“Turn your eyes upon Jesus/Look full in His wonderful face/And the things of earth will grow strangely dim/in the light of his glory and grace” – Helen H. Lemmel, 1922

How do I turn my eyes to look full in the face of Jesus? I can’t literally see the face of a human whose body of flesh and blood and hair and bone has not been visible on earth for two thousand years. A body buried in a grave or mummified in a tomb somewhere could be exhumed. But instead of a face, we might just see a skull.

Obviously, the language of the song is poetic. But it isn’t metaphorical. At least not completely. The ‘eyes’ are a metaphor for my conscious attention, because I don’t literally ‘see’ with my mind’s ‘eye’. I attend with my whole ‘self’, whatever that is. I use my ‘heart’ which is not an organ, my ‘mind’ which is not a software, my ‘spirit’ which is not a ghost, and my ‘strength’ which is not a muscle.

But the face of Jesus is a literal human face, with skin and hair and eyes of certain colors and teeth of a particular arrangement and condition. It can be referred to metaphorically, just as someone who hasn’t seen me in a while might say “it’s good to see your face again” even though what they really mean is my whole person, which this face simply represents. But the face of Jesus can’t only be metaphorical because we know it also to have been literally embodied like the face of any other human.

In that case, it might seem like a loss that we don’t know what the human face of Jesus looks like. Conjectures have been made somewhat pseudo-scientifically. Even more unlikely representations have been made devotionally. One advantage of not knowing is that people from all cultures have made the face of Jesus their own. Jesus was no more European than he was African or Asian or Meso-American or Aboriginal. But in the absence of a single objectively definitive physical face, a myriad of subjectively meaningfully expressions are freer to flourish. I suspect this may have been by divine design.

Put simply, when we turn our eyes upon the face of Jesus, we use our imagination. We quite honestly make-believe. We conjure up a conceptual representation that is fundamentally limited by our imaginative ability, and yet also simultaneously freed by it. I don’t ordinarily dwell too meticulously on the specific qualities of the face of Jesus I imagine, though I think some people do. What matters most for any of us is that Jesus has a face – a human face. And the most important feature of that face isn’t its skin tone or hair color or eye shape or any of that. Rather it is the one thing Jesus himself taught was more important than anything else: love.

We can imagine the human face of Jesus who loves us because we have seen at least some human faces full of love before, if only briefly and imperfectly. And I don’t think Jesus minds at all if we imagine his face all ‘wrong’ from a purely aesthetic perspective, so long as we get it ‘right’ in its relational dimension.

But this post was supposed to be about what we turn away from when we turn our attention fully to Jesus. What are the ‘things of earth’ that ‘grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace’? Maybe next time . . .