Chapter Twenty-two

GOD’S LIKENESS

The modern ambiance of the Sistine Chapel distorts Michelangelo’s original vision for his magnum opus. Visitors to the Vatican enter in groups of several hundred at a time, many of them clasping white plastic headphones to their ears. Instead of looking up when they walk into that splendid room, they follow the trail of red tape on the floor that marks an area where the audio guide is being transmitted.

Nothing can prepare the visitors for what they see when, on cue, they raise their heads. Magnificent works of art cover every inch of the walls and vaulted stone ceiling: the division of light and darkness, the creation of the sun and planets, the days of Noah, the Last Judgment. In the focal center, the calm eye in the swirl of frescoes, Michelangelo has rendered the creation of man.

I linger in that sublime room after most tourists have left. Twilight approaches, and the light has ripened to a golden hue. My neck aches slightly from supporting my head at odd angles, and I wonder how Michelangelo must have felt after a day’s work on his scaffold. My eyes drift over to the pivotal scene of God imparting life to the first human, their fingers almost but not quite touching. In a boldly controversial move, the artist did not shrink from portraying God in the image of man. In fact, if you snapped a digital photo of Adam’s face, aged it around the eyes, and crowned it with flowing white locks and a beard, you would have Michelangelo’s depiction of God the Father.

Can any artist render God? The Old Testament insists that God is spirit and cannot be captured in a graven image; one of the Ten Commandments explicitly forbids it. After living in a country where graven images and idols abound, I understand the prohibition.

Hinduism has thousands of gods, and I can hardly walk a block in an Indian town without seeing an idol or representation. As I observe the effect of those images on the average Indian, I note two results. Most commonly, the images trivialize the gods: they lose any aura of sacredness and mystery and become rather like mascots or good luck charms. A taxi driver mounts a goddess statue on his taxicab and offers flowers and incense as a prayer for safety. At the other extreme, some gods personify powers that evoke a sense of fear and oppression. Calcutta’s violent goddess Kali has a fiery tongue and wears a garland of bloody heads around her waist. Hindus may worship a snake, a rat, a phallic symbol, even a goddess of smallpox.

Wisely, the Bible warns against reducing the image of God to the level of physical matter. Any such image limits our understanding of God’s real nature: we may begin to think of God as a bearded old man in the sky, like the figure in Michelangelo’s painting. The notion of an omnipotent Spirit who spoke the universe into being gets lost. “With whom, then, will you compare God?” asks Isaiah. “To what image will you liken him?” (Isaiah 40:18).

God Incognito

Christians believe we got a true and authentic image of God in the person of Jesus Christ. The Spirit took on flesh, a human body of skin and bone and blood and nerve cells. The book of Hebrews describes Jesus as the “radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being” (Hebrews 1:3). In other words, if you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus.

Ophthalmologists warn against looking at the brilliance of the sun, even for an instant. Doing so will overwhelm light-receptors and sear the retina like a brand of fire. For thirty-three years Jesus gave us a clear image through which we can perceive God’s own self—something like the pinhole camera that allows us to see a solar eclipse without going blind. Here, though, is a strange truth: the image Jesus revealed surprised nearly everyone.

Those of us familiar with the Jesus story may not appreciate the shock, the cataclysmic shock, of God incognito. Jesus missed the people’s expectations of God so widely that some asked, incredulous, “Isn’t this the carpenter’s son?” An ethnic slur followed, “Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?” Even Jesus’ brothers did not believe him, questioning his sanity. One of his inner circle betrayed him and another denied him with a curse.

Jesus claimed to be a king greater than David, but little about him suited the image of royalty. He carried no weapons, waved no banners, and the one time he permitted a processional he rode on a donkey, his feet dragging on the ground. To put it bluntly, Jesus did not measure up to the image expected of a king—and certainly not of a God.

We instinctively think of Jesus as a perfect physical specimen, and religious art usually portrays him as tall, with flowing hair and fine features modeled after the accepted ideals of the artist’s culture. On what basis? From the evidence, nothing about Jesus marked him as a physical standout.

