triggered by a similar negative reaction I had to some Colorado shirts two days earlier. The Friday night of our last weekend in Fort Collins, Jennie and I went out to eat. As we were leaving, a couple walked past us wearing identical black T-shirts with large white stenciled letters that read LIONS NOT SHEEP. The back featured a red, white, and blue roaring lion and the number 1776. Hmm.
The first thing that came to my mind with the shirts’ juxtaposition of lions and sheep are the images of Jesus as the Lion of Judah and Lamb of God in Revelation 5:5-6. I just taught the passage at Wednesday morning Bible study and pointed out the brilliant theological sleight of hand employed in Revelation. Namely, as John is given a glimpse of Heaven’s throne room, he is told by an angelic elder, “Do not weep. See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered….” John then turns his head to look and sees … Wait for it … “a Lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered.” Got that? The conquering Christ, the power that will ultimately prevail over all manner of sin and death, is depicted as a crucified lamb, not a roaring lion.
That’s an extraordinary claim. When we humans imagine power sufficient to overcome evil in its many guises, we look for lions. Bared fangs. Brute strength. Roar! Hence the couple wearing the chest-thumping shirts that growled LIONS NOT SHEEP.
Curious about the shirts’ origin, I did some internet sleuthing and found the purveyor of the slogan, shirts, and other merch, including a T-shirt that turned one of John Lennon’s mantras on its ear. It read: GIVE VIOLENCE A CHANCE. Do you follow the logic? The way of suffering love doesn’t work. It’s soft. Ineffectual. It’ll get you crucified by strong-armed Romans or thrown to the lions for holding to the confession that a lamb-like Christ is Lord. Give us LIONS NOT SHEEP. That’s our default way.
But it’s not God’s way. God sent not a lion, but a lamb to “take away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). A dove, not a hawk. A man on a donkey, not a war horse. God isn’t enamored with armored things. The Psalmist writes, “Some take pride in chariots and some in horses, but our pride is in the name of the Lord our God” (20:7). Christians are to aspire to be lambs. Lions are not our friends. The early Christians were thrown to lions. God's sovereignty is exercised not as absolute power but as steadfast love. LAMBS NOT LIONS.
I still had the t-shirt depiction of the Lamb of God as Lion on Steroids when I saw the Kansas air-brushed Jesus. From shock to schlock in 48 hours. Help!
Good news: there are better ways to depict God in Christ. Frederick Buechner’s exquisite book The Faces of Jesus is a case in point. It is a retelling of Jesus’ life through artists’ depictions of him throughout the centuries across myriad cultures. The paintings, sketches, and sculptures are accompanied by Buechner’s theologically and biblically informed prose. My favorite is a wood carving titled Christ with the Crown of Thorns from Africa, 20th century. Buechner describes it:
It is some anonymous African craftsman carving a face only a few inches high who tells us that a god who would so demean himself, if there is such a god, is the only god worth living and dying for. It is the face of Christ crowned with thorns, a Black Christ carved on a book end out of some dark wood that has been sanded and mellowed to a soft sheen. You ache to run your fingers down the bridge of the nose and the great, full lips; to trace the cool plane of the cheeks where the swirl of the grain has become the track of dried tears, the scar running down into one eyebrow where the wood has cracked. The wood says it all---compassion, beauty, sorrow, majesty and love. The wood is mute. What it tells us is simply all there is to tell about what it means to be black, what it means to be a human being, what it means to be God.”
It matters how we depict Jesus. It matters what we say, how we think, write, and sing about him. It matters what kind of power we trust and who we trust to wield it. The good news is that despite the schlock and shock plastered on T-shirts and billboards, there are artists, musicians, authors, poets, photographers, and theologians whose renderings of God get preciously close to getting it right – as close as we humans can get.
Promises Paul, “Now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully….” (1 Cor. 15:12, 13)
