Putting Jesus Out of Reach: The Incarnation and the Second Commandment

A friend recently entered a graduate program in Art History at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and made me think again on the relationship between art and spirituality. Those of us with spiritual roots in Judaism, Islam or Christianity (particularly the tradition stemming from the Protestant Reformation), are ingrained with the rejection of pictorial representations of God. This comes from interpretations of the Second Commandment (Exodus 20:4) and passages in the Koran (Sura 42:9; Sura 21: 53ff) and hadiths. The Westminster Larger Catechism, a document summarizing the convictions of the Reformation in Great Britain, goes on to say that we should not form pictures “of all or of any of the three persons (of God),* either inwardly in our mind, or outwardly in any kind of image” (Larger Catechism Answer #109). The idea is that no representation can fully portray God and therefore would be a distortion of the Divine Being, even if it is only a mental picture. They would be false and therefore an idol.

It seems then that representational art and the worship of God should have no relation, at least not in these faith traditions. But what about Jesus? As with so many other subjects, the discussion of Jesus has a way of turning the issue upside down and inside out until the various parties of that discussion find themselves adopting positions that seem strangely at odds with their core convictions.

What I mean is this: it is an absolute core Christian conviction that the transcendent God became flesh to be near us, relate to us, identify with us and redeem humanity. But our traditional reading of the Second Commandment as it regards Jesus, the man, exhorts us to refuse to even think of his humanity, his creaturely-ness… his hands, his face, his physical presence. Sure, plenty of theologians discuss his “human nature,” but I am not referring to the esoteric aspects of being human. I am referring to something very practical and mundane: Jesus had a certain appearance, a feel, a smell to him. He was a real person. And he came near to us, quite literally. Yet, it is the Christian community that seems to put Jesus out of reach.

Christians do this in many ways (lyrics from the U2 song ‘If God Will Send His Angels’ come to mind: "Jesus never let me down/ You know Jesus used to show me the score/ Then they put Jesus in show business/ Now it's hard to get in the door"). I believe our reading of the Second Commandment as it relates to the Incarnation is one of those ways. In the film Ben-Hur (that had the tag line, “A Tale of the Christ”), director William Wyler told a story of redemption of the man Judah Ben-Hur as he had interaction with Jesus Christ. However, the few times Jesus comes into the story, we hear him speaking no lines, nor do we see him properly; only a leg or a shadow. I sympathize with the artistic reasons for this as well as the sensitivity the director may have been showing to a devout religious community who may have been offended by an explicit depiction of Jesus. However, it has the effect of making Jesus other-worldly and impersonal. Surely, this is a greater distortion of the person of Jesus than simply showing a man playing the part of Jesus.

Some will argue that portraying Christ at all in art or film would certainly not capture the God-Man that we worship and again become an idol. ‘We don’t know what Jesus looked like so any attempt to depict him would be false.’ To be blunt, this is sophomoric. We have a very good idea what Jesus looked like. He had two eyes, a nose, a mouth. He was most likely average in appearance (Isa. 53:2).# Jesus was a man. We know the kinds of things he did and the way he lived. The depiction of him in film or art re-affirms that Jesus was indeed a man. People don’t think Jesus really looked like Jim Caviezel (who played Jesus in ‘The Passion of the Christ’) any more than they think Richard Nixon really looked like Anthony Hopkins (who depicted Nixon in the 1995 Oliver Stone movie bearing the president’s name). His exact appearance is beside the point. The fact of his appearance is the point. To refuse to even picture this in our minds seems an implicit denial of his appearance.

‘No graven images’ some protest, meaning there can be no depictions of God at all, even the God-Man, Jesus. But this proves too much as Exodus 20:4 (KJV) also says: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth….” That would mean we should never make any picture of animals in any context (this is where some Muslim communities take there own scriptures). To counter that the Second Commandment does not forbid the pictorial representation of animals because it is speaking of idols used in worship would mean this also applies to depictions of God. As long as they are not used as objects of worship, they are fine. Which direction shall we take this?

My overall purpose is not to fully explicate the Second Commandment, but to point out a problem with our conceptions of Christ. We take the mystery and wonder of the incarnation and we tame it by making Jesus the man an abstraction. We justify that abstraction with the Second Commandment. I am not advocating pictures of Christ for use in worship. I am saying that our religiosity has a way distancing Christ from ourselves and from the world that desperately needs to know him. God stripped himself of his glory to be with us. He was not stopped by our baseness. He took on hunger, and indigestion, and sexual urges and the indignities of puberty because he loved us. The picture (if I may use this term) we get of Jesus from the Gospels is that of a strong but compassionate and accessible man. Whores and white collar criminals (tax collectors) could talk to him. People wanted to touch him and he was willing to touch them as well. He was physical in his tenderness and in his anger. He was wholly… human.

Why is it that the world doesn’t seem to relate to Jesus? I suppose there are many reasons. Let’s not one of them be that Christians put him out of reach with our religious practice.


* In orthodox Christian theology, we believe there is one God who exists in three persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, together referred to as the Trinity. Christian theology also holds that the second person of the Trinity, God the Son, took on humanity (a human body and soul) in the incarnation. This is the man we call Jesus.
# Of course there are abuses such as a picture I saw of a ‘contextualized’ Jesus as an African-American rapper called L.L. Cool Jesus. The ridiculous nature of the picture however proves that the Gospels themselves implicitly suggest proper parameters of depictions.