The Face of Jesus

Today I had what I believe may end up being one of the biggest spiritual breakthroughs of my life. I was reading Gentle and Lowly by Dane Ortlund and came across a paragraph that identified a truth about Jesus that I am sure I have read dozens of times in various ways “Jesus is not Zeus. He was a sinless man, not a sinless Superman. He woke up with bed head. He had pimples at 13. He never would have appeared on the cover of Men’s Health (he had no beauty that we should desire him.” Isiah 53.2). He came as a normal man to normal men.” For my whole life I have basically shrugged away this concept of Jesus while maintaining an idillic image of him in my mind.

This might seem relatively harmless. After all, it has been the normal portrayal of Jesus for centuries. Today, however, I had an image float into my mind of what Jesus probably actually looked like, and I broke down. It was like a wall came crashing down that had been preventing me from fully viewing Jesus as a person that I could actually have a real like relationship with. My celebrity savior image was hindering my emotional connection with my real savior. I don’t relate to celebrities. They make me nervous and awkward. I few weeks ago I met one of my favorite baseball players from when I was a teenager, and while it was exciting and fun, and I got to have a cool moment with him, there wasn’t a closeness there beyond a shared love of a baseball team. This is how I have felt when trying to encounter Jesus. I got that he loved me, but I struggled to grasp that he knows what it feels like to be me. I have so much in common with my real savior. I never felt that way about the celebrity one I had been trying to connect with for years.

Right after having this breakthrough and right before drafting my thoughts and experiences about this, I did a google search on “Jesus’s actual appearance. This is the image that I found, and it was startling how close this image matches the one that floated into my mind.

I like this face. I can be myself when encountering a savior who looks like this.