Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Was Jesus White? | Who Is Jesus?

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to 10 Minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. My name is Patrick Miller. And I'm Keith Simon. Right now, we're asking, who is Jesus? On a Sunday morning in September, 1963, white supremacist detonated a bomb outside of 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. The blast went through a stained glass window, taking out the face of Jesus. The face of Jesus in that stained glass window of a predominantly African-American church was of a white Jesus. I'll link to the image in the show notes, but what's remarkable is how much of Jesus remains while his face is gone.

Starting point is 00:00:49 Over 4,000 miles away in the country of Wales, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, an artist named John Petz, who was known for his work with stained glass, heard about the bombing and offered his service. What's interesting is that the gift received from Wales, the stained glass window that replaced the one that had been bombed, was of a black Jesus hanging on a cross. What do you think Jesus look like? The physical appearance of Jesus has been argued about for centuries, argued about in almost every country. Where did you get your image of Jesus? When you pray, do you pray to a Jesus that looks like you? I remember where I got my picture of Jesus. It wasn't from the movies or a television show.

Starting point is 00:01:37 It was from a picture book. My family had bought me this book of Bible stories, and I remember this specific picture of Jesus. He was tall. He had long flowing brown hair. He had pale white skin, blue eyes, a halo around his head, and he kind of floated off the ground as if he were so otherworldly, so holy, that he wouldn't touch the ground even as he walked.

Starting point is 00:02:01 I have to admit that I had something similar to that image in my head of Jesus for a long time, an embarrassingly long time. I think a lot of us have an image of Jesus of what he looked like that is probably false. It's probably built on an image that we saw in a painting or on a movie or a billboard or maybe in a church story Bible lesson, but it probably doesn't look like the real Jesus. In 1940, a graphic artist from Chicago named Warner-Salman produced a picture of Jesus called the Head of Christ. That picture became the most copied picture, the most reproduced picture of Jesus in the history of the world. As it turns out, as of the 21st century, over 500 million copies

Starting point is 00:02:54 have been produced. It's been put on plaques and bookmarks, funeral cards, church bulletins, buttons, calendars, clocks, lamps, coffee mugs, stickers, billboards, and keychains. I'll link to the picture in the show notes, but I bet when you see it, you're going to look at it and say, yep, I've seen that before. That might be the forming image in your mind of what Jesus looked like. Every culture, every people group has a tendency to make Jesus in their own image. That's not just true of Americans or white people or black people. It's true almost of everyone.

Starting point is 00:03:31 If you spend any time on Google, you can find Ethiopic Jesus and Coptic Jesus and Syriac Jesus. And there's something about that. That's good. In the incarnation, God became a human being. God became like us. So in some sense, it's smart and wise and biblical to see Jesus entering into our world, our culture, our life. There is a sense in which Jesus comes to dwell with us. But of course there are some downsides to this too, downsides to making Jesus in our own image.

Starting point is 00:04:07 A German artist named Albert Dür, who lived and worked in the 16th century, created a painting of a face that was a blend of his face with the face of Christ. And I think his point was that we all have a tendency to make Jesus into our image. We all have this tendency to create a Jesus that first, our ambitions that makes us feel comfortable that doesn't challenge our sacred cows. A problem develops when we think that the image of Jesus that we have in our mind was what he was really like. For example, in December 11, 2013, Megan Kelly, who was at that time a Fox News anchor, said on air that it was a fact that Jesus and Santa Claus were both white. Really? Jesus was white? About a year ago,

Starting point is 00:05:04 I was in a conversation both in the newspaper and then over lunch with an African-American pastor. He's a great guy, really like him, enjoy being around him, always learned something from him. But in a particular newspaper column, he had offered a critique of me and the church I'm a pastor of. Now, please don't get me wrong. He'd been very complimentary of the kinds of things that our church was doing in the community. But he said, he and I differed when it came to theology, because I bought into a white theology, a European Jesus, an Anglo Jesus. Now, when we got together over lunch, we had a lively conversation about this. And I thanked him for all the ways that he had been complimentary of us and told him that I really respected him and his ministry as well. But I did have a problem with the idea that the Jesus that we are talking about at our church is a white Jesus or is beholden to white theology. The Jesus I believe in is the Jesus of the New Testament, the one that Augustine, Tertullian, Athanasius, who are African church fathers, black men who helped develop the theology around the Trinity, the theology of Jesus for the church.

