Helen Tyte

What Did Jesus Look LIke?

Children in our Junior Church were drawing pictures of Jesus entering into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. They had all begun by sketching the donkey, with varying degrees of success. One child drew Jesus astride the colt as a stick figure with shocking pink hair, and another drew him in jeans and a T-shirt.

One little boy complained that he couldn’t draw Jesus properly, and asked if I could use my phone to show him a photograph of the actual scene for inspiration. I tried to explain that when Jesus rode into Jerusalem, about 2,000 years ago, that there were no cameras or ways of recording images other than artists’ impressions of the event. I went on to say that there were lots of drawings of Jesus, but that nobody really knew what he looked like.
One little girl who was yet to add Jesus to her picture announced, “Don’t worry Miss Helen,” as she began to draw furiously, “they soon will!”

The fact is that Jesus was a carpenter’s son, born in Israel and would have looked just like the other Jewish men around him at the time. There would have been nothing special about his appearance that would have set him apart from others in the crowd. What was on the outside did not matter, because what made Jesus stand out was how he treated those around him. He showed love, compassion and empathy, and stood up for the marginalised.
When each of us finally beholds our saviour I pray that we are all able to say the same about ourselves.