The Face of My Lord

******** Every Easter brings much the same spate of movies of the life of Jesus Christ, and ever since I was very very young, I thought: this can’t be right – surely Jesus did not look and act like a washed-up, drug-sodden, syphilitic ex-rocker spewing those famous world-changing words à la Bob Dylan, which is largely how He is portrayed in Hollywood. And even different interpretations, like The Last Temptation of Christ or The Passion of the Christ don’t do it for me. I had often asked myself what Christ was really like – was he the man of sorrows depicted to me by my teachers and Bible storybooks? I wasn’t convinced. There was a majesty to His words that was not accounted for. What was His bearing? His tone of voice? How did He captivate multitudes? How was He at His most intimate moments, as in the Garden of Gethsemane? When He delivered the Sermon on the Mount, was He in another world, or did heaven come to Him? Did His moods change dramatically, was He serene for the most part, how was He when seized by the Holy Spirit? Much is made of His anger when casting the money-changers out of the Temple – how did that actually happen? Were His words about the Pharisees as cutting and ironic as I imagine? We know that he grieved; surely he joked and laughed as well?

Oddly enough, the Bible itself is little help in this regard, for not only does it not provide any details that might serve as clues, but the four Evangelists themselves had differing portraits of Jesus. Even more oddly, the model that came as close to satisfying this thirst was Swami Dayananda Saraswati, a saffron-robed teacher of Vedanta with whom I studied for fifteen years. He spoke with calm authority, and was saintly and dignified without being the least bit pious, since ebullient hilarity was bubbling and gurgling just under the surface at all times.

At any rate, Bahá’ís are prevented from portraying the Manifestations of God as characters in a drama for this selfsame reason, that it would be impossible for us to do justice to the majesty of Their being, as well as for preventing a host of other abuses, such as having Bahá’u’lláh’s face in an ashtray, or a plastic Lucky Buddha smiling inanely atop the television showing the Ultimate Fighting Challenge.

Case in point: this past Good Friday I was in a village in Honduras where they spray-painted the Stations of the Cross on “carpets” (actually sand poured on the street), and paraded effigies of Jesus, Mary, and other figures on funeral biers during all hours of the day and night, followed by a brass band playing the most pitifully morose music you could ever imagine. Doesn’t the face of Christ in the photo above look like Che Guevara? And the priest and his retinue would walk over the face of Jesus!! Somehow that’s what upset me – the rest I could pass off as village tradition, which is the only explanation I could get anyway.

I was privileged to see one of the two existing photos of Bahá’u’lláh on a recent pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and it pierced my very soul. The other is not in the hands of the Bahá’ís, found its way onto the Internet, and was sent to me by a friend for verification. I glanced at it for a mere five seconds (Oh, my God) and filed it, and shall perhaps look at it someday again at a propitious moment. But I certainly won’t be putting it on my welcome mat.