The Expression on Jesus' Face

One day in one of my youth ministry classes we were asked this question: When you imagine Jesus looking at you, what is the expression on his face? Close your eyes, and think about that for a minute. What do you see? Our guest speaker in our class that day, who does a ton of work with high school and college students, had a fascinating fact for us. She loves asking students that question, to enter into dialogue with them about Jesus, so she's asked a ton of people to answer this. What she said blew my mind...and then quickly resonated with me. She said that almost more often than not, when a college student who grew up in an evangelical youth group, from any denomination, is asked this question they will respond with these words...Jesus is looking at me in: anger, disappointment, sorrow, sadness, frustration, or even contempt. She said she can predict this response 9 times out of 10. At first I was appalled. Then, I thought more about it and realized I would respond the same way. In fact I have recently responded this way, in a conversation with someone, saying 'I wonder if God is mad at me?' Throughout college I wrestled a lot with feelings of not being a good enough Christian. I felt like I had disappointed God, had somehow not done enough to serve Him. Our professor was saying this is because we have gotten really good in youth groups of perpetuating the "Gospel of Sin Management," meaning we always tell kids, "don't do this...stay on this path...just pray harder...read those bibles...have that quiet time...bring friends to church...don't drink...definitely don't have sex...honor your parents...oh yeah, get good grades too, Jesus likes it when we're good students..." Any of those things sound familiar? I was very involved in two churches in high school and I received these messages in both places. Certainly, somehow we do have to encourage kids to make wise choices, yet in our attempts to do so we have managed to make Jesus some tyrant who is waiting to punish us. Where do we talk about grace, freedom in Christ to be who we were created to be? Or maybe grace was mentioned, but how often? And in what context? Even today, I find myself still struggling with this. I don't live as if I am the Beloved of God, I live as if I still need to play by all the right rules or I will be punished.

I started thinking about the way Jesus is depicted in art, and the expressions on his face, so I started typing different things into Google to see what I could find. I found a variety of images, and I think they are fascinating to reflect on. I am so grateful for the people in my life in my 20s who taught me that it is okay to laugh and joke around when praying--that Jesus delights in us! Of course he loves our laughter! We don't have to approach him with such solemn faces and properly folded hands. I actually think sometimes he'd just as much prefer us to NOT fold our hands and bow our heads! So my favorite pictures these days are of Jesus laughing:

It is interesting to me that when Jesus is depicted as laughing or smiling, he is usually with children. I wonder if we can learn something from that? I don't think that is a coincidence...

This next one fascinated me...not just the picture of Jesus clearing the temple, but the caption printed beneath it.

One of the reasons our professor was saying youth especially have a tough time picturing Jesus as anything but angry is that we don't teach them about the compassion of Jesus...the tenderness of Jesus who longs for us to crawl up in his lap and call him "Abba!" The Jesus who longs to remind us, when we have screwed up, that He still loves us passionately, more than we could ever imagine. This picture is beautiful to me and I hope is to you as well:

Think about it...when you imagine Jesus looking at you, what expression is on his face? And where in life did you learn to view Jesus in that way? I think for most of us, we might need to expand our vision of Jesus to encompass a bit more of the joy, delight, laughter, and freedom we have in him! And to close, here's one of my very favorite images of Jesus (and really you can't even see Jesus in it)...it's a statue at the Crystal Cathedral in Southern Cal...may we be like this child, running without shame, into the arms she knows will catch her.