Who is Jesus? What Does He Look Like?

How many of you know who this painting depicts? 

With over 500 million copies of this portrait produced by the beginning of this century, it has often been claimed that this is the most common religious image in the world.  For decades, especially in this country, this image was everywhere.


It hung in nearly every Christian church, in nearly every Christian child’s bedroom, it was in the pockets of almost every soldier going off to war...  This Jesus was familiar to the American public, like Jesus had ever been before.  Like an image of the statue of liberty, this image was instantly recognizable by almost anyone.  This portrait, and the person it represented, become one and the same.  Never before has Jesus been such a popular figure, a Super Star.

        

Why did this happen and what does it mean?

    

Our 20^th century fascination with Jesus, and the elevation of what some call “Jesus-only-religion” was an American creation.  And, Unitarians had a part in its creation!  Jesus as cultural icon / Jesus alone (separate from God, separate from doctrine) was new on the stage of human history.

 

Since the 1960’s there has been some movement away from the predominance of just one image and of a singular idea about “who Jesus is” as we have become a more multi-cultural and diverse society.  Yet, even though he may have been cloned into many diverse superhero manifestations, his personhood continues to be iconic in our cultural imagination.

 

I probably don’t need to say, that the American view of Jesus is often far removed from any “truth” we might think we know about the historical Jesus.  And it is rare that the contemporary Superstar Jesuses, have much if anything to do with any of the many understandings of who he was for his first century followers….

 

But, I am not going to go there in this sermon series.  I am more interested in helping you understand how Jesus became such a popular personality, a Star in the American religious imagination.  Why did Jesus (with the last name Christ!) move from a relatively minor actor in God’s long history with humankind, to take central stage?  Why in America?

I will share some of what I have learned …in progressive sermons, delivered about once a month.

A lot of what I will be sharing comes from Stephen Prothero’s 2003 work entitled American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon.  

I won’t be spending much time telling you about what those who study the historical Jesus can tell us about what he was really like…back then.  If you want to know what modern scholarship says about that, the ECU Dept of Religion has just begun a public lecture series to share what academia has to say about who Jesus “really” was. 

But, I’ve got pictures! 

  

What I am interested in is trying to help you to see how the images and ideas about Jesus have changed over time…how those images and ideas have addressed differing needs and desires within American culture. 

I am hoping to enlighten you by showing you that the way things are or have been in our lifetimes, is not the way things have always been, and certainly not the way they will be. 

I am trying to give you some space…. some space for your intellect to stand in for just a little while, to get perhaps a little distance from where you are or may have been, in order to take a fresh look at where you might be going…

My goal in this sermon series is to give your religious imagination some freedom…freedom to move.  I am doing what liberal religionists have always done…and that is “smashing idols”! 

Icons can obscure the movement of the holy.  Icons, created by humans to point to the sacred, after awhile can become the sacred.

I think we do holy work on Sundays.  Part of that work is to free ourselves from what keeps us stuck in place.  Sometimes, we get stuck in the business of rejecting what doesn’t sound right or feel logical.  That’s important work.  But so is moving into the place where we are free to creatively imagine what symbols or images best channel our spiritual yearnings, to understand why certain images work and how they work.

I am hoping that if we can begin to understand what made the Jesus- so appealingly captured in this image- so popular, we can also understand why it is sometimes so difficult to wrest this image of Jesus out of our imagination and try to see again.

   

Perhaps you will hear how important and powerful religious symbols are, even if you decide for yourself that you don’t need the props.  And perhaps you will hear and have a new appreciation for how, like all art, religious images not only display what we imagine; they also play a role in determining what we can imagine.

Next month, I will back up a bit share how the nominally unitarian Thomas Jefferson and genuinely Unitarian, Theodore Parker played significant roles in the cultural forces that led to the popularity of this image.  Perhaps, UU’s are now playing a role in bringing to the world religious imagination, images that move us forward.

