Jesus Albus Non Est
“Jesus ain’t white”
A friend of mine sent the above picture of a bit of urban art on a trashcan on display in the Crescent City, the Big Easy, the City that Care Forgot, Chocolate City, Crawfish Town, Hollywood South, yes, the City of New Orleans.
I would like to commend the artist for a couple things: first, for mentioning the name of Jesus, the name that is above every name, the name before which every knee shall bow (Phil 2:9-10). Whether He is proclaimed in pretense or truth, we rejoice with St. Paul that Christ is proclaimed (Phil 1:8).
Second, the grammar is correct. Often this statement is made in the past tense: “Jesus wasn’t white.” This implies either that Jesus is dead, or that He used to be non-white at some point, but is now white. The present tense is a confession that Jesus is risen and lives. I would use the A-word in praise of this confession that Jesus lives, but it is still Lent, so let’s just respond, “Amen” instead.
As far as the use of “ain’t,” I know this will cause scandal to some of my fellow LCMS homeschoolers and Lutheran teachers, but a little scandal is good for people from time to time - especially midwestern Germans. And if you all are honest with yourselves, this is why you enjoy coming to New Orleans for youth gatherings. Some of you like strolling along Bourbon Street with plastic beads around your neck. And that is certainly a more innocent scandal than some of the stuff that has gone on in worship services at the youth gathering - especially in years past.
My point, however, is not so much the grammar, but this latest obsession with our Lord’s ethnicity and skin tone. For decades, the secular world has typically scorned Jesus and His followers, or taken His teachings out of context, or turned Him into some kind of Social Justice Warrior. But at least in currently arguing about His flesh and blood existence, we are at least speaking to the incarnation.
Historians will hopefully look back on our crazy times with awe bordering on disbelief. Our culture seems to be living some kind of mass delusion, as we go about our lives in a kind of Alice’s Wonderland, a Clown World, a dystopia where nothing makes sense. Having successfully eliminated slavery, segregation, and apartheid among civilized countries around the world, having elected (and re-elected) a black president thirteen years ago, having people of every race and ethnicity serving at the highest levels of government and commerce, academia and society - one would think that we would declare victory over racial bigotry and get on with our lives.
Instead, we have a strange new iteration of racism: open hatred of white people, as the recent Coca-Cola employee training to “be less white” illustrates.
And so there has been renewed interest in our Lord Jesus Christ. Not in His atoning death for the life of the world, not even in His ethical teachings, but now our culture is really interested in His physical appearance and the assertion that He “ain’t white.” And given that “whiteness” is equated with systemic evil, who could possibly worship a Jesus who is the member of an ethnicity that has been arbitrarily designated to be made up of Untermenschen - like as if He were historically Jewish or something.
While artistic renderings of Jesus run the gamut of every shade of human skin on the planet, to illustrate Jesus as white is now seen as systemic racism. But the problem is one of definition. The popular depiction of Jesus from 1940 called the Sallman Head is a case in point. Jesus is clearly not black or Asian in appearance. But neither does He look Scandinavian or Germanic. He has brown eyes and olive-colored skin - not unlike people of the middle east today.
And since our Lord is of Middle Eastern origins, is this really that far from reality?
An amusing Tweet says that we rubes out in “Jesusland” are going to be shocked that Jesus has dark skin. I don’t know where this adorable little lad is from, but he seems to have lived a sheltered life, and certainly doesn’t seem to have many Christian friends. One of his commenters replied: “Wait until they find out he's Jewish too. Oy Vey.” In addition to living in Alice’s Wonderland and Clown World, we have also officially transitioned from “Idiocracy as Comedy” to “Idiocracy as Documentary,” and we have now progressed to “Idiocracy as Quaint Nostalgia.” If only our culture were merely as stupid and debased as the 2006 Mike Judge film. Idiocracy has become our generation’s Little House on the Prairie, especially after Laura Ingalls Wilder’s cancellation down the Memory Hole.
In fact, the oldest icon that we have of Jesus (Christ the Pantocrator - from the 500s AD) actually comes from the Middle East - a monastery in Sinai. And in this artistic rendering of our Lord - which represents His two natures - we see a man who looks Middle Eastern, with brown hair and eyes and a skin-tone that is likewise not Northern European. But neither does He look Sub-Saharan nor Far-Eastern.
In short, the earliest depiction that we have of Jesus seems to be of a clearly Middle Eastern man. And this rather makes sense, doesn’t it?
Again, part of the problem is how we define “white.” If “whiteness” is defined as evil and even inhuman (“White people are born into not being human… to be demons”) - as a certain sensitivity trainer that some corporations hire asserts, then yes, “Jesus ain’t white.” Jesus is human and Jesus is neither evil nor a demon. But if being white refers to the traditional (if somewhat outdated) taxonomy of the races of man, then a Middle Eastern Jew is indeed white. To complicate matters, there are people (both Jews themselves and people who really don’t like them) who classify even blond haired and blued eyed Jews as “non-white.”
The U.S. Census bureau categorizes Jesus as white, as for their purposes, “white” refers to:
A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.
There are some writers who claim that Jesus is black, and that there has only been a conspiracy to cast Him as a Middle Eastern Jew. But if one believes the Bible, Jesus was born in Judea of Jewish heritage; there is no biblical data to support that He was either of Ethiopia or Norway or Japan.
So maybe the issue isn’t really about our Lord’s physical appearance as He walked the earth, but more about wrangling over definitions of “whiteness” and viewing our Lord as just another pawn in the great game of Intersectional Critical Theory Chess.
It would be better to focus on our Lord's physical appearance in the Eucharist, where He comes to His beloved and redeemed people “from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” (Rev 7:9) and where we all kneel together without regard to melanin or eye color or hair texture. For though we are not all of the same ethnicity and appearance, we are all truly sinners in need of restoration. And that is why our Lord took on our flesh - our human flesh - to begin with.
Instead of worrying about whether Jesus looks like us, we would do better to strive to make ourselves look like Jesus in His mercy and in carrying out the Father’s will by doing what we are called to do for the sake of the kingdom and in love for our neighbor. And it isn’t a bad thing to try to be historically accurate in our art - whether icons or movies (my congregation had our statue of our Lord repainted after 50 years, and we did indeed tan Him up a bit), we must retain our humility and not fall for the idol of seeing our value in terms of our ethnicity - whether it is the promotion of a Jesus that satisfies either the National Socialists or Louis Farrakhan.
The question of whether Jesus is white or not depends on a somewhat arbitrary human definition and taxonomy. But the reality of who Jesus is - God, Man, Creator, Sacrifice, Lord, and Savior, the Light of the World, the Bread of Life, the Lamb of God - does not depend on linguistic definitions or politically popular agendas.
Jesus is human. Jesus is divine. Jesus is Lord. Jesus is Savior. And that is what is important.