The Face of Jesus?

Do you see Him in the picture?

I was just sitting down to relax on our back porch, after splitting a cord of firewood for the winter, with beverage of choice in hand, when I noticed a face of someone looking at me from the trees! I took a double take and then a third, a couple gulps of my beverage of choice, and, sure enough, the face was still there!

I called my son Richard to come out of the basement, away from his computerized war game, and see. At first he didn’t, but then, in time, he saw, and said, matter-a-factly, “Wow”, and returned downstairs to his game.

I called my wife Marilyn to come out and see! She looked, saw nothing. Then when I more carefully directed her attention, she saw, but said, “Jesus? Looks more like the Jolly Green Giant,” and went inside to finish cooking dinner.

I sent the picture to some friends and most couldn’t see him, but my middle son, Peter (who’s discerning priesthood), replied, “Whoa!”

Do you see Him yet?

I remember once, driving in my car listening to the radio, and hearing about a man who was storing his George Foreman grill in his refrigerator because he clearly saw the face of Jesus in the congealed grease! We’ve all had people show us pictures of Jesus in cloud formations or heard of people seeing the face of Jesus or Mary in the rocks of a hillside or the dented side of an oil storage tank. What do we do with this stuff?

Once Jesus healed a man who was deaf and couldn’t speak. Afterwards, He charged the man “to tell no one” (Mk 6:36). Of course, the now hearing and speaking man was beside himself with joy, and “the more [Jesus] charged them, the more zealously they proclaimed it.” Biblical scholars have called this the Messianic Secret, or, as the footnotes in the RSVCE explain, “Knowing their nationalistic views about the Messiah to come, Jesus wished to avoid a tumult” (note for Mark 5:43).

This certainly is plausible, but I have always understood this differently: the healing of the man was primarily for him and his personal spiritual benefit, and not really for anyone else, for the purpose and power of the miracle too often loses its meaning in the telling. Certainly the man’s friends and family were probably impressed by what happened, but did they too quickly see everything in political Messianic terms, and miss the point of it: God, through this man, Jesus, had touched this deaf and speechless man because God loved him! God wanted this otherwise discouraged and lost man to know that the distant Creator of the Universe loved him personally! On the days that followed, were they all caught up in proclaiming Jesus as their long awaited political savior, or did the miracle cause them to fall to their knees in recognition of the proof of the reality and love of God?

Do you see Him yet? Maybe the picture to the right will help. Now, I don’t want a stream of buses descending upon the peacefulness of our farm! Because, frankly, I think this “miracle” was intended only for me. I had lately been feeling a bit of discouragement, particularly about whether there was any altruistic purpose to focusing so much time and effort into this farm! And as I sat, sweating, grumbling, close to swearing, there He was.

He has done this many times in my life, in a myriad of different ways, “miraculously appearing,” giving a glimpse of His love and nearness, just to remind me that He is here and very, very real.

Once years ago I was skiing, and poised on the pinnacle of the tallest slope, ready to descend through a freezing low-visibility fog, and as I reached up to lower my goggles, I accidentally bumped my eyes and both contacts popped out onto the snow!! I CANNOT SEE WITHOUT EITHER GLASSES OR CONTACTS! How was I ever to get down? So I dropped to my knees, uttered a quick desperate prayer, “Please, please Jesus, help me!” And wouldn’t you know it? I immediately found both contacts in the snow!! This was nothing short of a miracle! No one else was all that impressed—it lost its power and meaning in the telling—but I knew: it was Jesus reminding me just how close He is to all of us. And I thanked and praised Him! It was no coincidence; it was not because of my skills at finding needles in haystacks; it was the gentle nudge of His love.

If these miracles, like the face of Jesus in our trees—and, yes, Marilyn was right, in this particular instance, He does seem to have come in the image of the Jolly Green Giant—if these miracles are meant primarily as private, personal reminders of God’s intimacy, then why am I proclaiming this to the world in my blog? Because I believe God is doing this to every one of us all the time. The question is are we looking for Him, and do we recognize Him, and His miraculous interventions, or just writing everything off as coincidences or figments of our imagination?

A good friend, Brother Rex (a diocesan hermit) sent me this wonderful quote in response to the picture:

Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God,
But only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round and pluck blackberries.
– Elizabeth Barrett Browning