Robert Hudson

“I’m talking about the Aramaic-speaking, rough-hewn, odiferous, road-soiled, itinerant Jesus who nonetheless would be able to look straight through me just as he looked through the woman at the well, whose every fault and vice were visible to him, leaving me vulnerable and shivering. Nor is it a coincidence that the direct, unwavering gaze of Jesus would make me every bit as uncomfortable as the intense look of a desperately homeless person on the streets of my hometown of Chicago. It would make my heart race. A convicting gaze. An unblinking and slightly overlong gaze. If indeed we are to treat the poor and hungry and naked and imprisoned as though they were Jesus in disguise, then there is a deep significance in the comparison. The question is not so much “Dare I look into those eyes?” as “Dare I look away?” Is it possible (to paraphrase Tillich) that there is more presence of ultimate reality in the face of one homeless person than in all the sermons in all the world? Say amen, somebody.”
― Robert Hudson, Seeing Jesus: Visionary Encounters from the First Century to the Present

“Is that what claims of seeing Jesus are about? Are we supposed to play along and pretend we believe what Christians across the centuries have claimed? Sometimes it feels like that. When churchgoers claim that God has spoken to them, using such language as “God spoke to my heart,” we never respond by saying, “Hogwash.” We’re respectful. Empathic. We suspend our disbelief, much as we do when we read fantasy novels and fairy tales. So maybe I’m the problem. By not believing in ghosts—by lacking imagination—perhaps I disqualify myself from seeing them.”
― Robert Hudson, Seeing Jesus: Visionary Encounters from the First Century to the Present