©2007 UrbisMedia
I am always amazed at the tendency these days for Evangelicals to go on about Jesus Christ as though he was somebody they knew personally. It’s that “personal savior” thing and Carl, from Australia, exemplifies what I like to call the “when I get to heaven I want to go duck hunting with the Redeemer” attitude. Carl goes on about how much Jesus means to him. How Christ is his “hero” and his “friend,” how Christ is “perfection.” I suspect that Carl might not have had a male figure, like a father or older brother, when he was young, and Jesus filled the void for him.[1] The whole “personal savior things” is such New Age nonsense. I guess everybody’s Jesus is a product of time and circumstance.
Fr. Fahey, the retreat master that I had in high school, knew the psychology of young men quite well. Like a lot of Jesuits he probably had be around the block a time or two before he took vows. He knew how to approach guys who would rather be out playing basketball than sitting a chapel for hours hearing about God and sin and salvation. He must have known what he was doing because there were things he said that have stuck with me through the decades, even if the object of the lessons had been transmogrified by subsequent life experiences.
“Jesus was no Breck girl,” he would say with a typical opening shocker that resounded around the nave and among the Stations of the Cross. Then, pointing up to the crucifix above the chapel alter he would add, “Does He look like some cutie from St. Agnes [2] all prettied up for the prom?” We knew he was referring to those depictions of Jesus with the long, nicely-coiffed hair, the rouged cheeks, the sweet Agnus Dei eyes, and the robes by, who else,Christian Dior. That is the effeminate [3] Jesus image he detested, and he figured we would as well.
Then he would tell us about the real Jesus, the carpenter’s son with rough hands, who probably could hold his own in a punch-up in the alleys of Nazareth. He would wax about the type of guy who could throw money-changers out of the Temple, and “had the balls” as a kid to take on the elders in the Temple on liturgical matters. And he especially liked that Christ grew up to hang out with tough, illiterate fisherman, like Simon. Christ grew up in a dangerous neighborhood; the Romans were meanest guys in the Mediterranean, as he would later find out, and taking on the local Jewish power structure was risky business as well. “No place for a Breck girl,” Fahey would sneer. In my imagination formed a vision of somebody like Shane in eponymous film, in this case a formidable metaphysical gunfighter called “The Galilee Kid,” strong, self-possessed, and of few words.
The fact is we know very little of the man/(God?) so many people call their “personal” Savior. His childhood is thinly recorded and, after about age thirteen he disappears for about seventeen years—gone! Where he went and what he did and learned, nobody knows. Many think he went East, maybe to Persia, and picked up some Zoroastrian stuff, and on to India, to see what they had to say. He was indeed a man of few words (although a lot of words have been put in his mouth.)
Then, mirabile visu, the Galilee Kid is back in town, primed to shake things up with the Jews and the Romans. He doesn’t say all that much (probably a lot ascribed to him that he never said) and in less time than it takes to get a bachelor’s degree, he’s dead and “resurrected” (at least by Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and Paul) as arguably the most influential human being (others say Mohammad is) ever to walk the earth. There has been more good and evil done is his name than in any other’s. Economically, he has made more money for more people, as Mel Gibson continues to prove, and probably sold a good amount of Breck Shampoo. I wonder how he feels about that.
But the Galilee Kid thing didn’t really work that well for me. I just couldn’t get a handle on how he might really look. I was pretty isolated when growing up; Italians and other Roman Catholics were about all I associated with. There were Jews around, shopkeepers mostly, but none that I saw seemed like they might have the appearance of Jesus. “Beansy” Altman, the proprietor of the store that sold workmen’s clothes, was maybe the first Jew I knew to be a Jew, and he was short, fat, and bald. Hardly a mental model for the Jesus the nuns rhapsodized about, or the one on the cross. I think part of the problem was the Church’s de-Jewification of Chirst? Not only do they do him up like Breck girl, but they seem to except him from his own ethnicity. Never mind that Yeshua bar Yusef was born a Jew, lived as a Jew, and died a Jew. He wouldn’t have recognized his Greek “Jesus Christ” name from Krispy Kreme Donuts and, I’m convinced, he would have tossed 87.4 percent of those who call themselves Christians today out of the Temple. So, if Jesus didn’t look like Jeffrey Hunter [4] with a Breck “do,” ten what did he look like? Certainly not one of those mean cartoons done up by Nazis and Muslim newspapers; not like Red Buttons, or Edward G. Robinson; maybe Paul Newman, or John Garfield. At one time I didn’t even know these guys were Jews, thanks to Hollywood’s de-Jewification.
That’s why I think that if you replied to some of these people who urge us to “take Jesus Christ as our “personal savior,” “best friend,” and such, “Oh, you mean “my best friend, the Jew, Yeshua?” you would get a perplexed reaction, perhaps even touch a sublimated, or repressed anti-semitism. They would be referring to the commodified Jesus, the one concepted by Paul, and then worked up into product that scarcely resembles the original—the Breck girl Jesus, the celebrity Jesus, maybe even the Galilee Kid, ridin’ off into the sunset of resurrection.
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©2007, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 1.10.2007)
[1] A few days later Carl volunteered that his father died when he was a baby and he “never knew him.”
[2] The nearby all-girls Catholic High School
[3] Nobody broached the idea of a “gay” Jesus in those days.
[4] Even prettier than the guy Mel Gibson casted, see Nicholas Ray’s King of Kings (1961)