For today, let me share the story of the artist that created this portrait.

Warner Sallman was born in 1892, as the eldest of three children, to immigrant parents from Finland and Sweden.  As a young man, he was trained at the Chicago Art Institute.  And, his mentor was a well known newspaper illustrator.   

This image was originally rendered as a charcoal sketch which Sallman entitled The Son of Man.  That version first appeared on the cover of the denominational magazine for the Evangelical Covenant Church in 1924.  The ECC is an American Christian denomination begun by Swedish immigrants.  The ECC includes about 800 congregations now and, like us, they don’t ask their members to subscribe to any particular creed.  In 1935, Sallman used oil to create the work that appeared at the 50^th anniversary celebration of the Evangelical Covenant Church.

 

Eventually, the Baptist Bookstore, serving the much larger Southern Baptist Convention, had a huge hand in popularizing the painting, distributing various sized images for sale throughout the Southern US.  The Salvation Army and the USO handed out pocket-sized versions to servicemen and women heading overseas during WWII.  After the war, groups of evangelicals conducted campaigns to distribute the image in private and public spaces in order for there to be card-carrying Christians who countered ‘card-carrying Communists’.

Prothero tells readers of his book who might be too young to remember that the “Head of Christ by Warner Sallman went on to be reproduced in almost every “imaginable form—on prints, plaques, bookmarks, funeral cards, church bulletins, buttons, calendars, clocks, lamps, coffee mugs, stickers, billboards, and key chains”.    Sallman’s image was an advertiser’s dream, far out performing any that had come before.

    

His was also - originally and only - a portrait of Jesus.  The images that were used by Christians before Sallman’s where those lifted from works of art that showed Jesus in the context of a Biblical narrative.

 

During the 1920’s and 30’s this one also entitled Head of Christ by Heinrich Hofmann was likely what was in the Protestant public’s imagination when they envisioned their Lord and Savior.

       

But, this Heinrich Hoffman portrait was actually a “cut and paste” from his larger painting.

You’ll hear more about the American “cut and paste” tendencies when it came to popularizing Jesus “only” religion next month!

The Sallman Head of Christ portrait was unique in that it made no reference to any story about Jesus.  It was not set into any context.  It did not rely on any particular doctrine.

The Jesus he rendered stood alone.  It was easy for the American public to project whatever they wanted to see or feel … upon it. 

    

Sallman’s image was brilliant!  It was brilliant in the sense that it allowed Jesus to stand in the American imagination completely divorced from doctrine, from any particular theology or denomination.

Just Jesus.  

It was Jesus as friend.

 

Prothero says; “His skin is movie-star perfect.  His hair is flowing.  And the light that bathes his beautiful face begs to be described as dreamy.  While the subject is clearly male, he is not self-evidently masculine. …Different Americans could read different Jesuses into it.”  

This image served as a shortcut for the American relationship with Jesus. 

Jesus on my side.  Jesus who walks with me and talks with me. 

This Jesus “worked” because this image captured what the American public imagined, or wanted to imagine…. 

Yet, images that become icons also determine what we can imagine. 

Straight nose, light skin, chestnut hair…????  Is this what the real Jesus looked like???

Sallman's Jesus was what the American public wanted Jesus to look like.  And once the American public thought this is what Jesus looked like, it was not easy to imagine he might look different. 

For an image to become an icon means that for most people the image is instantly recognizable.   It also means that the image becomes the single and narrow lens that channels our vision, limiting how we think of the thing or the idea or the phenomena that the image represents. 

This year, my hope is to help you to understand more about American religious history.  I want you to know that Jesus the Christ wasn’t always the Super Star he became around the mid-twentieth century in this country and still is…   

This is probably the most popular image of Jesus right now within contemporary Christianity. 

  

Still a head and shoulders view, but this Jesus is not gazing dreamily away.  There is a image captured in this portrait that says something about what Americans want and need now. 

Can you see it?