April 27, 2003
"Face Up To It"

Few things are as fascinating as a human face. Many, many songs have been written in tribute to the face, including one from a Broadway musical that goes like this: “Look at that face, just look at it. Look at that fabulous face of yours. I knew first look I took at it, you’ve got a face that the world adores. Look at those eyes, as wise and as deep as the sea. Look at that nose, it shows what a nose should be. As for that smile, it’s lyrical, friendly and warm as the summer’s day. That face is just a miracle. How could I ever find words to say, the way that it makes me happy, whatever the time or place, I’ll find in no book, what I find when I look at that face.”

When you come right down to it, the face is the only part of the body that really matters. Only the face can welcome or reject, smile or scowl, laugh or cry. For all of our body language, only facial features register emotions such as fear, anger, shame, scorn and pain. Only in the face can we eat and drink, speak and sing, taste and smell, breathe and kiss. The eyes are called the mirror of the soul. When we come to great crossroads of our life we talk about saving face, losing face or facing up to our responsibilities. If we reverse ourselves, it’s called an about face.

And in sports, especially in football, athletes talk about putting on their game face, which means maximizing one’s determination. That’s what Jesus was doing in today’s gospel lesson, which talks about him setting his face towards Jerusalem.

Americans worry greatly about other parts of their body, but they absolutely obsess about their face. Which department store department makes the greatest profit? The cosmetics counter, where glorified cold cream is sold for hundreds of dollars on the promise of eternal youth. What’s the hottest rage in cosmetic surgery? Botox injections, which inject deadly bacteria into the skin to flesh out wrinkles. Where did some women get those wrinkles? From face lifts.

I just saw Cher on TV the other night. It’s really amazing. Her skin is as tight as a snare drum. It really makes you wonder. Cher first came into the public eye 40 years ago, when she first began singing with Sonny Bono, and yet here she is, looking like a teenager. She must have had so many face lifts her ears are about to meet at the back of her head.

Plastic surgery is now looked upon as preventive maintenance that often begins in the teen years and is repeated regularly. According to Newsweek magazine, the number of aesthetic surgeries doubled from 1984 to 1999, and has doubled again since then.

In all this face peeling and stitching and blasting, I think we have neglected a statement that is clichéd but true: Beauty may be skin deep, but ugly goes right to the bone. That’s meant to be a joke, but it’s true. Physical beauty is the most superficial of attributes, but if we have neglected the character that resides within, all the surgery in the world won’t help when that ugliness rises to the surface.

One of the things I enjoy sometimes is just to go to some public place and watch the faces go past. Look how many are hard, sullen, or sad, artificially painted on to mask the pain that lies beneath, the absence of any joy. One translation of the Book of Isaiah says “The look on their faces testifies against them.” Many a face sags from the weight of the life that has been ill-led.

Sometimes we become part of the faceless mass because no one takes the time to really see us for the beautiful creations of God we are. But other times we deface that creation, like the nut who took a hammer to Michelangelo’s incredibly lovely statue the Pieta, breaking off pieces of the face of Mary the Mother of God. In Goethe’s Faust he writes of the Satantic Mephistopheles, “It was written on his brow that he had never loved a human soul.” The Bible speaks of people who “turn away their faces from God.” Sometimes sinners “hide their faces in shame,” as Adam and Eve did in the Garden of Eden.

Some people harden their faces in rebellion. Others try to mask the true condition of their face. Jezebel painted on her face to look beautiful and disguise the wickedness that lay beneath the surface. Others try to look miserable so they will win praise for their great sacrifices.

Lots of people today want to look like celebrities so they, too, can have their 15 minutes of fame.

But all of these are disguises that mock reality, because the outer layer, which is seen, does not reflect the truth of the inner layer, which is unseen.

Remember that Satan comes to us as an impersonator, the Lord of the false face. The Grim Reaper is depicted without a face at all, because spiritual death is faceless, devoid of the life-giving image of God.

In the Old Testament, the highest expression of spirituality was to seek the Lord’s face, to enter into his presence. A very few people were actually permitted to see his face.

But when God decided that the time was right, he revealed to the world God with a human face: his son Jesus Christ, and suddenly people everywhere were allowed to gaze on that face to their heart’s content. In all of the Gospels you will find not one word about the physical features of Jesus’ face. Each of us may use our imagination, to search our own heart to decide what Jesus looks like. Yet the record is clear about the many ways that Christ’s face revealed the mind and heart of God.

First of all, it is a compassionate face. It expresses sorrow over the diseases and sins that cripple mankind. It welcomes sinners back to the fold. It was a sad but tender face when a rich young man walked away rather than accept what was necessary to enter the kingdom of God. Christ’s face was tear-stained when he reached Jerusalem and confronted the stubbornness of a people who would not turn away from the ways that lead to destruction.

Yet Christ’s face was also a resolute, unwavering face. Even though his followers warned Jesus about the folly of going to Jerusalem, he set his face towards the fate that he freely accepted. This is one more prophecy recorded in the Book of Isaiah which came to be: Isaiah wrote about the Servant of the Lord who “hid not his face from shame and spitting” but rather set his face like flint because he was confident of God’s ultimate vindication.

That courage, that determination, that forcefulness of Jesus never wavered—not when his face was slapped to coerce a false confession, spat upon in derision or pierced by a crown of thorns. When finally he bowed his head in death, it was not as a defeated victim, not in shame or in humiliation, but as a triumphant conqueror whose last words were those of victory: “It is finished.”

About all, Jesus’ face was radiant with the glory of God. It was transfigured on the mountaintop when his face shone like the sun. So luminous was God’s presence in his life that even in the noontime darkness of Calvary a Roman centurion could look up into his face and realize, “surely this was the son of God.”

