THE LAST WORD - MY BOSS IS A JEWISH CARPENTER.

The National Catholic Reporter recently sponsored a nationwide religious art contest that awarded first prize to an image of an androgynous Jesus belonging to no particular race or ethnic background. A more inclusive figure may never have been imagined by (hu)mankind. Perhaps this "Jesus 2000" is indeed, as NCR editor Michael Farrell has suggested, a harbinger for Y2K Christendom of "what kind of divinity it will look up to as the next millennium unfolds." He/she is an abstract Jesus for an abstracted millennium.

Obedient children of the Enlightenment that most of us have been raised to be, we sometimes seem to mistake abstraction for reverence, preferring a deferentially metaphorical Jesus to a specific Jewish guy. It's disconcerting enough to speculate on what it means for a person to be fully human and fully divine without staking one's entire life and longing on the belief that there is one such person: a male native of Bethlehem, one, and only one, of the countless and mostly anonymous Judaean victims of the Roman occupation of Palestine two thousand years ago.

Not long ago at the University of Notre Dame's Snite Museum of Art, I walked into a gallery where an entire wall had been covered with 100 photographic prints for a traveling exhibition titled "Facing Death: Portraits from Cambodia's Killing Fields." The photographs had been taken to supplement dossiers compiled by the staff members of Prison S21, the former Tuol Sleng School in Phnom Penh, where at least twenty thousand men, women, and children were tortured and murdered during the Khmer Rouge reign of terror from 1975 to 1979. My friend, a curator at the museum, told me that soon a bench would be placed in front of the wall. But gaze after doomed gaze from these photographs-of a terrified and nearly weeping little boy, of a despairing grandmother, of an exhausted and apparently resigned teen-age girl, of a beatifically grinning and apparently retarded man-struck me with a force that made my knees weak, and I found myself thinking, "Why not a kneeler?"

My impulse was to make a sign of the cross, because to look into these shocked and hopeless faces-each with its own devastating particularity- was to meet the eyes of Christ crucified; to see the hand of an off- camera captor gripping the biceps of a collapsed young man was to feel the heft of the unanswerable accusation, first heard by Cain, "What have you done?" Nothing could be less abstract than these portraits of a hundred innocents who were sacrificed, along with at least 2 million others, to Pol Pot's highly abstract idol, a pre-industrial agrarian utopia. Nor could a divinity be less abstract than the one whose mercy they surely implored in those horrifying moments at Tuol Sleng, the divinity who seems, at least from this distance, to have been silent. The divinity whose silence we fearfully interrogate in our most desperate prayer.

The Jewish man who claims to be this excruciatingly silent God's only begotten son claims also to live within each of these doomed Asians, as well as within the distracted Caucasian man now writing these words, as well as within an African-American woman or Native American man who might be reading them. But to see Jesus as an average, even as the average, of humanity, is to disfigure him, and perhaps humanity as well.

Jesus is like us in all things but sin, which is to say, he likes or dislikes oranges, figs, and almonds. He is bored by some sorts of music and greatly delights in others. He has a deep and resonant or perhaps a high and nasal voice. He may or may not snore. It is impossible to get a fix on these and a million other things about him, but it is certain that among the ways he is like us is in our individuality. He is less like all of us than like each of us. To say that he lives in "the victims of Cambodia's killing fields" may be true, but it obscures the fact that he lives in each man, woman, little boy, and little girl who stared helplessly at a camera lens in a blood-washed room of the old Tuol Sleng School. He lives in Sork Huy and Ti Nen and Ang Sieu. He lives in this young bank clerk about to be executed for betraying Kampuchea and in the bank clerk's wife, whose screams he must hear as she is beaten to death in a nearby cell.

The "kind of divinity (we) will look up to as the next millennium unfolds," had better be the same kind Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob looked up to, the same kind that impregnated one young woman from Nazareth and sired one baby boy who grew up, made a name for himself in one troubled region, was arrested, tortured, murdered, and then astonished his best friends a few days later by sharing with them a lakeside breakfast of grilled fish. The kind Jesus calls Father. It had better be that kind of divinity. There is no other kind.

Michael O. Garvey is the author of Finding Fault (Thomas More Press).