THE WHITE JESUS WHEN BLACK LIVES MATTER
I grew up with the most popular portrait of Jesus ever painted: Warner Sallman’s “Head of Jesus” 1940. Estimates state that it has been reproduced over five hundred million times, enough to make this Jesus image easily recognizable to most people even in our secular culture. Here is Jesus for all to see: blond, blue-eyed, and glowing as if he’d just been to a beauty parlor or make-up studio to get groomed for a photo-op.
Needless to say, I consider the image sentimental kitsch. This haloed and idealized Jesus has no physical connection to the “man of sorrows acquainted with grief” who “had no place to lay his head” and on the night he was betrayed, sweat blood. Christian art needs to follow textual, biblical clues when available. While there is no physical description of Jesus in the New Testament, a post-WWII religious revival made civil religious use of Sallman’s image in contrast to “cold war godless communism.” His Jesus image created a visual piety that reflected the culture of white American Christianity.
This obviously Caucasian Jesus may have drawn some inspiration from the 13th century Shroud of Turin, on which the imprint in its fabric depicts a wounded corpse with a bearded face. The earliest portraits of Jesus from Roman Christian artifacts picture Jesus as a beardless young man. It is possible that the Shroud’s image dominated artistic portraits of Jesus into and beyond the Renaissance, influencing the Jesus image’s development into the 20th century. There is an affinity between the Shroud’s image and that of Sallman’s Jesus.
We certainly have the artistic freedom and spiritual license to picture Jesus “for us” in whatever cultural context we choose, and to be sure, Jesus has been pictured in many and diverse racial and even tribal contexts with corresponding facial features. Back in the late 1960s, when I served an integrated church on the Southside of Chicago, I hung a painting of a black Jesus on the wall of the parish hall…and took a lot of “heat” from white parishioners for whom this was a new, startling visage. The black members of the parish appreciated the new image, acknowledging the work of a black artist befitting the social conversation that “black is beautiful.”
It was a disappointment when one of our young black teens decided to leave our Lutheran parish and join a black Baptist church in the neighborhood in order to better understand his religious and racial roots expressed in their worship style. Black history was just beginning to be promoted and the white cultural legacy of Lutheranism was difficult to navigate. A month later I attended a community meeting at that same Baptist church and was shocked to see the walls of the nave decorated with larger than life fresco paintings of Jesus and his disciples…all of them white.
Confounded, I sought the council of friend and fellow urban Lutheran pastor, Norm Theiss. Norm had an insight that I’ve been reluctant to share because it is a perception that could easily be misinterpreted. But the white Jesus on the walls of a black church gives his blessing, approval and encouragement to a congregation that daily encountered negative white authority figures, and they welcomed this white Jesus’ gracious recognition of their existence and struggle. Finally, they visibly encountered a white authority figure who was kind and compassionate. In the days of the civil rights marches it was a welcome relief to encounter civil whites…Jesus and his disciples.
I was recently reminded of this experience while reading Trevor Noah’s autobiography, Born a Crime. He tells the story of growing up in apartheid South Africa, a “colored” bi-racial child in a country that segregated white and black people. He struggled to discover just where he fit into this bifurcated society; his devoted Christian mother took him to three churches every Sunday: the black church for its colorful setting and strong emotional preaching, the white church for its restrained liturgy and intellectual preaching; and a colored church for the attempt to negotiate an integrated detente between the other two. Noah describes the artistic effect of a white Jesus portrait in a black church in similar fashion to what I experienced back in the late 1960s.
However, my early visual encounter with a Jesus portrait conveyed a warning not to provoke his disapproval. It seemed to me that Jesus was always surveying my behavior and could shut heaven’s door if I strayed off the straight and narrow way. The Jesus image also harbored a hidden appeal to white privilege that mustn’t be disturbed or contravened, an authority (after 2000 years) now vested in a denomination that questioned liberal researchers’ textual search for the historical Jesus. Just who is it who stands before us and calls, “Follow me”? Is Jesus a protector or a judge, a prophet or a religious lawyer, a source of consolation or initiator of apocalypse?
John the evangelist claims: “we have seen his glory…full of grace and truth.” It is grace and truth that constitute his glory, not perfection of form or a glowing face. There is a radical power in Jesus’ presence, an authority that comes from within his person that marks his integrity which, the gospel texts elaborate, was witnessed by the crowds that came to him for healing and ethical direction. He ultimately paid his dues—his choices, associations, charisma and teaching all led to the cross, and his cross has led to the redemption, inspiration and hope of those who follow him…black and white and colored.
My own artistic image-making (below) uses a more expressionistic style in which a split-image has Jesus looking both at the cross and at us. The colors have emotional content but are not “natural”. How we visualize this Jesus needs to encompass as much variety as we find in the human race.
Joel Nickel
The Rev. Joel Nickel, STS is a retired pastor and member of Peace Lutheran Church in Salem and serves on the congregation’s Committee for Visual and Liturgical Arts