My Baptist grandmother kept a reproduction of a painting on her bedroom wall. It was entitled “Head of Christ,” painted by Walter Sallman in 1941. If you saw it, you would know it; it was a seemingly ubiquitous painting in homes and churches for decades. It’s a Europeanized portrayal of Christ, and we can say with some certainly that it looked nothing like what the real Jesus must have looked like. But as a child, when I thought of Jesus, or when I “saw” Jesus, this was the image that came to mind.
Few of us will claim that we’ve “seen Jesus.” We might say we’ve experienced Jesus,” but a claim to have seen him is something else again. But a number of people through history said that they had seen the real Jesus. It started with the disciples, as recorded in the gospels, who saw him before and after his death. Stephen saw him moments before he was dragged to his death by stoning. Paul was blinded by the light of Jesus on the road to Damascus. The Apostle John saw Jesus on the Isle of Patmos, in a vision that became the Book of Revelation.
And the visions continued beyond the apostolic age, right up to our own time. In Seeing Jesus: Visionary Encounters from the First Century to the Present, Robert Hudson tells the stories of people who said they saw Jesus, transforming their own lives and the world around them.
Martin of Tours stopped an invasion of France by Islamic forces. St. Jerome translated the Bible into Latin, creating the version the church knew for a thousand years. Francis of Assisi founded a monastic order. George Fox founded the Quakers. The teenaged William Blake saw Jesus in Westminster Abbey. And add to this list Sojourner Truth, Mother Teresa, Charles Finney, Oral Roberts, Julian of Norwich, St. Anthony of Egypt. And many, many others.
Robert Hudson
Hudson isn’t trying to argue whether these people did or didn’t really see the face of Jesus. That’s not his point. As he says, the skeptic in him doubts, while the mystic in him says “How do you know it wasn’t?” Instead, Hudson tells their stories.
And what great stories he tells. He has an insightful look at John and the Book of Revelation, suggesting it should be read as poetry. He explains how the emperor Constantine sought the blessing of the desert father St. Anthony. Simeon Antonov was a lusty, world-loving carpenter living on the steppes of Russia who became a monk on Mount Athos in Greece. Joseph Smith founded the Mormons. Sojourner Truth became a symbol of abolition. What’s clear is that something happened in these people’s lives, and the lives of others, that was both profound and transformational.
Hudson has published 11 previous books, including The Poet and the Fly: Art, Nature, God, Mortality, and Other Elusive Mysteries; Kiss the Earth When You Pray: The Father Zosima Poems; The Monk’s Record Player: Thomas Merton, Bob Dylan, and the Perilous Summer of 1966; The Art of the Almost Said: A Christian Writer’s Guide to Writing Poetry; Beyond Belief: What Martyrs Said to God; and Thomas Dekker’s Four Birds of Noah’s Ark: A Prayer Book from the Time of Shakespeare. His articles and poetry have been published by Christianity Today, The Other Side, The Mennonite, The Seneca Review, Mars Hill Review, and other magazines and literary journals. He lives in Michigan.
Seeing Jesus is a gem of a book, filled with fascinating stories and equally fascinating insights. These are people who saw Jesus, or believed they saw Jesus. The vision and the belief were sufficient to help change the world.
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