Sunday Sermon: Blond-Hair, Blue-Eyed Jesus and the Social Rebel.

I see all these portraits of Christ Jesus as a beautiful man with light skin, blue eyes, blond hair. This is the Jesus who “loves me, because the Bible tells me so.”

While there’s a measure of self-seeking to this supposed imagery and Bible reference, remember that Jesus was Semitic … with dark features. And, if Isaiah is to be believed, “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him …” (Isa 53:2).

Then, there’s that other Jesus: the social justice rebel. He’s the Jesus who challenged the establishment: the social, religious, and political system of his day.

There’s the fully human, historical Jesus. And, also, the Jesus presumed to be fully God.

Who’s the real Jesus? The benign, children-welcoming Messiah of our Sunday School lessons? Or the social rabble-rouser rabbi who turned the tables on money-changers and confronted the elders of his society with a new way of seeing and doing things?

Maybe both are aspects of the real Jesus.

After all, they’re dual aspects of humanity … as was Jesus.

Remember how Jesus answered when baited by “religious” bystanders about whether they – an oppressed people in bondage – were to give tribute to Rome by paying their taxes to the empire?

“You hypocrites, why are you trying to trap me? Show me the coin used for paying the tax,” Jesus replied. They brought him a denarius, and he asked them, “Whose image is this? And whose inscription?”

“Caesar’s,” they replied. Then he said to them, “So, render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”

We should do no less.

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