I think you know a lot about Jesus’ body…so I invite you to close your eyes and picture some things.

Picture Jesus as a baby, his tiny body wrapped in swaddling clothes lying in a manger…Jesus as a 12 year old boy, walking with his family to Jerusalem, and sitting in the temple… Jesus as an adult talking to fishermen by the sea of Galilee…Jesus eating and drinking with his friends at a party in Cana…Jesus reaching out and touching a leper…Jesus holding a child…Jesus making a whip out of cords, charging through the temple overturning tables…Jesus kneeling and praying…Jesus spitting on his hands and making mud, smearing it on a blind man’s eyes…Jesus breaking bread on a hillside…Jesus walking on water…Jesus being whipped, carrying a cross, being crucified…Jesus’  dead body laid in a tomb…Jesus’ body risen, scars on his hands and feet…Jesus crouching down by a fire, cooking fish on the beach.

Now open your eyes.  Some of you, I can guess, had no problem picturing Jesus’ body doing all these things in your mind’s eye. We know about Jesus’ body from birth to death because the four gospels tell us about Jesus, God incarnate.  God with human flesh, God with skin on.  These are the stories in the gospels.

But I want to preach about what is not in the bible this morning.  I want to preach primarily today about the missing verses.  I invite you to close your eyes again and picture Jesus, with the verses that are not telling us about Jesus’ body.  Picture Jesus…Jesus  was handsome…Jesus had a purple birthmark covering half his face….Jesus was a very hairy man…Jesus was very strong and muscular…Jesus was missing one of his front teeth…Jesus weighed 350 pounds…Jesus walked with a limp…Jesus was a very tall man…Jesus had six toes on one of his feet…Jesus was bald…Jesus had beautiful eyes.

OK, you can open your eyes.  Well, that was probably a bit weird.  We know a lot about Jesus’ bodybut there are no verses that tell us what Jesus looked like.  Any of those things I asked you to picture could have been true.  I wonder if you’ve ever thought of this before, that even though we know so much about what Jesus’ body did, we know nothing about what Jesus looked like.  The gospels do not say one word about Jesus’ physical appearance.  It’s remarkable really, and I think it’s striking for usbecause we live in a culture that worships at the altar of physical appearance.

In the Old Testament the prophets often talk about Israel worshipping other gods…the Israelities would build an altar and worship Baal or whoever.  The prophets were adamant that these altars to false gods should be destroyed.  Well I think that in our society, from the time we are young to the time we are old, we are taught to worship at the pretty/ugly altar.  We are taught to be loyal to a false god that would tell us there are two types of people…beautiful people and ugly people, and that beautiful people are good and ugly people are bad.  Our culture, through TV, movies, through newspapers and magazines, promotes concepts of what is beautiful and what is ugly.  Of course these categories are slippery and difficult to hang onto.  Television programs show us only beautiful  people.  As we walk out the door, billboards show us beautiful people, and when we open a magazine, there are more beautiful people.

What does it mean to be beautiful in our culture?   According to the pictures held up for us everywhere, beautiful is to be young.  To have smooth skin.  To have smooth, white skin.  To have perfect teeth.  To have thick hair.  To have even features.  To have a thin body.   For women, to have an hourglass figure, for men, to have broad shoulders and  a muscular body.  And even with all those things going for you it’s still a toss-up.  As every beauty pageant shows…there’s beautiful and then there’s really beautiful.  The god of the pretty/ugly altar is very difficult to please!

Our culture equates beauty with goodness.  From the earliest stories, the heroes of the fairytale were always beautiful while the stepmother and the witch were ugly.  This stereotyping is present in almost every show or movie we watch.  Whether it’s a mystery, or a sit-com, the villain is often ugly, the main characters are usually beautiful.  In a movie like Lord of the Rings, for example, the bad characters are anyone who limps,  who has bad teeth or an irregular face, while the good people are all white and handsome or pretty.  Our culture tells us that how you look on the outside is the most important thing.  It’s the altar you should worship at.