Starting point is 00:06:19 it turns out that the Jesus of the Bible is the Jesus that came to Europe from Africa, not the other way around. But I guess I lost some of you a few moments ago when I hinted at the fact that Jesus wasn't white. No, Jesus wasn't white, at least the way that we use that term today. Jesus was a Middle Eastern Palestinian Jewish man. Like I said earlier, to some extent, it doesn't hurt to picture Jesus as a person like us, regardless of what culture that we live in. But it becomes a problem when people idealize the Jesus of a particular culture. For example, in our history, American history, people idealized whiteness. They said that because Jesus was white, the ideal human being was white.

Starting point is 00:07:14 And then they used that false truth. In other words, the thing they claimed to be true, but really wasn't, to subjugate other people who weren't white. A lot of damage has been done in the name of white Jesus. But of course, the crazy thing about it is that no Christian, no intelligent person should think that Jesus was white. With the aid of artificial intelligence, we are able to recreate pictures of what Jesus probably looked like. I say probably because it's not as if we know exactly what he looked like, but we do have lots of information about what a Middle Eastern Palestinian Jew in the first century would have looked like, and Jesus would have resembled those men. If that's not the

Starting point is 00:08:00 image of Jesus that comes to your mind when you think of him, then you have maybe an overactive imagination. Jesus was a real person who lived in a real culture who was born in the first century. He was a Jew. He grew up speaking Aramaic. He grew up in the northern region of Israel called Galilee. He was born around 6 BC under the Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus and under King Herod, the regional king. He died about 36 years later in 30-ish AD under the authority of a Roman governor named Pontius Pilate. He was crucified because it was claimed that Jesus was leading an insurrection against Rome. Jesus was the son of a carpenter, a construction worker. Now, when we hear that, we think of a person who works with wood, and I'm sure that Joseph did work with wood from time to time,

Starting point is 00:08:56 but he probably mostly worked with stone. So here is Jesus, a man who grew up in a particular time period, in a particular culture, a part of a particular family, and yet he has come for every human being in every culture. He is a person who is bound by his culture and yet not bound by any culture. He is omnilingual. He wants a relationship with every single one of us. But of course that means that any relationship that we're going to have with Jesus is a cross-cultural relationship. We didn't grow up in the place that he did. We don't understand the values in his culture. Our language isn't the same as his language. Our culture is not asking the same questions that his culture was asking during his lifetime. If we're going to understand Jesus on

Starting point is 00:09:48 his terms, if we're going to understand what he wants to say to us, we're going to have to understand that culture and that Jesus. If we don't, we're going to come to some terribly wrong conclusions about who Jesus is and what he taught. We're going to Americanize Jesus. We're going to make Jesus in our own image. that Jesus might be comforting, but that Jesus isn't the true Jesus. In 1519, the Spanish explorer Cortez met the Aztec King Montezuma. Cortez was very impressed with Montezuma and the Aztec kingdom. He had never seen anything like it.

Starting point is 00:10:29 But unfortunately, there was a tremendous failure to communicate. The two men had never seen anyone that looked like the other. They didn't speak the same language. didn't share the same values or the same culture. And so when they tried to communicate, they came to a tremendous misunderstanding. Montezuma praised Cortez. And Cortez received it at face value.

Starting point is 00:10:53 He thought Montezuma was surrendering to him a great man. But in the Aztec culture and in the language that Montezuma spoke, to praise someone like Cortez was to praise yourself. In other words, Montezuma was saying, Cortez, you are a great man, but guess what? I am even greater. But that part was lost in the translation. It led to a war, and the Aztec civilization was wiped out, all because two people from two different cultures didn't understand one another. That kind of misunderstanding can happen between us and Jesus, if we won't slow down, if we won't try to understand the Jesus of the first century,

Starting point is 00:11:36 that Jesus presented to us in the Gospels. That Jesus wants to get to know us. That Jesus wants a relationship with us. But we're going to have to do a little bit of work to understand who Jesus really is, what his mission is, and what he calls us to believe and do. Thanks for listening.

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Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Was Jesus White? | Who Is Jesus?

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