He Looked Like a Sinner

Imagine a person smoking. Saint or sinner? How about someone with a tattoo?

As I've mentioned from time to time, I used to play Jesus at our church during our Vacation Bible School. The other day someone told me about a lady they were inviting to our church. Apparently, she had a lot of tattoos. Because of her tattoos she expressed a worry about coming to our church. "I couldn't go to Highland with all my tattoos," she said. The person inviting her quipped, "Oh, you can have tattoos at Highland. Jesus has tattoos at Highland." Because I have a tattoo.

In Unclean I talk about the contamination attribution known as similarity. If something looks like a contaminant then it's hard to override that appearance-driven judgment. Even when we know, at a rational level, that appearances are deceiving us.

For example, borrowing from the work of Paul Rozin, I've poured lemonade into a sterile bedpan and have asked students to take a drink. They know it's just lemonade and they know the bedpan is clean. And yet still they refuse to take a drink. Lemonade in a bedpan just looks too much like urine and reason struggles to overcome our emotional response to that appearance. This is the appraisal of similarity. If something looks similar to a contaminant then it is a contaminant. Even if we know better.

As I argue it in Unclean, something similar happens when we size up people. We have stereotypes about what saints and sinners should look like. And at some deep emotional level if someone looks like a sinner then they are a sinner. It's this snap judgment that made that woman with a lot of tattoos hesitant to come to church. She knew what was going to go through people's minds, how church people would look at her and judge her.

And what makes this worse, as illustrated in the bedpan example, is that we make these judgments even when we know better.

That was the problem with Jesus.

Jesus didn't look like a saint. Jesus didn't look holy. He hung out with prostitutes and drank too much wine. He was a convicted criminal. He was given the death penalty. And he died under God's curse.

Jesus looked like a sinner.