And yet as Christians we worship a Saviour whose appearance is a mystery!  The gospels are a direct challenge to all who worship at the altar of physical appearance.  We know nothing about what Jesus’ body looked like because it did not matter.  It simply did not matter what Jesus looked like.  Jesus was our Saviour, and whether he had brown hair or blond hair, brown skin or white skin, whether he was short or tall, overweight or thin, it did not matter at all.

It’s interesting that artists uniformly picture Jesus as handsome.  Have you ever seen a picture of a very heavy Jesus, or of a balding Jesus, or a Jesus missing teeth?  It might have been startling or seemed almost sacrilegious that I asked you to picture a saviour who was not physically perfect or beautiful.  Jesus was God, so we think he had to be perfect, he had to be handsome.  But the gospels tell us a different story.  The gospels break down the pretty/ugly altar by ignoring it completely.

But our world does not ignore this altar, and it’s hard to live in a world where everyone is worshipping at the pretty/ugly altar.  It’s hard for young people particularly.  We form our identity as young people, and we wonder, “How do people see me?  How do I look?”  And because of the pretty/ugly altar we ask, “Am I one of the beautiful people or one of the ugly people?”

When I was a teenager, our youth group was having a car wash on a fine summer day.  A boy, a boy I really liked, said to me, in a tone of voice loud enough for a dozen other young people to hear, “Boy, your toes are really ugly.”  And he pointed to my feet, just in case people didn’t know what he was talking about.  A dozen people turned their heads and looked down at my toes.  It was a mortifying experience!

As a teenager I was worried about a lot of things.  I was worried about my hair, I was worried about my face, I was worried about my clothes.  I was worried about my skin and whether I had pimples, I was worried about the fact that I didn’t have a tan.  I was worried about my fingernails, I was worried about my body shape and size…I was worried about a lot of things! But up until that moment, I had never worried, not once, about what my toes looked like.  And now suddenly I was faced with the reality that there were categories for toes…and my toes were apparently in the ugly category.  After that experience,  I remember staring intently at my toes.  “Are they ugly?” I would ask myself.  I started to look at other girl’s toes.  “Are those toes beautiful?”  And of course the bottom line is, what could you possibly do about what your toes look like?  I did the one thing I could do, I never wore sandals to youth group again!

We remember what people say about our bodies, perhaps especially the comments that would put us in the ugly camp, because more than almost anything, we want to be in the beautiful camp.  We want to be there because those people have more fun…and are more successful.  Everyone loves beautiful people, it seems.  And did you know that tall people make more money?  Studies show that if you control for education and experience, for every inch of height, you earn $1000 more per year.  Someone who is 5’ 6” will make $6,000 less than someone who is 6 feet tall.  This is true for men and women…tall is beautiful, tall is successful.

This week I did a study where I read every verse in the bible, both Old and New Testaments, that had the words “body,” or “beautiful,” or “handsome” in it. I found that in the Old Testament we do hear about the appearance of people’s bodies.  Sarah was beautiful, Leah’s eyes were lovely, Rachel was graceful and beautiful. Joseph was handsome, Saul was handsome, David was handsome and had  beautiful eyes.  Bathsheba was very beautiful, Tamar was beautiful, Esther was fair and beautiful.

But when we get to the New Testament, descriptions about people’s bodies are strangely absent.  There is no verse describing what Mary, or Elizabeth, or Peter, or John, or Paul looked like.  There is no verse that says, “God chose Mary because she was the most beautiful girl in Israel.”  No verse that says, “Jesus took the cutest child and set it among them and said, ‘Be like this child’.”  There is no verse, “Jesus gathered the tallest, most handsome men to be his disciples,” or “Jesus reached out and touched the most attractive leper and healed him.”

This lack of physical description in New Testament is not a simple oversight.  Jesus  broke down the  pretty/ugly altars of physical appearance because he saw people for who they were.  He saw them asprecious and loved in the sight of God: each person a gift, each body beautiful, because each body is a temple of the holy spirit. 

As Christians we are challenged to worship at God’s altar, to make our bodies temples.  We long to be filled with God’s spirit.  We are called to cast down the pretty/ugly altars and see people as God sees them.  We are called to see deeper than skin deep, and to see into people’s hearts, just as Jesus did.

