This post is from a larger series under the cat­e­gory Friend to Jesus. It is a detailed explo­ration of the three stages of faith: the believer, the ser­vant and the friend of God.This post is the begin­ning of the series.

A painter should begin every can­vas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light. Leonardo da Vinci

I have read in Plato and Cicero say­ings that are wise and very beau­ti­ful; but I have never read in either of them: Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden. St. Augustine

Almost twenty-five years ago, shortly after becom­ing a Chris­t­ian, I came across a remark­able paint­ing. I was at my school’s library in down­town Chicago—Grant Park was right out­side the win­dow from where I sat. As I turned the page of a book the 15^th cen­tury Ital­ian painter Michelan­gelo Caravaggio’s The Sup­per at Emmaus caught my eye.  I was flip­ping through a bunch of books that I had grabbed off the shelves. I was just wast­ing time, wait­ing for a class to begin.  Imme­di­ately, this paint­ing caught my eye, because it wasn’t your typ­i­cal “reli­gious” art­work. In fact, it was almost too non-descript, and at first I didn’t real­ize that it was a paint­ing depict­ing any­thing sacred or religious—it just looked like a paint­ing of a few guys eat­ing lunch together. I’ve only seen this paint­ing in art books, and one day, I hope to ven­ture to the National Gallery in Lon­don and see it up close.

 That day when I caught sight of this paint­ing, it began for me a new way of see­ing Jesus. Some­thing was spe­cial about this paint­ing, made up of noth­ing more than some oils placed with some thought and skill on the can­vas. As I sat and stared at it, I real­ized why it held my atten­tion and I rec­og­nized its unique­ness. It was how the char­ac­ters looked. When I open up an art book now and flip to the paint­ing now, I real­ize that it depicts the friend­ship of God in an aston­ish­ing man­ner. Back then, you know what caught my eye? Sim­ply this, Jesus looks real. Gone is the blond hair and blue eyes. He looks like a real Hebrew guy, olive skin and all. Car­avag­gio did some­thing earth shat­ter­ing in his time as an artist—he painted Jesus like a real per­son; amaz­ingly, he looked human and real to life. In fact, very uncom­mon for his time, most of Caravaggio’s mod­els were peas­ants from local vil­lages. Instead of paint­ing the noble and the wealthy as his mod­els for John the Bap­tist, Jesus or any other bib­li­cal char­ac­ter, he was paint­ing the cob­blers, fish­er­men and maid­ens of his day, and there­fore, when it came to reli­gious art, for the first time ever, his paint­ings took on a look that was authen­tic and true.

In this paint­ing of Caravaggio’s, Jesus looks like a per­son; some­one you could know, the guy next door. He seems approach­able. This is the oper­a­tive word—Jesus in this paint­ing looks like a per­son. Before this, in the art world—for the artist, Jesus was never a person—He was just “God.” Most of the artists in this period were paint­ing the “majes­tic Christ”—the unap­proach­able Jesus, the one on the throne, the one you needed to sched­ule by appoint­ment. But none of this actu­ally cap­tured the bib­li­cal nar­ra­tive, because as we know, Jesus really is a per­son, a friend, and some­one who is very approach­able. With Caravaggio’s inter­pre­ta­tion, you see this “friend” aspect come out onto the can­vas. Jesus is just hang­ing out, eat­ing a meal and shootin’ the breeze. When I saw this paint­ing, this was in my early years of being a Chris­t­ian and this was the Jesus I wanted to get to know. You could get close to him and this was what I wanted. Unlike other reli­gious art I had seen up to that point, it cap­tured Jesus as some­one you would want to get to know. As a con­trast, go look at some of the art work from this period or ear­lier and you will notice that the char­ac­ter­i­za­tions of Jesus are oblong and uncom­fort­able. Let me illus­trate some exam­ples; you might have seen some paint­ings depict­ing Jesus like this:

• Paint­ing No. 1: Baby Jesus is pure white and his face looks like he’s 59 years old—wrinkled and bald­ing. He wears a smirk, a bap­tismal gown and a bratty look.
• Paint­ing No. 2: Jesus has his kingly pose, no smile, wea­ried look and it looks as if he might want to think about get­ting a pre­scrip­tion for some Prozac.

Again, these por­tray­als of Jesus’ just aren’t real­is­tic. They don’t tell the real story that the Scrip­tures tell. These works of art do not depict Jesus as he really is. How­ever, Car­avag­gio was get­ting into it, paint­ing as if he was there, sit­ting at the very table with Jesus, and show­ing you some­thing sacred and important.

This is the Jesus that we try to write about through this blog. The real one.

This work, unless oth­er­wise expressly stated, is licensed under a Cre­ative Com­mons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.