Don't Look Now

Abstract

He hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. To many, this ‘man of sorrows’ spoken of by the prophet Isaiah is an Old Testament prefiguration of Jesus Christ, ‘wounded for our transgressions … bruised for our iniquities … with his stripes we are healed’. Isaiah, interpreted in these terms, prophesies the role Christ is to play as our Saviour, while also stressing his physical lack of appeal. Christ is not to be understood primarily as a man of outer beauty, whose physical presence is desired or desirable. In the later gospels, the crowds and Roman soldiers mock and torture Jesus during the Passion. In other words, lack of true recognition, of a spiritual understanding of Christ's message and role on earth, is directly linked with his unappealing or grotesque appearance, culminating with his broken body on the cross. Only those who manage to look beyond his physical being are able to see his true beauty, which goes far beyond what one can see with one's own eyes.