Race is Not Like Rain

 “What would our church and society look like if we just remembered that Jesus was brown? If we were confronted with the reality that the body hung on the cross was a brown body: one broken, tortured, and publicly executed by an oppressive regime. How might it change our attitudes if we could see that the unjust imprisonment, abuse, and execution of the historical Jesus has more in common with the experience of Indigenous [and Black people] or asylum seekers than it does with those who hold power in the church and usually represent Christ? Perhaps most radical of all, I can’t help but wonder what might change if we were more mindful that the person Christians celebrate as God in the flesh and saviour of the entire world was not a white man, but a Middle Eastern Jew.”   -Robyn Whitaker 

“Jesus is portrayed in as many ways as there are cultures, languages and understandings. And I don't think that throwing out everything we've got in the past is the way to do it, but I do think saying 'that's not the Jesus who exists, that's not who we worship' is a reminder of the universality of the God who became fully human.”   -Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby 

“Behold, that first-century Palestinian Jew was born in a funky manger. He had some funky working-class parents…He walked some funky and dusty roads, didn’t he? He brought together 12 funky folk. He didn’t go out 100 miles to the vanilla suburbs, did he? He picked them right from around where he came from. It is so easy to forget the funk of Jesus’s life because our churches can become so easily deodorized.”   -Dr. Cornel West 

Friends, 

I have been thinking a lot about this topic. Who was Jesus? What did he look like? Make no mistake, during the time he lived, the demonic concept of race that we live under today had yet to be conceived of. That is right, folks. Race is not like rain. It hasn’t always existed. Yes, human beings have recognised differences between peoples—however, mostly by ethnic or geographic boundaries prior to the 16th century. This modern conception of race is one invented by European thinkers. Some were so called ‘naturalists’ who were theorising upon anthropology and physiology (Johann Freidrich Blumenbach) and others were moral philosophers who sought to use this invented pseudoscience to justify the Atlantic slave trade by ascribing hierarchical worth to each race (Immanuel Kant). Modern genome sequencing has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is a common human ancestor and that the conception of race as a biological reality is a fallacy. So why does it matter what race Jesus was and what pictures we hang in our sanctuary? 

I grew up going to Catholic school here in Calgary and was awash with imagery and iconography depicting Jesus as a svelte, surfer dude who looked more like a guy I’d run into on the beach in Malibu, than in the dry land of first-century Judea. What harm could this do? This nearly all-white school, with all white faculty, teaching us an all-white history with a backdrop of a white saviour—surely benign, no? For a little Black girl, it was far from a neutral environment; damage that I may never fully recover from was done. I couldn’t see myself anywhere. Even when I went home, my mother and sisters were white and despite assurances that they “weren’t racist” because their daughter and sister was Black, I still heard hurtful comments about my hair (just one example) from my mother who couldn’t understand it and after years of slathering Vaseline on it and cursing it under her breath, she eventually gave up and sent me with my father to his barbershop. My dad and I had the same haircut until I was twelve years old. Each time my hair was shorn, I wept. The whole world in which I was formed seemed to agree that white (culture, history, hair, and even saviours) stood above all other things. 

It matters what Jesus looked like. It matters that we reimagine our faith which beautifully frees us to a life beyond the worldly understanding of this life, is held in context. The context is, in this case, that particularity matters. This particularity is that of a brown-skinned Jew from the Middle East being the saviour of the world. It matters because in this constructed world of racial understanding, all of these things are signifiers of deeper meaning. It matters because the God we serve has a radical message about our mission as disciples and about the unity we are meant to foster in this world. Unity cannot be achieved until we see truly the multiplicity of particularity. Unity has never been a call for obfuscation or making everyone ‘the same’. I believe that to truly recognise the time and place in which we stand--this crossroads of the Western Protestant church, we must, with clear eyes contemplate the reality of a brown Jesus as liberator and brother to us all. This will radically shift our intention and focus as we proceed from here. It will alter our discipleship. It might just be integral to creating a church that can endure centuries beyond now. Perhaps this is our making as ancestors… 

Blessings, 

Amy