There aren’t many facial expressions that can tell a message with more audacity and truthiness than a mustache. Can you imagine Jesus if he wore a mustache? Would it have changed the living Word into some other sort of truth or would he have just said something differently? Maybe the words pouring off of his lips would have been the same, but maybe the emphasis would varied ever so slightly. Maybe a ‘Verily” would have been dropped at the beginning or the sentence would have faded off before he got around to the “and they will all die”. Maybe the only reason we view death as an inherent part of our nature, our humanness, is because it was spoken.
If the words from the mustached Jesus had been quieted just a bit, as the flicks from the tip of his tongue got caught up in the twirly knots of a bearded cage of a mustache. The words would raise their enraged fists and struggle through the twine only to have their heals looped around an ingrown hair and their necks strangled until their screams became whispers and then only an exhale. Where they meant to condemn a crowd of 5000 to death, the words merely spoke blessings over the loaves and fishes. He meant to say “Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?” That is what they said he said in verse 33. That is when he damned the to the wide-open fangs of Gehenna.
But the woodland creature man that stood with a full face clothed to face the weather would have never said these things. And if he never said them, well then boy oh! How things might have been!