Upgrading Jesus

Seven centuries ago the Flemish brothers Jan and Hubert Van Eyck painted the Ghent Altar Piece, a twelve-panel polyptych masterpiece, twenty-four individual paintings in all, one of the first to use oil paints on such a large scale. The center piece, "The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb," shows a varied congregation as they worship Christ, who appears here as a white lamb on an altar, pumping blood from his wounded breast.

A team of experts is currently at work to restore the painting to its pristine brilliance. They gained permission to peel off added coats of varnish and pigment after scientists used the latest radar imaging to prove that the buried original far outshines the subsequent accretions. Evidence reveals that two layers of overpainting separate the viewer from the original painting. Later (and lesser) artists, it seems, attempted to "improve" the piece.

Restorers testify without hesitation that these efforts, however well-intentioned, only obscured the work's original beauty. Now a gang of restorers from the Belgian Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage, backed by an international cabal of experts, is spending several years and upwards of a million dollars to undo the damage. The work involves softening and then lifting the intruding pigment using cotton swabs. In some cases, restorers wield scalpels to lift individual flakes and uncover the masters' brilliant brush-strokes.

One of the portions the interlopers messed with was that image of the sacrificial Christ. Hélène Dubois, the project's ramrod, says flatly: “The white lamb in the middle. . .I can assure you, is overpainted.”

Funny: They tried to improve Jesus but only obscured his beauty.

I sometimes wonder if our image of Jesus suffers from overpainting by generations of good-hearted theologians and pastors.

"He has no stately form or majesty," warns Isaiah 53.2, "that we should look upon him, no appearance that we should be attracted to him."

He was a man of color, a middle-eastern Jew, yet we have slathered white pigment over his olive skin and lightened his dark-tinted hair.

He flayed the greed of the rich but we have made him the ikon of capitalism.

He withered fig trees and thundered out woes and talked a lot about Hell, but we have soft-filtered his rugged teaching and transformed the Son of Man into the Son of Bland.

He demanded turned cheeks and second miles as the green card of the Kingdom of Heaven, but we have offered our world the concealed-carry Christ of the castle doctrine.

He performed miracles at the request of his oppressors and healed the children of foreigners, but we have made him a hard-core nationalist and border guard who turns away pilgrims.

He appears in eternity as a slain lamb who bears his scars as a reminder of the risky price of the project of peace, but we imprint those images only on pricey t-shirts which we remove at will.

Maybe the time has come for a costly, careful, time-consuming restoration. Perhaps we should, not recklessly, but righteously, X-ray our imaginings. Possibly we need to swipe a cleansing cloth over the accretions of our acculturated Christology. We might do well to take a spiritual solvent to our varnished ideas and a surgeon's scalpel to the bastardized blandishments of our beliefs.

I pray that no one ever leaves after sitting under our preaching and before our pulpits, only to murmur softly, "“The white lamb in the middle, I can assure you, is overpainted.”

For more details on this story, see "A Master Work, the Ghent Altarpiece, Reawakens Stroke by Stroke" By MILAN SCHREUER

For more on Jesus as a man of color, see Crystal Valentine's powerful poem.