The Faces of Jesus
ABOUT
With timeless insight, Frederick Buechner meditates on the person, work, and life of Jesus Christ.
Reflecting on sculpture, canvas, fresco, and tapestry, Buechner presents us with his own portrait of the faces of Christ: ‘what I found myself doing’, he writes in Now and Then (1983), ‘was writing not in any sense either a scholar’s life of Christ or a complete life, but as much of a life as emerged from the pictures themselves.’
Beginning with the annunciation and nativity, Buechner journeys through the ministry, the Last Supper, the Passion, and the Resurrection of Christ, pausing over each work of art to draw out the life within it, and the life it represents:
He rises from the table to stand there in silence, and if, like a rose, time itself has a center, a heart, his face is that center, as faith beholds it, and all our times pulse out from it like petals as he raises his life to his lips, his death. […] So once again, for the last time or the first time, we face that face – all the ways men have dreamed it down the years, painted and sculpted it, scratched it into the teeth of whales, stitched it into wool and silk, hammered it out of gold. There it is.
NOTES
With timeless insight, Frederick Buechner meditates on the person, work, and life of Jesus Christ.
Reflecting on sculpture, canvas, fresco, and tapestry, Buechner presents us with his own portrait of the faces of Christ: ‘what I found myself doing’, he writes in Now and Then (1983), ‘was writing not in any sense either a scholar’s life of Christ or a complete life, but as much of a life as emerged from the pictures themselves.’