You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I’m not hungry enough to eat six.
- Yogi Berra
I’ve heard it said that the Lord works in mysterious ways. Evidently, He has a thing for food, having appeared on toast, French toast, frying pans, and all manner of edible (and inedible) creations…so it would stand to reason that seeing the face of Jesus Christ on a three-cheese pizza wouldn’t exactly tax the imagination. And it should hardly be surprising that the pizza ended up being auctioned off on eBay.
The process is really all too predictable: see the face of Jesus, alert the media, sell the apparition on eBay. After all, what good is seeing the face of the Lord if you can’t ultimately make a few bucks off your religious experience?
Here’s something that I’ve never been able to figure out. As far as I know, Jesus never sat for a portrait, nor were cameras available during His time on Earth. So how is it that someone can claim to see the face of Jesus in a pizza, or a piece of toast, or a frying pan…or anything else? How do we know what he even looked like? And when people claim to see the face of Jesus, how is it that no one calls them on this? How do you know that it’s Jesus? Just because your apparition has long hair and a beard, how can we be certain that what you claim to be seeing is in fact the face of Jesus Christ?
I understand religious faith and fervor, but isn’t this really just a case of someone seeing what they want to see? Is this a pizza, or is it a Rohrschach test? Is that Jesus Christ, or the gamer geek down the hall who plays World of Warcraft 24/7? The truth is that there’s simply no way to know if what someone is seeing is in fact the face of Jesus, because we have no frame of reference. Those inclined to see what they want to see assume that, since the apparition appears to have long hair and a beard, they’re seeing Jesus Christ when it could just as easily be Charles Manson or Antonio Banderas.
Yeah, try selling THAT on eBay….
