Did Jesus look like his pictures?

He grew up before him like a tender shoot,
and like a root out of dry ground.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
---Isaiah 53:2

Maybe it's been a slow news week, or maybe it's just that most wonderful time of the year when non-Christmas experts suddenly want to chime in on all things Christmas; but today a talking head on a national news network took to the air to state that it is 'just historical fact that Jesus was a white man.' And I just sat there, smh (for those of you who, like me are afraid of online slang, this one is safe --- 'shaking my head'). Because this TV lady (I'm not ready to call her a newscaster right now) had walked into the Children's Bible, Illustrated Edition trap. You have that Bible, don't you? It's the one with the full color front, with the picture of flower-child Jesus --- long, flowing, light-brown hair, shaggy beard (also light brown), righteous surfer tan set off by his white robe, rope sandals --- surrounded by a group of adorable (also white) pudgy children. What sets the picture off, though, are the piercing blue eyes.
Now, everything we know about Jesus' origin (yes, historically) tells us that he looked nothing like a gentle surfer dude. He undoubtedly looked like a typical middle-Easterner, dark-haired and -skinned. That is the history. And perhaps Isaiah's writing (quoted above) hints at Jesus', well...plain-ness. The piercing blue eyes? Probably not. Heads that turned when he walked by? Nope.
See? That was part of the idea of incarnation. Not that God took on human skin to walk the earth as America's (or The Galilee's) Next Top Model. Not that God came down in an Elvis sequined jumpsuit that shouted 'Look at me!' But that God came as a regular Joe, passed as the son of a regular Joe, and lived right here with us, like us.
What made Jesus holy, set apart, was the message bound up in his humanity --- the message that God is for us. It wasn't his historical dark skin and hair. And it wouldn't have been his whiteness.

...so here we stand, whoever we are, 
bathed in the light of a star...