corpus christi

Walking along the street yesterday evening, an emphatic gentleman clothed in a billboard advertising Eternal Salvation kindly handed me a leaflet featuring a colored illustration of a smiling, haloed Jesus ushering small children into an ivy-clad church: "Thanks", I said.
It was an interesting image, you know, the usual blue-eyed Messianic ideal, which made me want to turn around, waving the leaflet at my benefactor and yelling, "Hey. Wait a minute. This isn't Him! You've got a picture of the wrong guy on this. Jesus doesn't look like this at all!"
Obviously, with the exception of those who have unshakeable faith in the authenticity of the Turin Shroud, nobody really knows what Jesus actually looked like, although it is highly improbable, of course, that he was Caucasian with wavy, golden hair and neatly trimmed beard. He may have been black, olive, brown, tan, sandy yellow, conch red - "Bethlehem beige", even, in Ralph Lauren Speak - but God most certainly did not said His only son to Earth looking like a fresh-faced, shaggy-haired mid-seventies era High School English teacher wearing a dressing gown. One can only imagine the scene occurring in Heaven if Jesus had attempted to descend into the world in such a guise: "You are not going out of the Pearly Gates looking like that. Go back to your room and change into something more Biblical this minute."
I would have disposed of the leaflet in the garbage when I arrived home, but although I am the most vacillatingly undecided of agnostics, I can never bring myself to throw out anything possessing a religious connection, no matter how trivial the object may be or how tenuous the connection. I suppose this makes me superstitious. However, the one thing in this life I am sure of is this: it is better to be safe than sorry.