PICTURE PERFECT??

Number 10 – March 2010


What did Jesus look like?
And why is it important?

These two questions were posed by Dr. Rodney Sadler at a lecture he delivered at McCormick Seminary, March 15, 2010. Dr. Sadler, Associate Professor of Bible at Union – Presbyterian School of Christian Education in Charlotte, asked the students: “What does Jesus look like in the pictures in your homes?”

Were they Biblical images like the description in Colossians 1:1-20? Jesus is here “…the image of the invisible God, the first born of all creation…” and is declared the incarnation of God “For in him all the fullness God was pleased to dwell…” If we experience Jesus we experience God. But this is not a physical description.

Or are the images based on Revelations 1:13-15?
…one like the son of man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden girdle round his breast; his head white as snow; his eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined as in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of many waters…

To be frank, it is a futile task to find a physical description of Jesus within the New Testament. You may remember that Judas was paid thirty pieces of silver to identify him for the Roman soldiers so they could arrest him. It seems that Jesus was not particularly physically distinguishable from other Palestinian Jewish men in the area and so someone needed to identify him – pick him out of the crowd.

As the students began answering Professor Sadler’s question it became obvious that the most recognizable image of Jesus is the Sallman’s Head of Christ. It is a picture found in many homes and most churches.

This tall fair haired portrait was created in 1924 by Warner Sallman and has been reproduced over a billion times – literally, over a billion times. It has taken over our hearts and it certainly has taken over the market.

As a Palestinian Jew, Jesus looked nothing like the Sallman’s Head of Christ. But it is the popular image and, until liberation movements growing out of the sixties, seems to have been present in congregations of people of color.

Different groups have rejected the image of the white Jesus. Black Americans have created black images of Jesus; women have produced female images of their savior; Latinos and Latinas in Latin America and the United States create their own images; as have Asians and Africans.

Jesus has been “ethnicized” so that different folks can identify with a savior “incarnated” into the particularities of their cultural context. It gives folks a sense of being “created in the image of God” that a white Jesus does not provide. Oppressed people find it helpful to image a God who understands their pain and shares their hopes.

Sallman’s Head of Christ has been an impediment to the faith journeys of many non-white Christians.

So these questions “What does Jesus look like?” and “Why does it matter?” turn out to be significant for people of color.

But these are important questions for white Christians as well. It is interesting to note that we can identify and label paintings and sculptors of a black Jesus, a female savior, or Latin, Asian, and African Jesus’ images. And we know that the historical Jesus did not look like any of these images.

But with the Sallman’s Head of Christ we simply see the picture and use it for our advantage. We don’t say: It’s a Western Christ, or an American Christ, or a white Christ even though these adjectives are true and accurate descriptive terms. The fact that we use no adjectives, while describing with modifiers other cultural images, means we see it as the norm. White becomes the norm that dominates and upstages all religious images of Jesus for the Western Church.

This is a problem for American churches. Jesus was a Palestinian Jew who looked like the people with whom we are at war. He lived in the Mediterranean area, walking from place to place, feeding the hungry, curing the sick, relating to people on the margins of society, challenging the Pharisees and eventually executed on a cross for treason against the Roman Empire. The Sallman’s Head of Christ captures none of these very important New Testament roles describing Jesus.

The Sallman’s Head of Christ takes Jesus out of his historical context. It is a way of creating Jesus (the Christ) as our image with our white cultural biases. Is this, perhaps, a form of idolatry that comforts us as privileged white Christians who pushes out of bounds the prophetic cultural challenges of the New Testament Jesus?

The “culturalizing” of Jesus allow us to reinforce the values of our society without holding our images of Jesus up for scrutiny. If Jesus was not culturalized as a German in the 1940s, could the holocaust have taken place? If Jesus had not been culturalized in the Sallmans’ Head of Christ in the South during the 1940s could lynching have occurred at the vicious level it did with its religious sanctions?

Images we use to depict the divine shape what we do and what we hold valuable and, often justifies much evil. The two questions Dr. Sadler posed are significant for whites and people of color.

When asked at the end of his lecture about what images (icons) of Jesus he would recommend for churches, Dr. Sadler suggested we do away with all images (graven) of Jesus. Jews and Muslims do not use pictorial images in their religious practices because of their belief in the radical holiness of God.

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thersthatmatter.blogspot.com

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TEAM MEMBERS:
Karon Alexander, Dwight Bailey, Brittany Barber, Darron Bowden, Gloria Carey-Branch, Minta Coburn, Ann Marie Coleman, Don Coleman, Carol Josefowski, and Leila Ward