The apostle Paul captured the whole point of this speculation about Christ’s facial features when he wrote that God’s light shines into our hearts when we see “the light of knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” In other words, we are transformed when the light of God in Jesus Christ floods into our lives. That’s why we sing, in the words of what will be our second hymn today,

“O soul are you weary and troubled? No light in the darkness you see? There’s a light for a look at the savior, and life more abundant and free. Turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full in his wonderful face, and the things of earth will grow strangely dim, in the light of his glory and grace.”

There’s only one way to permanently change our faces, and it has nothing to do with cosmetics or plastic surgery. It has to do with altering our inner lives with the same qualities of mercy and determination and holiness that transfigured holiness that transfigured the face of Jesus. We can paint the face and the effect won’t even last until evening. We can use a scalpel and mold a firm new chin, but the effects will last a few years at best. But no matter how many times we peel the skin or zap the blotches or carve the profile, we are fighting a losing battle with vanity.

The inner sources of beauty, by contrast, shape our faces slowly over time. Only character gives a beauty to the face that never fades. Now there’s nothing the matter with being attractive. It’s only when the quest to be beautiful takes over our entire lives that it becomes a problem. Is outer beauty all you want your face to display? It was said of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah, “He had no form or comeliness that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him.”

Think of those who, like the Servant, have allowed the tragedy of life to become deeply etched in the furrows of their face. Abraham Lincoln was so ugly that his political opponents used to call him a gorilla. Mother Teresa’s face was as lined and worn as an ancient leather chair. But God’s infinite pity and humanity’s vast pain were crowded into every crevice of their faces, making them beautiful to behold because they were full of strength—the strength of the same resolute determination as Jesus to love the unlovable.  Do you catch the irony here, folks? Do you see the paradox? We most admire the faces of those who have spent their lives in humble self-effacement.

The apostle Paul noted that when Moses came down from Mount Sinai, he had to wear a veil because his face was aglow from talking to God—a brightness that faded because it was based on the limited understanding of an earlier era. But by contrast, when we behold the glory of the Lord through the living spirit of the Risen Christ, “we are gradually being changed by his likeness from one degree of glory to another,” because God in raising his son from the dead has shined “in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”

When we look into that face we share in that resurrection and a share in his kingdom.

One more thing about faces: have you ever heard it said that a husband and wife will start to look like each other if they’re married long enough? I think that in order to look like Robin I’d have to be married to her for, oh, 5,000 years or so. But if you gaze even a little while on the precious, bruised, blood streaked, face of Jesus, the transformation will be complete.

I was reading Sports Illustrated, of all things, this week when I encountered a couple stories about transformation that I want to share with you.

One is the story of Brian Doyle, who had his 15 minutes of fame with the New York Yankees in the 1978 World Series when he batted .438 and did not make an error as he finished second in the voting for series MVP. But the following season he was back in the minor leagues and by 1982 had retired with a lifetime batting average of .161. Disappointing, to be sure. But with his brothers Doyle founded a baseball academy that has been attended by about half a million youngsters. They are instructed not only in turning the double play, but in the fundamentals of the Christian life.

Doyle’s faith also influenced him after he was diagnosed with late-stage leukemia in 1994. For two years he believed that he was suffering from ulcers, vertigo and arthritis before he discovered the real cause of his pain. Then he started a radical course of chemotherapy that included two sessions per day for six months. He now is in full remission, and he says, “My faith was my hope.” He remembers grabbing his doctor by the shoulders, a doctor he had never met before, and saying, “I’ve got one question. Are you here to win?” He said yes, and Doyle replied, “Let’s go win.”

Doyle said “I firmly believe life is not how you start, it’s how you finish. I want to be a good finisher.”

The other story is about someone who will not beat cancer. Her name is Diane Geppi-Aikens, and she is the women’s lacrosse coach at Loyola College in Maryland. Nine years ago she was first diagnosed with a brain tumor, when she was newly divorced and the mother of four, including an infant. To that point she had never been sick a day in her life, never needed so much as an aspirin, but from the day of her diagnosis one tumor led to another. She began having seizures at practice that would scare her players to death. She had two brain operations and several rounds of radiation and chemo, and still she coached full time. Not only did she coach, her teams were some of the best in the country.

This past December doctors discovered a large, inoperable brain tumor at the back of her brain stem, and she faced a choice. Spend her 40^th and last year of life feeling sorry for herself, or go on being the best coach she could be. Since February she has been confined to a wheelchair, but she still makes it to all the practices and games. When her fatal diagnosis was made, she called a team meeting to break the bad news to her players, and there, in the midst of all the tears, she told them about falling down in her bathroom and finding herself unable to get up.

She used all her strength to pull herself down the hallway to call for help. “Along the way,” she said, “I drank from my cat’s water dish to keep me going. That’s perseverance, I said.” In response, her team’s captains ordered workout t-shirts that read perseverance on one side and Meow on the other. Now she says she has two goals: for her team to make the final four, and to live to see her oldest son graduate from high school in May. Each day, she says, “I try to be as positive as humanly possible and to thank God for one more day with the people I love.”

My friends, I believe that the call of Jesus Christ as written in the Easter message is this: We are granted only a short time in life, and we can spend that time in one of two ways: we can look away from Christ and waste that time in selfishness and acrimony, or we can look full in the face of Jesus and find that the things of earth, the bizarre little jealousies and backbiting, the anger and pain inflicted on others and ourselves, grow strangely dim. Jesus was the ultimate good finisher. He was the ultimate in determined perseverance to the end. We all must choose whether we will allow our face to be transformed like his, or whether our beauty will be strictly skin deep.