Once in my childhood my gentle Aunt Eunice came home from a Bible study enraged. Someone had read a description of Jesus, written by the historian Josephus, that characterized him as a hunchback. Aunt Eunice trembled with shame and anger, and her face flushed scarlet. It was blasphemy, she declared. “Utter blasphemy! That is a horrid caricature, not a description of my Lord!” An impressionable child, I could not help nodding in sympathetic indignation.

Although the notion disgusted me at the time, now it would not upset me at all to discover that Jesus was no ideal physical specimen. Although the Bible does not include a physical description of Jesus, there is a description of sorts, in a prophecy of the suffering Servant in Isaiah:

He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,

nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.

He was despised and rejected by mankind,

a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.

Like one from whom people hide their faces

he was despised, and we held him in low esteem. (Isaiah 53:2-3)

Furthermore, Jesus identified most closely with those perceived as unattractive and useless. He said of the hungry, the sick, the estranged, the naked, and the imprisoned that whatever we do for one of the least of these people, we do for him (Matthew 25:40). We meet the Son of God not in the corridors of power and abundance, but in the byways of human suffering and need.

In terms of the image the world admires—the image we exploit today in status rankings, beauty contests, and Forbes’ lists of the wealthiest—Jesus made no special mark. Yet that one from Nazareth, a carpenter’s son, a bruised body writhing on a cross, even he could express the exact likeness of God. I cannot exaggerate the impact of that truth as it fully dawns on a person who will never measure up: a leprosy patient in India, for instance, unspeakably poor and physically deformed. For such a person, Jesus becomes a harbinger of bright hope.

The Same Mindset

I had never grasped the revolutionary pattern Jesus laid down until I began working among leprosy patients. Again and again I saw these people, so cruelly ostracized from society, somehow radiate the love and goodness of God. They had a natural right to bitterness, yet the spiritual maturity among patients who chose to follow Jesus shamed us doctors and missionaries.

As if the image of God that Jesus presented was not shocking enough, the New Testament makes clear that Jesus’ followers should express that same image. What he modeled—humility, servanthood, love—become the standard for his Body. Recall the passage from Philippians that says plainly, “In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:5).

I search my memory bank for the people I have known who best express this “same mindset.” As a child, I often attended large churches and retreat centers where I listened to some of the most famous Christian speakers in England, many of whom demonstrated eloquence and erudition. Instead, another kind of speaker holds a special place in my memory: Willie Long.

I encountered Willie Long in a Primitive Methodist church at a seaside resort. As Willie mounted the pulpit, the fish scales still clinging to his blue fisherman’s jersey filled the hall with a pungent aroma. Yet this uneducated man with a thick Norfolk accent, unconventional grammar, and simple faith probably did more to nudge my own faith in those formative years than the entire company of famous speakers. When he stood to speak of Christ, he spoke of a personal friend, and the love of God radiated from him, through his tears. Willie Long, of little consequence in the image of men, showed me the image of God.

Later, in India, I observed with awe the spiritual rapport that bonded patients to the surgeon Mary Verghese. One of my most promising students, Mary suffered a horrific automobile accident that left her paralyzed from the waist down. For months she lay in her hospital bed, resisting physical therapy. She was staking her hopes on divine healing, she said, and rehabilitation exercises for paraplegia would waste her time since one day soon God would restore the full use of her legs.

Ultimately, Mary gained the courage to relinquish that demand for miraculous healing in exchange for the sense of a spiritual power best revealed in her weakness. Against all odds, she completed her surgery requirements and became a dynamic force in the Christian Medical College hospital.

In addition to the paraplegia, Mary had also suffered severe facial injuries. After a series of operations to rebuild the bony infrastructure of Mary’s cheeks, the plastic surgeon had no choice but to leave a large, ungainly scar right across her face. As a result, she had an odd, asymmetrical smile. By standards of physical perfection, she did not rate high. Yet she had a singular impact on the patients at Vellore.

Dejected leprosy patients would loiter aimlessly in the hallways of their wards. Suddenly they would hear a small squeak that announced the approach of Mary’s wheelchair. At once the row of faces lit up in bright smiles as though someone had just pronounced them all cured. Mary had the power to renew their faith and hope. Thus, when I think of Mary Verghese, I see not her face but its reflection in the smiling faces of so many others, not her image but the image of God poured through her broken human body.

