The Faces of Jesus

Jesus in a fish stick. His mother on a grilled cheese sandwich. Christ with his angels on the cross in the shower.

Is this fiction from the mind of a food critic?

A new mass marketing scheme?

Neither.

Increasingly, Jesus, Mary and even the angels in heaven have chosen to forego traditional theophanies, or conventional methods of communication, and have instead revealed themselves in wood splinters and culinary mistakes.

Fred Whan, a Canadian from Kingston, Ontario, after burning a fish stick at dinner, found, with the help of his son, the face of Jesus on his fish stick. A year later he took it out of the freezer and put it up for auction on eBay.

Diana Duyser of Ft. Lauderdale declared she had found an image of the Virgin Mary on her decade-old burnt grilled cheese sandwich. She, too, auctioned it off, selling it to GoldenPalace.com for $28,000.

Elsewhere, halfway around the world, Remona Peterson of Lavender Hill, South Africa, saw the silhouette of Christ on the cross surrounded by his angels in her frosted bathroom window.

A parishioner at St. John of God Church in Somerset, Massachusetts, found the Virgin Mary’s face in the wood grain of their church altar.

What do we make of this? Has God abandoned his usual means of revelation and finally come to us in what we all really understand … food, wood and water spots? Or have our imaginations run away with us?

Dan French of The Examiner, commenting on the images, writes that it seems that “God has a plan for me, and that plan is to sell you his mug in my beer mug for four grand!”

No matter what you think about these “miraculous” images, these latter-day theophanies do point to a yearning in our culture to find Christ in everyday, ordinary things. Dan French explains, “We’re all looking for the same thing, some faith-worthy sign to give us at least a fleeting clue on how to live our best lives and be our best selves in a confused, nearly unnavigable world.”

We dream of touching what we know only by faith, and whether it be in an old sandwich, some burnt fish sticks, our own church altar or even in the frosted glass of a shower stall, these images let us glimpse with our own eyes the unseen Christ.

The problem here is that these cheesy images also pose a real danger to our faith. How in the world do you lift up a God worthy of praise and thanksgiving when you’ve just found him on a fish stick? Where are my faith and my praise for a transcendent God when that God is not much more than a commodity on eBay?

After all, a God we have to save from the garbage disposal or that emerged from our own culinary mistake does nothing worthy of praise. Thanking a God we can sell or own is a waste of our time.

Not to disparage the faith of some of the faithful who genuinely marvel at the simulacra they find in off places or objects. Not to say that their faith isn’t fervent.

But perhaps we can grow out or beyond this. I mean, if you paw through a pile of 200 potatoes you’re going to eventually find one that looks like Richard Nixon.

Psalm 100 urges us to prepare for the coming of the Lord by calling us back to worship, thanksgiving and praise. And, of course, there’s not even a hint that we should look for iconic representations of deity in potatoes, fish sticks or tortillas.

The first words in Hebrew name it a psalm of thanks. What follows this introduction are both the reasons and the words to thank and praise our God and King.

It tells us we should praise God for four reasons: because God made us, because God loves us, because we belong to God, and because God is all around us.

First, God is our maker. He is not made by us. The “miraculous images” of Jesus, Mary and the angels were all made by human hands. The sandwich was made by a mother. The fish stick was made by a worker. The glass, the dirt, the altar. All made by human beings.

Not so with God. Our thanksgiving comes because “It is he that made us …”(v. 3). We did not make him, nor did we fashion him in our image. Rather, we were made in his image. Scripture tells us: “in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). We are his creation. He is not ours.

Second, we are loved by God! We as people love many things that do not love us back. We love our cars and our homes. We love food or entertainment. None of these things can return our love.

We love a God who loved us first. Scripture tells us: “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4:10). God’s steadfast love and faithfulness last through all generations.

It is no accident that the psalmist ends the psalm, “For the Lord is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations.”

We give God thanks and praise for the sole reason that God loves us so much. God went into death itself to claim us as his own. God loved us before we even began to love him and for this he deserves our thanks and praise.

Third, God owns us. We do not own him. Each of the images belongs to someone. They were found, claimed, and oftentimes, sold to someone else. In essence, God has become the property of human beings.

When the psalmist writes: “we are his …”(v. 3) it is a statement of ownership. We belong to God in Christ, he does not belong to us. We do not and cannot own him, no matter what. Since we are his, it is fitting that we thank and praise him. As creations owned by a creator, we cry out in praise and thanksgiving for all he gives and does for us.

And fourth, God is all around us! Finally, we give God thanks and praise because Jesus Christ’s face is found, not on the burn marks of a baked piece of fish, but in the marks of life in the faces around us. “We are his people” and as his people, we discover Christ’s presence in the faces of the people with whom we live and work, and those with whom we don’t live and work — the needy, the marginalized, the less fortunate, those in prison, those on welfare, those who live in cardboard shacks, those who are different from us.

This is most significant. For in this the baked fish stick challenges us. We need not look for Christ who says “Whatever you did to one of the least of these my brethren, you do for me” (Matthew 25:40) in a piece of baked fish! We need not worry ourselves about the dirt marks on our shower stalls when he has promised to be in the faces of those around us. It should not be easier to see Christ in frosted glass than it is to see him in the faces of our neighbors.

If we long to see Christ, we need only to look around us. Christ is with us in the faces of our neighbors. In the people who do what Christ does for us as they care, provide, love and keep us safe. And in the people we are called to be Christ to, doing the same for them.

So don’t be looking for God in the drumstick of a leftover turkey. Find God in the faces of those gathered around your table, wandering the streets or conversing at the water cooler in the office.

And give thanks – because God made us, God loves us, we belong to God, and God is all around us.