Welcome to the Knox Talks blog. Here you can find recent and past sermons relating scripture to a wide variety of topics. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.
“Ask Andrew” is an annual opportunity for Knox folks to ask for their spiritual or religious questions to be addressed in a sermon.
Ask Andrew:
What’s With the Blue-Eyed Jesus?
Does Jesus have blue eyes and fair skin in all Christian churches?
When did Jesus first appear with Northern European complexions?
Scriptures: Revelations 7:9-10Acts 8:26-40
I would like to start this with the question: Why does anyone paint a picture of Jesus at all?
There are no clues about how Jesus looked from his own lifetime. Jesus took no selfies. So, every portrayal is a work of imagination. The artist is making an artistic statement of some sort. Each picture tells a story about Jesus and represents what the artist or their sponsor believed.
My favourite description of Jesus came from the author Parke Godwin who said in his 1988 novel Waiting for the Galactic Bus, that Jesus looked like an Arab taxi driver.
More recently, people have used Computer Generated Imaging to produce a face of Jesus that would fit a Mediterranean Jewish man: brown eyes, black, curly hair, dark skin. Not far off the Arab taxi driver image, really.
Most people paint Jesus to tell a story, not for historical accuracy, and the oldest Christian story is that Jesus is like us. That’s the theological point most important to early Christians. Jesus bridged the gap between humanity and divinity, between people and God.
Early Christians wanted to reassure others that God’s love is universal. As it is expressed in our Revelations reading, countless people were welcomed from every land and nation. That was the message for centuries, even after religious symbolism added details that only trained people could decipher,
One of the earliest portrayals of Jesus would have happened in Ethiopia when the Ethiopian eunuch went home and established the oldest Christian community outside of the Roman Empire. That painting, (or mosaic, or icon or whatever) would have shown Jesus with Ethiopian features, saying: “See, Jesus was like us. He understands our lives. We can approach God through Jesus.”
Artists who painted Jesus used local models, sometimes wearing familiar local clothing. You could say a lot if you chose to paint Jesus in the clothes of a rich person or a street person.
The blue-eyed Jesus paintings would have started about 1000 years ago when missionaries took their lives into their hands and reached out to the Germanic and Scandinavian nations. Those missionaries, who were probably small and dark, would have wanted to convince the tall, blue-eyed people that Jesus loved and understood them too.
It was a mix of theology and marketing, and the goal was both honest and loving: to show people that Jesus was worth trusting; to give people a way of imagining Jesus that fit their lives, that didn’t have history and geography and genetics as obstacles.
The problem came when various European countries, who had all benefited from the industrial revolution, decided that they were civilized and that other lands were savage. (I know that “savage” is an offensive word today, and I am using it deliberately to underscore the attitudes that existed not that many decades ago).
When they went to other lands, it wasn’t to tell people that Jesus could empathize with their lives, it was to tell people that Jesus was like the Europeans and that the Europeans were coming as white saviours (and empire builders).
Europeans had confused culture with religion. How could Jesus really love people who dressed like that (or worse, ran around naked)?
In Europe for centuries paleness had been equated with privilege. The rulers tended to be whiter than the poor folks because peasants were tanned by the sun while the rich folk could stay in the shade and be pale. It even got into tales of King Arthur: When you “rescue a maiden fair,” she’s fair-skinned because she’s a princess; she’s rich and has never worked in the sun in her life.
By the time of the great European empires, the ruling classes were convinced that their own poor, who were darker because of tanning and dirt, were in desperate need of salvation and were more or less savages themselves. The whole society, rich and poor alike, classified the people of the places they were invading as even more savage.
It does make it easier to take land and gold and beaver skins if you don’t consider the people you are taking it from really human, if you don’t consider the people you are kidnapping and forcing to labour for free forever, as really people. After all, real people have proper clothing; they know how to set a table properly, with all the different spoons in their rightful places. What kind of good Christian can’t set a proper table?
That’s why the lands that have the blue-eyed Jesus pictures are the places who have been colonized by blue-eyed people.
One dimension of this is that the church turned Biblical imagery, which addressed natural human fear of the night and comfort of the day, into a dichotomy of black and white; darkness vs. light, where white represents purity and black represents sin. Still today, across the world in former colonies, cosmetic companies make a fortune on skin-lightening products for all the people who are still convinced that whiter is better.
One sad reality is that a lot of the white supremacists of today are descended from the poor white Europeans who were abused by their rich, entitled “betters”. They used to have the comfort of thinking that while they might be inferior to the rich and powerful, they were superior to anyone darker than themselves. The principle of equality takes that small comfort away from them and they are reacting with violence. A good Marxist would take that fury and aim it at the ruling classes. That’s not happening.
Where Christians have approached a new culture with love and honesty, you can find art that shows Jesus as Asian, African, Slavic, Peruvian, short, tall, and every colour of skin that humans have. Some of it has existed from centuries before any blue-eyed Jesus paintings ever existed.
And new art is being created. I saw a wonderful one where Jesus is clearly first-nations: dressed in traditional plains garb and welcoming three indigenous children, two of whom are dressed in the clothing of a residential school.
And there are the crucifixes, one at Emmanuel College in Toronto, that portrays Jesus as a woman. People are often upset at the gender challenge. Some are upset that the women are portrayed as topless, (as crucifixes always are) or sometimes completely nude (as real crucifixions always were).
One artist, making this feminist Christian point, painted a crucified female Jesus who was so white and even blond that I started to wonder what artistic point was being made.
The blue-eyed Jesus image started off as a way to persuade my violent ancestors to embrace a more loving way. Then the church made the mistake of thinking that our culture was the same as our faith. So, the blue-eyed Jesus became a symbol of oppression, racism, ignorance and hatred.
This is one of the saddest realities of modern Christianity. We have to accept that it has had terrible consequences and we must work to understand how we should really present Jesus to other people. We still confuse our culture and our identity with our faith. The only way we can show someone different that God loves them is to express it in terms and images they understand.
Amen.
(Stay tuned for my next Ask Andrew sermon in a couple of weeks: How do we reconcile being members of an institution with so much blood on its hands?)
Knox United Church Nepean 