According to Shaun King, a columnist for the New York Daily News, a Jesus who looks like a cross between Brad Pitt and Johnny Damon (when he was cool) is a tool of white supremacy.
Sigh.
King is correct when he says that our predominant picture of Jesus is white and European. In reality, he’s less likely to look like, as King says, a California surfer dude, than he is to look like Sayid in LOST.
But where King falls down badly is the reason why. It’s not a plot by the KKK, Republican Party, and Faux News (See what I did there? hahahahaha). If you have to blame someone, blame the apostle Paul who also probably looked more like Sayid than like Jeffrey Hunter or Jim Caviezel.
Through is efforts, Paul probably did more than anyone to spread the center of what became Christianity from the Middle East to Europe, where people didn’t look like Sayid.
King isn’t even wrong to say that maybe we should start depicting Jesus to look like he probably did. What’s the harm? Nothing. It shouldn’t matter what Jesus looked like. The central idea is that God loved his people–all of them–so much that he decided to come hang with us for a while so we might get the idea that he thought we were worth coming to live with. And that would be true even if Jesus looked like Marty Feldman.
If there’s any doubt it doesn’t matter, how many people are angered by Morgan Freeman playing God. There were people offended by Evan Almighty–mostly because it was an awful movie. But I don’t recall a hue and outcry about Freeman in it.
The central message of Jesus transcends race. His law is based on two simple things–the second of which is to love your neighbor as yourself. I’m not sure if King considers himself Christian, but if he does, he might do better concentrating on that–along with everyone else.
* — Jeffrey Hunter, Captain Christopher Pike in the original Star Trek pilot, also played Jesus in King of Kings.
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