On being little Christs

In the entertainment world—film, TV and video—and sometimes in high-stakes security services, there is an interesting device used to replicate the presence and image of a high-profile person with what is called a body double. Tom Cruise, Sandra Bullock and some political leaders, for example, are known to have used such body doubles in the course of their work.

A body double substitutes for the celebrity when he or she must be elsewhere or is unavailable. Those who specialize in this device have learned how to recreate the presence and effect of the star by replicating so faithfully the details of appearance, gesture and demeanor that even a trained eye cannot detect any difference. In fact, much of what we may see of a star in a film is actually a body double standing in for the headliner.

This concept from the secular world is worth pondering as a figure for understanding ourselves as Christians or, even more compellingly, for understanding the church.
The headliner of this faith movement—the Jesus movement—is no longer physically present as the full story unfolds. But there is ample reference in the New Testament to Jesus’ ongoing presence and role in the story in the form of “Christ’s body,” the community of faith learners, who “grow up into the full stature of Christ” and are a kind of body double for the central, transforming figure of the drama. As individuals, but even more intensely together, we reflect the traits, the purpose, the manner of the one whose body double we are.

In 2003, when speaking to North American Mennonites gathered in Atlanta, Jimmy Carter opened his address by reminding the assembly that the label “Christian” could be taken to mean “little Christ” or, to put it another way, that our presence and calling in the world as followers of Jesus is somehow to be mistaken for him, to be his “body double.”

Hollywood special effects may not be the highest moral aspiration for the Jesus people of our time, but being a body double for Jesus definitely is. Indeed, it is the only authentic plan for the renewal of the Christian movement in our or any time.

Jonathan P. Larson lives in Atlanta.