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Published on Thursday, 16 February 2012 08:59

Last weekend a group from Peace traveled to Detroit to catch one of the last days of an art show entitled Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus.  It was better than I could have imagined.  Rembrandt is a master and his images have a depth that reaches out from the surface.  But there was a surprise in the exhibit that I wasn't quite expecting.

The way the exhibit was designed you were invited to reflect on the development of how Rembrandt painted Jesus over his life.  A young Rembrandt painted him the way other people of the time did, looking just like themselves.  He painted Jesus full of power, actively raising the dead and healing the sick.  Later in life the images of Jesus became more passive as if to say that Jesus' power to heal did not come from what he did (raise his hand and wave it over the sick person) but from who he was.  It's a subtle theological shift, but an important one.  In that shift I think we begin to learn what it means to follow Christ - we aren't totally there as a Christian until what we do comes out of a sense of who we are.  To be like Christ is rooted in our Baptismal identity as people transformed.  But this is not the surprise that I found.

The other thing that the exhibit was designed to teach was that Rembrandt began painting Jesus as Jewish.  This shouldn't be surprising, after all he was Jewish.  But artists rarely have depicted him that way, either before Rembrandt or after.  Instead most of the famous painting of Jesus (and likely all of the ones that are hanging in our homes) depict him as very European.  The exhibit explained that at the time of Rembrandt there was a strong Jewish quarter in the city of Amsterdam and Rembrandt moved his studio into the neighborhood, using locals as models for much of his work.  At the same time, church scholars in Amsterdam were beginning to teach that Jesus was actually a Jew.  Rembrandt was interested in depicting him as accurately as possible so he began using his neighbors as models for the image of Christ that he painted.  In one gallery of the exhibit were collected several portraits of a young Jewish man (obviously the same one) that Rembrandt had painted.  At the end of the gallery then hung one of his most famous paintings of Jesus with the exact same face as the young man.  It was amazing.  The power of the painting was captivating.  I had seen it before, but to see it in person was completely different.  I knew what Rembrandt's Jesus looked like, the face was familiar to me, but to see them in this context was transformative.

The real impact of what Rembrandt was doing didn't hit me until I left the exhibit and toured some of the rest of the Museum.  Every painting of Jesus showed a very european white Jesus - fair skinned, high forehead and cheeks, light hair, etc.  After coming home I found an article on the daily beast websitethat talked about this very thing and put together a small collage of images to illustrate the point.  Take a look at it and see if you can pick out the one that is Rembrandt's.  (click the image to read more about the individual paints)

I've heard it said that we are likely to depict Christ in our own image.  Artists around the world do it.  Maybe there's comfort in thinking that Jesus looked like us.  But I also think there could be a danger.  If Jesus looks too much, or only, like us, then we're likely to be discriminatory to those who don't fit that image and less likely to be open and respectful of others.

As we drove home from the exhibit, Robin Coye asked if I had noticed the diversity of the crowd.  "There were people from everywhere," she said, "some were speaking different languages."  I had to confess that I hadn't really noticed.  She said that at one point she stopped to listen to all the different languages and people and that she was mesmerized by how they could all be in one place.  Maybe that's the real power of Rembrandt's Jesus, to transcend the bounds of a single race or culture or even creed to touch all people.  What a delightful surprise.