What did He look like?

 

Doesn't it strike you as strange that nowhere in the Bible we have a description of Jesus? We are told He was born as a baby, He was twelve when His parents found Him preaching in the temple, He was a grown man when He started His Mission on earth.

We are not told by the Gospel writers, or by Luke who also wrote the Acts of the Apostles, the colour of Jesus' hair, the colour of His eyes, how tall He was, or anything specific about His features. 

I guess we can tell how tall He was by the shape left on the Turin shroud. And some artists have tried to use this as the basis of paintings of what Jesus looked like. But yet, many people doubt the authenticity of the Turin shroud; so a debate about this will not lead very far.

The fact remains that no Bible writer has described Jesus. Why is that?

Is it perhaps because they did not consider the physical description of Christ as relevant to His Mission on earth? After all, they do not describe the disciples either. We assume that Peter was big and tall; but that's because that's the way he was portrayed in films. Do we really know how he and the other followers of Jesus looked like? They may have been tall, short, thin, fat, walked with a limp or whatever. 

What we do know about Jesus, however, is more important.

He was kind, merciful, compassionate, forgiving, caring and loving. He was all-powerful, and if He wanted to He could have healed millions of people just by clicking His fingers. But He did not do that. On every occasion, and in every Gospel, we read that He treated people on an individual basis. Whether the person was blind, deaf, mute, lame, a leper, infirm, paralysed or possessed by demons; on every occasion, we read that Jesus approached them personally. Spoke to them. Took pity on them; or on the person pleading on their behalf, like the centurion who pleaded for his servant, or Jarius for his daughter. And then, having communicated with them personally, He granted their requests and answered their prayers.

That's the description of Jesus that really matters.

That's what it means when we learn we are made in God's image.

The early writers, and painters, assumed that if we are made in His image, then God must be a man. Because He always existed, then He must be old. So they painted Him with a beard sitting on a cloud.

How wrong they were.

Being made in His image means having the potential to be kind, merciful, compassionate, forgiving, caring and loving.

Sadly, many people these days seem to be intent on being anything but in God's image. Anything but being like Jesus.