Alternative History of Jesus: Episode 2

Surely we have all born witness to the Monkey Jesus* that now adorns a flaky bit of plaster in the Santuario de Nuestra Señora de la Misericordia, a quiet church nestled in the western corner of Zaragoza. Once a fairly prosaic fresco in the mode of ecce homo, an amateur attempt at restoration has reduced this recognizable figure of Jesus to a monotone smudge which has been described in the media as “simian,” “hedgehogian,” etc… A blizzard of memes starring this re-imagined Jesus has since dotted the internet.

This particular Christophany is striking in that it represents a reversal of the far more common “Toast Jesus” trope. Appearances of Jesus in toast, cheetos, or dental x-rays are intriguing because they have an element of paradox: the glory of a resurrected Lord breaking into our world through the most everyday materials. But these minor kitsch apocalypses gain such traction as items of devotion for certain audiences because they have a reorienting effect. They are clues to some that the divine is not simply somewhere out there, but here among us spilling so effulgently beyond its theoretical containers that it leaks out even into our snack foods.

Taking one giant Abrahamic step back, this is also the intent of the “Goy’s teeth” interlude in the Coen brother’s A Serious Man. In this rabbinical koan, a Jewish dentist finds the words “help me” engraved in Hebrew behind the lower teeth of a gentile patient. He is haunted by the plea and stumbles across the possibility that the letters may have some sort of Kabbalic significance. They don’t. The letters translate into the telephone number of a grocery store a few cities over. Puzzled, the dentist visits his rabbi for advice, who tells him that such appearances of the divine often seem to be speaking to us. If we can’t understand exactly what is being communicated, that is okay. We must accept them as tokens of the presence of something much Grander than ourselves. In the same way, Toast Jesus becomes an impromptu icon, drawing the eyes of the believer through its savory crumbs unto the divine realities that empower spiritual reflection.

Monkey Jesus has the opposite effect. Our experience of this Christophany begins at the same place, with a certain sense of alarm. Something seems out of place. But it fails to render as a moment of clarity. It doesn’t have the reorienting effect of Toast Jesus, by whom we are forced to stop momentarily and consider the general relationship between this material world and the nagging sense of divinity that expresses itself in such unexpected ways – even if we find it all a bit goofy.

Just take a look at this Monkey Jesus. Look into his smudged and spiritless eyes. About his brow is now arrayed a fog of umber, perhaps the aesthetic equivalent of a literal crown of thorns. Though a transcendent glow alights upon his T-zone, his cheeks wither beneath a pane of dishwater fawn. This contrast draws the eye down to a minimal hieroglyph of lines that at times suggest a Mona Lisa smirk, at others a simian complacency. Beneath a plume of neckbeard, Monkey Jesus has traded his royal robe for a barber’s smock. The image has a peculiar quality in that while largely indeterminate in form, it leaves an indelible impression. But it belongs, I think, to Van Eyck by way of de Kooning.

What we now behold is something far less than a man. In fact, we are not sure what we are looking at. If we were not aware that the image was once a classically legible representation of Jesus, it would surely not strike us as something worthy of critical reflection. But as we do know that the image is a revision, it now has an unsettling tradition history that causes us to interact with it as something in process. It is a process in which a comfortable, recognizable image of Jesus has transformed into something murky, unidentifiable, and perhaps even beastly from certain angles.

If Toast Jesus leads us to reorienting reflection, Monkey Jesus does the opposite. It is disorienting. It even has an apophatic character in that it chips away the welcome features of our formally standardized  Jesus acceptance process. What we are left with is something irreversibly unrecognizable. This is not our Jesus anymore.

A guiding principle in this Alternative History of Jesus project is that any representation of Jesus, especially the ones from which we recoil, bear within themselves the marks of alterity, humanity, and counter-intuitive grace that serve as the canonical channels through which we perceive and accept Jesus.  Buried deep within the tradition history that is the Monkey Jesus of Santuario de Nuestra Señora de la Misericordia, these qualities can be observed.

A helpful example can be found in Robert Bresson’s stunning 1966 film, Au hasard Balthazar, which chronicles the life stages of a donkey as they intersect with those of his various owners in a French village. Along with Balthazar we watch his kindest young owner, Marie, learn and grow; her first real taste of life a sad parable of misdirected love. Against this simple narrative background Balthazar stands mute, often in the frame only as a flicking ear or tail, quietly bearing the weight of his owners’ anger, duplicity, and grief.

A constellation of features in the film point to Balthazar as a sort of Christ-figure, all embodying Bresson’s suggestion that the film “is about our anxieties and desires when faced with a living creature who’s completely humble, completely holy.” He draws on the donkey as a biblical image, lacing Balthazar’s story arc with images of the virgin birth, gifts of the magi, a baptism, stations of the cross, crown of thorns, and a stigmatic wound. The film ends with Balthazar lying down and dying in a field among braying sheep, having been shot by thieves in the night.

In these last few moments, the obscure spiritual structure of the film comes into focus. Critic James Quandt sees his death simply as the “prolonged expiry of an old, abused animal.”  But Balthazar has passed silently through the film as a reference to something far beyond the materiality of its characters. It begins to dawn on us that Balthazar refers abstractly to Christ, specifically in his role as one called to bear the sins and failures of the world. But this is pretty heady stuff for a film about a donkey, and one experiences Au hasard… with a sort of hermeneutical discomfort, wondering how much Jesus Bresson intends for us to recognize. As it is one of the few moments in cinema history that deploys Jesus as an aesthetic form rather than a narrative figure or thematic idea, this apprehension is to be expected.

In the beginning of John’s gospel, it is said of Jesus in his guise as Logos: He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. Bresson’s use of Balthazar as a structural device creatively evokes this sense of disorientation, riffing on John’s idea that from certain angles Jesus is not even recognizable by those whose very form he has taken. Likewise, Balthazar’s image has difficulty fitting into the film. It moves quietly through each frame until Balthazar exhausts their narrative potential, eventually (and paradoxically) being broken by the dramatic mechanisms of the film that he alone has given shape and purpose.

Similarly, while Monkey Jesus is disorienting, it is disconcerting in a Christological way. The tradition history created by this restoration challenges our adherence to a set of recognizable features that define our acceptance of Jesus images. This is an important challenge because such aesthetic orthodoxies are often a reflection of ideological boundaries that bind our missiological reflexes. They are symptoms of our inability to perceive and bear witness to Jesus in ways that defy or even subvert our expectations.

The humble visage of Monkey Jesus is a call to remain disoriented by Jesus, to embrace his acrobatic presence in time, space, and history in whatever form this presence takes. Many cultural Christophanies are often, at first glimpse, unrecognizable and conflicting. But such are the formal echoes of someone introduced to history by the scandal of the incarnation, trading the poker chips of ideology for something we have come to know as love and grace. The species of Jesus image that includes Monkey Jesus and Balthazar embodies the inherently dismaying, category-defying quality of faith in such a figure.

May our canons expand to accept the Monkey Jesus.