What Color Is Jesus?

For me to disagree with something said by John Piper is pretty unusual. In this very brief audio clip at the Desiring God blog (and I don't know the context, so I hope it represents the fullness of what he was saying), Piper suggests that artistic representations of Jesus should be racially diverse, since we don't know what Jesus looked like and we should strive to emphasize that His incarnation encompassed all people groups. I wouldn't necessarily call this a strong disagreement, because I have several art books in which Jesus is represented as Asian, Native-American, African, etc. I like these pictures, because they remind me of the eyes through which other cultures see the gospel.

However, these artistic representations have their limitations--and may even be misleading. Why? Jesus' incarnation is inextricably connected to His prophetic role as the Jewish Messiah, therefore to represent Him as anything other than as close an approximation as we can get to a 1st-century Jewish man is to misrepresent Him. He is an historical person, not a subjective idea around which our cultural perceptions may be wrapped.

His Jewishness was that which identified Him as the Messiah to those Jews who accepted Him, that which gave Him a right to claim to be the Son of God, to heal, to cast out demons, to be raised from the dead. Had He been a woman, a gentile, born anywhere but Bethlehem, of anyone other than a virgin, He would not have been the Messiah.

This does pose a challenge to contexualization in mission. The idea of importing a foreign god into another culture is distasteful--and some missionaries have been guilty of foisting a white, Anglo-Saxon Jesus on the people groups they are attempting to reach. But Jesus' role as the redeemer of the nations is inseparable from His role as the redeemer of Israel, and this historical/theological/biblical reality should not be ignored in our attempts to make the gospel understandable to those who have not heard.

What Color Is Jesus?

For me to disagree with something said by John Piper is pretty unusual. In this very brief audio clip at the Desiring God blog (and I don't know the context, so I hope it represents the fullness of what he was saying), Piper suggests that artistic representations of Jesus should be racially diverse, since we don't know what Jesus looked like and we should strive to emphasize that His incarnation encompassed all people groups. I wouldn't necessarily call this a strong disagreement, because I have several art books in which Jesus is represented as Asian, Native-American, African, etc. I like these pictures, because they remind me of the eyes through which other cultures see the gospel.

However, these artistic representations have their limitations--and may even be misleading. Why? Jesus' incarnation is inextricably connected to His prophetic role as the Jewish Messiah, therefore to represent Him as anything other than as close an approximation as we can get to a 1st-century Jewish man is to misrepresent Him. He is an historical person, not a subjective idea around which our cultural perceptions may be wrapped.

His Jewishness was that which identified Him as the Messiah to those Jews who accepted Him, that which gave Him a right to claim to be the Son of God, to heal, to cast out demons, to be raised from the dead. Had He been a woman, a gentile, born anywhere but Bethlehem, of anyone other than a virgin, He would not have been the Messiah.

This does pose a challenge to contexualization in mission. The idea of importing a foreign god into another culture is distasteful--and some missionaries have been guilty of foisting a white, Anglo-Saxon Jesus on the people groups they are attempting to reach. But Jesus' role as the redeemer of the nations is inseparable from His role as the redeemer of Israel, and this historical/theological/biblical reality should not be ignored in our attempts to make the gospel understandable to those who have not heard.