Seeing Jesus
I heard a story recently that goes back to the 1940’s. Korea had been invaded and occupied by the Japanese. A Korean Christian at that time was given a magazine with a picture of what an artist thought Jesus’ face might have looked like.
The Korean was fascinated for a number of reasons. Firstly, he had never heard of someone painting a picture of Jesus’ face; and secondly, the picture was made up of a myriad of little dots (pixels). This put the thought in his mind: could he make up a picture of Jesus’ face, but instead of using dots, using the words from John’s Gospel? The Korean language uses characters for words so each word would be a single character, the equivalent to a dot.
He worked painstakingly on the venture. By the end, every word from John’s Gospel was used in order. With varying degrees of light and dark, the face of Jesus was obvious to all who saw it.
Why do we read the Gospels? The hope of each of the writers – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, was that as we read, we would see Jesus.
Look more carefully. Read more closely. Take a bit more time. Look for what you can learn about Jesus. Look for Jesus’ face as you read.
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