Now I think we do this sometimes.  I wonder whether you have ever had this experience.  You meet someone and you think, “They are gorgeous… strikingly so! “  But as you get to know them, you realize that they are not a nice person.  In fact they are mean, they are dishonest and untrustworthy, they are lying all the time.  You get to know their character over a long period of time and it is not pretty!

And a year or two later if you hear someone refer to that person as pretty or handsome, you will be startled , because you realize that you don’t see them that way at all.  Their actions have influenced how you view them.  In the same way you might meet someone and initially think that they are quite ugly but as you get to know them and you see how kind and truly good they are…you’ll look back and wonder, “Why did I think they were unattractive?”

I saw an old movie once that challenged this stereotype that pretty or handsome people are goodand ugly people are bad.  The movie was called “Freaks” and it was made in 1932.  It was set in a circus.  Actually the director of the show used actual circus performers for the movie.  In that time period, circuses weren’t like our current Cirque du Soleil,  but included people who were different.  People with birth defects and strange genetic conditions worked in the circus so that people could look at them.  These people were called freaks, and this was the freak show part of the circus.

In the movie there are two normal people who are beautiful in every cultural way.  She is young, slim, with blond hair and regular features and nice teeth.  He is tall, dark and handsome and very muscular.  Their appearance fits every stereotype of beauty.  The rest of the cast is an unbelievable assortment of differences…dwarves with hooked noses or irregular facial features, a man covered with hair, a man who was born with no arms or legs, and so on.

The startling thing about the movie is that the people who are different and would not be culturally considered beautiful, are the ones who keep showing  hospitality, love and kindness.  The “normal” people turn out to be traitors filled with meanness and hatred.  The movie is called Freaks because it challenges your categories, “What makes a person a freak?”  It challenges you to look deeper than skin deep and to look at people’s hearts.  In a way it’s a challenge to all who worship at the pretty/ugly altar.  (Now I don’t want to necessarily recommend that movie because it has a horrible ending, and it is a horror picture.  But it’s a hard movie to find, so you probably won’t ever see it!)

As Christians we reject that pretty/ugly altar.  We believe that God created our bodies.  We don’t choose which body we want. The body we are given is the body we are given--and it’s a gift from God.  You could have been born into a body that had no arms, or into a body with a giant birthmark on your face, or you could have been born with a body like Angelina Jolie or Brad Pitt.  But would you be any different?  You are still the same person inside.

Our bodies are created by God, who saw us in our mother’s wombs.  Everyone is beautiful in God’s eyes, because every person is a temple.  Every person holds the breath that God has given us.  We can spend our lives trying to fill our bodies more with God’s spirit, or we can spend our lives working against that.

We can either seek God’s presence to fill us more and more, or we can go our own way, and actively work to fill that temple with other things.  What is beautiful, what is truly beautiful in God’s eyes, is whether we are drawing close to God’s heart.

I have an assignment for you this week…I want you to unmask the pretty/ugly altars all around you.   This week, as a follower of Jesus, refuse to judge people by their appearance.  Christians don’t make negative comments about people’s appearance…their body size or shape, their facial features.  Catch yourself if you make judgements about what people are like by their appearance and say to yourself, “I refuse to worship at the pretty/ugly altar.”

Where else do we find the pretty/ugly altar?  Too often it is often found in the mirror in our own house.

I challenge you this week to look in the mirror and say, “My body is a gift from God…thank you God for this body.”  As an adult, maybe you’ll see a teenager obsessing over their appearance.  Gently ask them, “Are you worshipping at the pretty/ugly altar?  I think you’re beautiful just the way God made you.”  Or as a teenager, maybe you’ll see your mom looking in the mirror worried about all her wrinkles.  Gently ask them, “Are you worshipping at the pretty/ugly altar? I think you are beautiful, just the way God made you.”

So the good news I am sharing with you today is that we live in bodies, bodies that we have not chosen, but that were given to us as a gift, bodies that can be filled with God’s spirit.  We have the power to reject the tyranny of the pretty/ugly altars of this world because we worship a Saviour who broke those altars down by treating everyone as beautiful.  Can any body say Amen?