Saturday, December 29, 2001

Read: Matthew 25:31-46

Whenever I see a portrait of Jesus on the walls of many churches, I always experience personal doubt about the way in which the face of Jesus is portrayed with flowing brown hair, intending to emphasize Jesus' gentleness and dignity. I can imagine the difficulty expressing the many faceted personalities of Jesus the Christ on canvas can be. Many of us expect him to be what we feel embodies his role as Christ; kind yet decisive, warm-hearted but stern too, humble yet lofty, smart but strong, humorous yet tearful, and so on.

In my imagination, Jesus' face should first of all reflect his young and courageous heart as a revolutionary figure, because he was only in his early thirties, manifesting his identity with his convicted will to confront the status quo of the privileged people who despised the sinners with their rule of maintenance. He was all too human, in fact, too human to be made divine. He was not a man of religious sanctuary, or in other words, church, but a man of secular world. He challenged societal customs whenever these were the source of human injustice, because he loved the unlovable, those whom were not allowed to come into the sanctuary.

Even the way Jesus talks about eternal punishment and eternal life does not seem to be projecting into life after death. To me, the dimension of eternity is not to be calculated on a chronological scale, elongating our time span on earth into the infinite future in heaven. What is the use of living a thousand years if it is nothing more than wishful thinking only because we cannot endure the miserable conditions of life, in fact, without having changed any conditions of our painful life situations on this earth?

Eternity is the description of our present quality of life, meaning that if our current style of life has the seed of hope in our joyful future, it will surely bear its fruit here on earth. Otherwise, it will be threatened by the eternal procrastination of improbability. Yes, the seed is in our hearts, yet we have to make it sprout and grow. The soil of the systemic world structure has to be the very element wherein the seeds may find their place to be sown. I want to find the eternal dimension of life in the young immature face of Jesus, rather than in the old gray-bearded face of Christ.

Sungsoo Hans Hahn

Next Devotional | WUMFSA Homepage