Mad Scientist
“Has anyone ever told you you look like a mad scientist?”
It was coffee hour. The questioner was maybe 20 years old, maybe 15. I can’t tell anymore.
Hearing a negative reply, she said, “Well, you do.” And after a bit of silence, she went on: “And that’s a compliment.”
Compliment received, I inquired their names (she was with a young man, younger than she to my eyes, but again, I can’t tell anymore). And I wondered what it meant, to look like a mad scientist, and for that to be a good thing.
Well, I thought, at least they didn’t say I look like Jesus.
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But what does it mean to look like Jesus?
Jorge Luis Borges, the great, blind Argentinian writer of short stories, has a parable called “Paradiso, XXXI, 108.” The title references a line from Dante—“was this, then, the fashion of thy semblance?”—a question posed by a traveler who beholds the image of Christ on the cloth with which, in pious story, Veronica touched his face as he carried his cross. Borges’ parable is about our loss of the face of God. We once had the image, but now it is gone. There are hints, but we lack the full image. “Paul saw it as a light which hurled him to the ground; John saw it as the sun when it blazes in all its force: Teresa of Leon saw it many times, bathed in a tranquil light, and could never determine the color of its eyes.”
Yet there is a marvel that Borges sees in our loss of Jesus’ image. Anyone might be a bearer of some feature that was also Christ’s. “A Jew’s profile in the subway is perhaps that of Christ; the hands giving us our change at a ticket window perhaps repeat those that one day were nailed to the cross by some soldiers.”
Indeed, “some feature of that crucified countenance” perhaps “lurks in every mirror.”
To look like Jesus is a possibility latent in every human being.
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How does Jesus look? He looks human. In him is revealed what it means to be human. All of the rest of us fall short; sin keeps us from being fully human. But despite falling short of full humanity, we still carry the possibility of looking like him.
Even if we look like a mad scientist.
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Out & About. This Sunday, the Day of Pentecost, I am to preach at Incarnation, 3966 McKinney Ave., Dallas, at the traditional services at 7:30, 9, and 11:15 a.m.