The New Yorker, What It Means to See Jesus:
A young man once told me that he had seen the face of Jesus in the trunk of a chestnut tree, the bark moving as if it were flesh. An older woman told me that Christ had appeared to her in the afternoon light that poured through her hospital window. A father who was dying of lung cancer confided that he had looked up at a crucifix years ago in a church and watched as the body hanging there writhed and wriggled, coming alive before his eyes; it had been so terrifying that he had never previously told anyone.
I cherish such stories, and collect them the way others do rare works of art or first editions or vintage cars. Even secondhand stories will do, which is why I took so much pleasure from Robert Hudson’s Seeing Jesus: Visionary Encounters from the First Century to the Present.
Images of Jesus are all around us, but Hudson’s book is about people who claim to have really seen Jesus, the way the disciples did in the days and years after his death—crucifixion wounds fresh, descending and ascending from heaven onto hilltops, blinding rays of lights all about him: the sort of psychologically upending seeing we do in our lives from time to time, as when we see our ex-husband and go ashen, or see our future wife and blush.
Hudson’s book is organized according to two taxonomies: types of seers (disciples, ascetics, mystics, trailblazers, and moderns) and types of seeing (appearances, apparitions, and visions). The first of these taxonomies is essentially a chronology, which starts with those who saw Christ shortly after his death and ends with contemporary seers. It’s less useful than the second taxonomy, which is borrowed from mystical studies and offers a way of organizing these kinds of sightings. What Hudson calls appearances are communal visions, with more than one person seeing the same image of Jesus at the same time; apparitions are when Jesus seems to be present in the physical world, as though anyone can see him, yet only the visionary actually does so; with visions, the visionary alone can see Jesus, and is fully aware that no one else can. …
Hudson’s reluctance to legitimatize any or all of the visions that he has chosen to include is curious in a book with a markedly faithful tone, published by a religious press. He notes his own Christian faith, and confesses to yearning for a vision of Christ, yet he is skeptical of all such visions. …
[A]t its core, “Seeing Jesus” does have a theological conviction that may intrigue the doubters—and assuage the devout, since it comes directly from Christ. As Hudson writes in his epilogue, “Centuries of Christian thinkers—most of whom were not mystics—have told us that we see the face of Jesus every day, walking the streets of every city, in the face of every person.” He quotes Nicholas of Cusa, who wrote: “In all faces is seen the Face of faces, veiled, and in a riddle.” The riddle is the judgment that Jesus shares in the Gospel of Matthew, when he says that on Judgment Day the righteous will be separated from the unrighteous, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. They will be judged, Jesus says, according to how they treated the least of their brethren, for, as the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer later explicated, “he comes in the form of the beggar, of the dissolute human child in ragged clothes, asking for help. He confronts you in every person that you meet. As long as there are people, Christ will walk the earth as your neighbor, as the one through whom God calls you, speaks to you, makes demands on you.”
Most Christians understand this to mean that if they were to see Jesus, he would not look like the man in Warner Sallman’s famous painting or the seated figure in Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.” The visions of Jesus that Christians are explicitly told to look for are not supernatural or spectral but humble and human: we are commanded to look for Christ in the faces of one another. Even if Hudson isn’t sure what to make of all the visions in his book, he believes this, too, and ends “Seeing Jesus” with a story from the pandemic, when he meets a panhandler outside a café and cannot help but want to help him, partly because he has been thinking so much about what it means to see Christ.
After handing over a twenty dollar bill, Hudson asks the man his name: Josh, he says as he walks away—the Anglicized form of Yeshua, the Hebrew name of Jesus. “The skeptic in me says, ‘How’d you know it was him?’ ” Hudson writes, in the last lines of the book. “The mystic in me says, ‘How do you know it wasn’t?’ ”
