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There is an old parable, I’m sure you’ve heard it before: Three folks, all blind, were standing around an elephant, each one at a different part side of the elephant–one on the side described the elephant as a wall, and one at the head touched the ear and described the elephant as a leathery paper, and the one at the… rear of the elephant touched the tail and described the elephant as a rope. All had their own perspective, all were right, every perspective was incomplete.
But what if the one at the side of the elephant had some friends, folks who agreed with him, who shouted over everyone else, who silenced their voice, who declared the only way to talk about an elephant is the way THEY understood an elephant.
For hundreds of years, Christianity was told from one side of the elephant–mostly from the side of the Holy Roman Empire–which was German, monarchitical, male. Even as the early church leaders were incredibly diverse, it was just this one version of Christianity to create an empire, to translate and interpret the scripture, to write the books, to teach others.
To image Christ to look like them, the powerful, to paint the pictures, for generations.
And there are portraits like these in churches all over, at least the country, maybe the world. These were found in a closet when we were cleaning them up during COVID–tucked away so we didn’t have to think about it. I know that these images are important to some, and I know that this is a church that understands Jesus was a Palestinian Jew and would have looked more like a Middle Eastern man than say… Norwegian….
As time passed on, as education becomes more common, as the world expanded and became more connected, let’s say… the 1950s, 60s, came the realization that no everyone reads the Bible the same way, not everyone experiences God the same way; that maybe God is bigger than an elephant, and it’s time to stop shouting down the people who are experiencing the ear, the trunk, the tail…
James Cone’s iconic work of Black Libertation Theology was one such person. He writes Jesus is black. It is both as a statement of likely having some African blood, but as a Palestinian Jew under Roman occupation, ontologically, metaphorically, Jesus’ experience and life would have been oppressed, marginalized, impoverished as the historical black community.
In his final work, Dr Cone connects the cross of Jesus to the lynching tree of 18 and 1900s; the cross to the fence post in Larime.
This call to the white Christians to see where are the crosses in our world today: ICE arrests and detention centers, mass incarceration, treatment of indigenous people and lands, ending of support for trans kids. It’s a call to White Christians to see where we participate in the systems of oppression, or where we have benefited, even unknowingly; it is investigating our own whiteness, and invest in learning from people and experiences that are not our own, from a diversity of people and perspectives.
Audre Lorde, in one of her often quoted speeches turned essays,
For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.
She was writing particularly about overturning the patriarchy and women’s place and role in it. She was saying that women couldn’t just take on the same power with the same way as men, we might be in charge for a little while but will never overturn the tables, we will never change the system. As it is with the patriarchy, it is with racial supremacy, heteronamtivity, all systems and structures that are used to occupy and marginalize people.
Because it is easy to mock the past. It is easy to pretend it’s foolishness of people of the past. It’s easy to put the ideas, the hundreds and hundreds of years in the closet and pretend we’ve moved past it. But there are still people dying, still people being run over by the system we are pretending doesn’t exist. But it’s still there, collecting dust.
The sentence before the one about the master’s tools says:
It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths.
We have to envision a new way to make a new world. This new world is one that is embodied–embraces the fullness of each person, allows each person to contribute their gifts and passions; a new world that is vulnerable and intimate and truthful; that speaks truth, everyone’s truth, and allows them to be truth, even if they are different, even if they are each from a different side of the elephant.
It is a new way of the world that is revealed in the way of Christ: a way of compassion and generosity; Spirit and justice; empathy and love. It is caring for our neighbor and being a good neighbor; it is turning over the tables of the way things have always been, of the systems of power; It is painting a vision of a word where we are call cared for, where all have enough, all are see, and all are loved as children of God.
And that is the personal and communal; it is cosmic and it is lifelong. We will be doing it all our days until kin-dom come.
And, what do we do with these? Because I’m not sure we can just put them back in the closet and pretend they aren’t part of our history. But what if we could do the work of… re-imagining Jesus?
At the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth, the leadership asked communities from individual countries to make images of Jesus and gift them to the church.
What exists are these amazing works of art of Mary from every place around the world, in traditional dress and skin and expressions.
What if we could re-imagine this Jesus into someone who reminds us of other perspectives of Jesus? What if we connected to local arts and artists we know, to interpret a Jesus in a different way.