My father had this painting of Jesus hanging in his home. When we first saw it, I dismissed it, calling it “James Garner as Jesus.” Mrs. P and I had many a chuckle over that down the years. The image seemed so perfectly to reflect mid-century Midwestern America. I saw it as an interesting but somewhat amusing relic.  

When I close my eyes and try to picture Jesus, I would see a different figure (to my father’s chagrin, I’m sure): one teaching while surrounded by a sometimes puzzled but always rapt crowd, or one holding a stone in his hand while using the power of his presence to stay the hand of a mob.  

Not Jim Rockford.   

When my father died eleven years ago, my brother got many of his personal things. Visiting him a few years later, I was shocked to find that, among those effects he had taken that picture, which was hanging in his apartment. 

It shocked me because this rose-colored image of Jesus didn’t seem to fit my brother’s character.

I mean, my father was an evangelistic Christian—a holy roller—whose deeply religious soul, suppressed to a degree, perhaps, as a young man, was rejuvenated when he found the evangelical church, where he resonated with the truth that he felt when hearing the words of the Gospels. That church, and those reborn and now fully realized beliefs, helped him fight the alcoholism that had cost him the life he had built earlier.  His faith was strong and vital to him. Still, he came from a time and a place where it would make sense for Jesus to look like James Garner. 

My brother came from a much different time and lived a wilder life. He had survived Vietnam and several years in the Marines. He had taken drugs my father had probably never heard of and been places that my father could not have imagined. He had lived for a time on the fringes of society experiencing things my father, even in his darkest times, never went through.  Often cynical and curmudgeonly outwardly, he hardly seemed to be ripe soil for James Garner as anything but a drinking body. And, yet, my brother wanted that picture of Jesus hanging in his home.  

That fact forced me to think about that picture some more. I needed to make sense of this shared embrace of an image that did nothing for me, a shared embrace that seemed to reach across a gulf of experiences. 

I realized that, of course, my father and brother had similarities, too. Both had a fundamental religiosity, although that might have been more latent than expressed for my brother for many years. Both had to fight demons. Both had lost their families and lived years without contact with their children. Both needed to believe in second chances. 

And perhaps that is why this view of Jesus worked for both of them. There he is, staring into the future, chin up, broad shoulders ready to take on any task, not looking back, not judging, confident, reassuring.  

They both needed to see that, every day. Who is to say that they were wrong?  

Words and picture © 2009 AtHome Pilgrim.

All Rights Reserved.