HUMAN, a vital Word for our Lenten Message Board, guides our self-reflection with Jesus as our model. I’m especially interested in the humanness that makes Jesus like everyday us, that encourages our everyday best: his vulnerable emotions beyond his righteous anger and final suffering. In this overwhelming Now, our own emotions are in constant play, and deserve respect.

Because we are emotionally alive and because Scripture focuses more on the man-god’s divinity than his humanness, we’ve long fashioned our own emotional Jesus, in our own varying terms. Online, you’ll find quite an array in devotional sources, resources for children, music, plays/movies, and art worldwide.

Here are examples in images from various communities across time.

This Jesus is far from the regal infant god! Netherlandish Christians of the 15th century instead transformed a Byzantine icon of the tender human mother into one of mutual human love, with Jesus’ “belly button,” sign of bodily birth, emphasizing his humanness. Such a devotional image for the home not only gives everyday form to a Christian mystery (the incarnation of God within a human); it celebrates loving human connection as essential to everyday life.

This work marks the spiritual renewal of its 19th-century maker, an eminent French Realist painter of elegant modern city life whose Catholic reawakening in midlife profoundly transformed his art. The experience prompted a new approach to the sketchy Scriptural account of Jesus’ tears at seeing his friend Lazarus’ tomb (John 11:35-36). Where most images represent a stoic Jesus standing before the shrouded Lazarus or his tomb, heralding the imminent miraculous revival, Tissot’s watercolor gives only Jesus’ anguished collapse. He becomes another human in pain, as he grieves with Lazarus’ sisters and friends. John’s account notes witnesses exclaimed: “Behold how he loved him!” Christ Wept forms part of Tissot’s 350 watercolors of Christ’s life that drew multitudes in a wildly successful traveling exhibition, then published in international editions of the Bible and devotional texts that are still famous. These watercolors became powerful modern devotional images especially in private, up close. Though only c. 7x9 inches, Tissot’s rendering of quiet emotional pain, drawing on the intensity of human interconnectedness, moves me deeply.

Finally, people often ask online why Scripture doesn’t describe Jesus smiling or laughing. Recent Christian offerings suggest our hunger for both, like this startling contemporary print, one of many on this subject (several with Jesus of color):

Man or god, Jesus’ huge smile and bear hug for the fragile steady and lighten us all.

For me, all these characterizations resonate today, reminding us how precious is the human who feels and gives emotionally, providing the solace of connectedness within darkness and loss.

—Suzanne Glover Lindsay, St. Stephen’s historian and curator