One last figure towers above all others who have influenced my life: my mother, Granny Brand. I say kindly and in love that my aged mother had little of physical beauty left in her. She had been a classic beauty as a young woman—I have photographs to prove it—but not in old age. The rugged conditions in India, combined with crippling falls and her battles with typhoid, dysentery, and malaria had made her a thin, hunched-over old woman. Years of exposure to wind and sun had toughened her facial skin into leather and furrowed it with wrinkles as deep and extensive as any I have seen on a human face. She knew better than anyone that physical appearance had long since failed her, and for this reason she adamantly refused to keep a mirror in her house.

At the age of seventy-five, while working in the mountains of South India, my mother fell and broke her hip. She lay all night on the floor in pain until a workman found her the next morning. Four men carried her on a string-and-wood cot down the mountain path to the plains and put her in a jeep for an agonizing 150-mile ride over rutted roads. She had made the same trip before, after a head-first fall off a horse, and already had experienced some paralysis below her knees.

Shortly thereafter, I scheduled a visit to my mother’s mud-walled home in the mountains in an attempt to persuade her to retire. By then she could walk only with the aid of two bamboo canes taller than herself, planting the canes and lifting her legs high with each painful step to keep her paralyzed feet from dragging on the ground. Yet she continued to travel on horseback and camp in the outlying villages in order to preach the gospel and treat sicknesses and pull the decayed teeth of the villagers.

I came with compelling arguments for her retirement. “Mother, it’s unsafe for you to live alone in such a remote place, with good help a day’s journey away,” I told her. With her faulty sense of balance and paralyzed legs, she presented a constant medical hazard. Already she had endured fractures of vertebrae and ribs, pressure on her spinal nerve roots, a brain concussion, a fractured femur, and a severe infection of her hand. “Even the best of people do sometimes retire when they reach their seventies,” I said with a smile. “Why not move to Vellore and live near us?”

Granny Brand threw off my arguments like so much nonsense and shot back a reprimand. Who would continue the work? There was no one else in the entire mountain range to preach, to bind up wounds, and to run the farm and training center. “In any case,” she concluded, “what is the use of preserving my old body if it is not going to be used where God needs me?”

And so she stayed. Eighteen years later, at the age of ninety-three, she reluctantly gave up sitting on her pony because she was falling all too frequently. Devoted Indian villagers began bearing her in a hammock from town to town. After two more years of mission work, she finally died at age ninety-five. She was buried, at her request, in a simple, well-used sheet laid in the ground. She abhorred the notion of wasting precious wood on coffins, and she liked the symbolism of returning her physical body to its original humus even as her spirit was set free.

One of my strongest visual memories of my mother comes from a village in the mountains she loved, perhaps the last time I saw her in her own environment. She is sitting on a low stone wall that circles the village, with people pressing in from all sides. They are listening to her talk about Jesus. Heads are nodding in encouragement as she answers their deep, searching questions. Granny’s own rheumy eyes are shining, and standing beside her I can see what she must be seeing through failing eyes: intent faces gazing with absolute trust and affection on one they have grown to love.

They are looking at a wrinkled, old face, but somehow her shrunken tissues have become transparent and she is lambent spirit. Granny Brand had no need for a mirror made of glass and polished chromium; she had the reflected faces of thousands of Indian villagers. Her worn-out physical image only enhanced the image of God beaming through her like a beacon.

Willie Long, Mary Verghese, Granny Brand—these are three in whom I have seen the image of God most clearly. I do not say that a Miss Universe or a handsome Olympian cannot show forth the love and power of God, but I do believe such a person has a disadvantage. Human self-image thrives on physical attractiveness, social status, intelligence, talent. Any such quality that a person can rely on makes it more difficult for that person to rely on the Spirit of God.

Popularity and acclaim tend to suppress the traits—humility, selflessness, love—that Christ requires of those who would bear his image. Rather, God’s Spirit shines most brightly through the frailty of the weak, the powerlessness of the poor, the deformity of the hunchback. The message is clear: “God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other” (1 Corinthians 12:24-25, emphasis added).

As we allow the mindset of Christ to guide us, we too become more accurate bearers of his image. “And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit” (2 Corinthians 3:18).