Retouching Jesus

Forget those darkrooms and their smelly chemicals. Now the computer offers you a cleaner and surer method of retouching or even redesigning old photos. With a scanner into which you can feed negatives, photos or color slides, and with a device for hooking that unit into a personal computer, you can be in the retouching business. The system allows you to enlarge images and to doctor details. You may also replace a background, adjust colors, mix images from two shots or make a photo look hand-colored. You can enhance a friend’s face or even superimpose a dog’s head upon his shoulders.

Unfortunately, the amateur photographer is not the only one who might engage in the trickery of retouching. Jesus has become the most redesigned person in history. Using verses uprooted from their context one can produce any image of Jesus which satisfies his own agenda.

One glaring example of a make-over of Jesus is to argue His social life made Him a "party animal." This may be trendy and popular; it may fulfill an iconoclastic ego, but it is not right. To characterize Jesus in this manner is to caricature Him.

Words have connotations as well as denotations, and the current connotations of such expressions as "to party" and "party school" should not be associated with Jesus. Granted Jesus "ate with publicans and sinners," but He did it on His terms and not to be "one of the boys." In explaining His action, He himself said that He came "to call sinners to repentance."

When I see the way some have exploited the social meals of Jesus, I feel it was not just the Pharisees who misunderstood the purpose of His attendance and His conduct when there.

Marlin Connelly

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