The ‘grilled cheeses’ lead balloon
The Briefing used to run a section called ‘Lead Balloons—Ideas slightly too outrageous to be taken seriously’; and, truth to tell, I've been getting nostalgic. So rather than sit on my hands and dream about the past, I thought I'd pioneer a revival in the genre.
With the approach of Easter, I keep seeing posters of Jesus around the suburb I live in, advertising some walkabout on Good Friday. It's extremely annoying. I always feel that images of Christ teeter on the verge of—if not idolatry—at the very least, an unhelpful misrepresentation of someone whose real appearance we have no idea. Was Jesus really blond? The pictures I saw in Sunday school stories when I was little left me in no doubt that the answer was ‘yes’. But the Bible is consistently silent on the question, with the sole exception of Isaiah 53:2-3.
It got me thinking, though, because it is often reported that people see images of Jesus all over the place—in a photo of the snow, in their reheated pizza, in the shadows on a wall. One recent discovery reported the image of Mary, the mother of Jesus, appearing in a toasted grilled cheese sandwich that sold for quite a bit of money on eBay.
I wonder if there might be a case for reversing the trend of superstitious sightings of Christ which, it has to be said, are frequently associated with certain forms of less thought-out Roman Catholicism.
Do you think there might be value in a bit of Protestant religious artwork which, at first glance, appears to be an image of our Lord, but on closer inspection coalesces into a near-perfect representation of a Big Mac?