Ever Wonder What a Black Christ Would Look Like on Screen?

Sharpening Mind and Soul

The Black Christ is not a new concept. However, as Harry Lennix said the nation is need of a revival. A Black Christ on screen, shows the nation Black actors can portray divinity and redemption.

Friday night my husband and I accompanied our daughter to the high school play “Jesus Christ Superstar.” The rock opera focuses on the last seven days in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. When the young man portraying Jesus ascending to the stage, my husband and I shook our head and said, “A White Jesus.” We watched. We enjoyed. We tried to remember if we’d seen the original or any production. We hadn’t. “Jesus Christ Superstar” opened in the U.S. on Broadway in 1971 and closed in 1973. We were not old enough.

Although the high school play’s portrayal of Jesus was white, Pontius Pilate and Apostle Peter were young Black students with voices from heaven. Baritone, smooth, and durable. I believed they’d been raised in somebody’s church.

After leaving, I questioned how the audience would have responded to a Black Jesus. I thought of our Sunday School Ministry’s Easter production when a female minister played Jesus Christ, and she put on a mustache. Why couldn’t Jesus be a woman? William P. Young author of The Shack depicted God as a Black woman. In the film adaption, Octavia Spencer starred as Papa, Abba, the Almighty and All-Knowing God. Theologian Kelly Brown Douglas author of The Black Christ, argues that to a portrayal of a Black Christ suggest that “Christ can be seen in the face of Sojourner Truth, a Harriet Tubman, or Fannie Lou Hammer… to portray Christ in the face of Black heroines and heroes signals that it was not who Jesus was, particularly as a male, that made him Christ, but what he did” (113).

Surprisingly, the idea of a Jesus Christ as a Black man surfaced again on Saturday afternoon. Harry Lennix, the film, television and stage actor, presented an Art & Spirituality lecture at Vassar College’s The Martel Theater. Lennix introduced us to his new production Revival, based on the Gospel of John starring a Christ who is African American.

Lennix wants to change the dynamics. He said, “How can one build a personal relationship with a God that doesn’t look like him or her and what does that mean in today’s political environment for the faithful?”

Lennix boldly stated, he’d seen enough actors such as Willem Dafoe play the Son of God. Let’s think about it: Christian Bale, Liam Neeson, and Jim Caviezel all Caucasian men playing the role of Christ but none have a hint of Middle Eastern or dark brown skinned Indo-Aryan features scholars acknowledge.

Some scholars claim the Bible doesn’t give a physical description of Christ. In Isaiah 53:2b, the prophet describes the Christ as Isaiah 53:2b, “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to Him, nothing in His appearance that we should desire Him.” All this tells us is that Jesus’ appearance was just like any other man’s – He was ordinary-looking. Isaiah was here prophesying that the coming suffering Servant would arise in lowly conditions and wear none of the usual emblems of royalty, making His true identity visible only to the discerning eye of faith.

GotQuestions.com, argues “Does it really matter that we know the color of Jesus’ skin—whether He was black, yellow, brown, or white? It is useless to speculate. Pointless because the redemption is not determined by Jesus’s skin color.

If Jesus’s skin color doesn’t matter then why has the Son of God been portrayed by one race, continuously? Even Muhammad Ali was curious about Why Jesus is White? Malcolm X proclaimed Jesus Christ was a Black man. Thus, the color of Jesus skin matters.

Brown Douglas claims images of Christ with Black skin and features helps nurture “Black self-esteem needed to mitigate the murderous/suicidal self-hate in the black community” (1). Brown argues Black Christ lifts up people who are a part of the black past and present, who have worked to move the Black community opener and wholeness.

In a Tavis Smiley interview Lennix said, black actors have played slaves and butlers, why not play a role that brings the gift of life to the world other than a subservient role.” I agree we need to change the message, in the U.S. as well as in our community “black people are capable of divinity and redemption.”

In the words of Lennix, this nation is in need of a revival. According to Sonia Sanchez’s poem “Haiku & Tanka for Harriet Tubman,” black voices are “reviving a country’s breath…”

Picture black voices
Leaving behind
Lost tongues

That’s a revival when we as a community, a nation, as a people recover strength, improve conditions, renew souls, reawaken minds and resurrect life. Didn’t Harriet Tubman revive her people, the nation?

The weekend was an unexpected moment of sharpening my mind and my soul. Like Harry Lennix, I am at an intersection of my expertise and a new field of discourse called black theology, merging a professional craft with faith.