The Mark of His Face

In the church, we love to celebrate God’s expressed delight in creating humans in God’s own image. It was very good! But what do we mean when we say we reflect the image of God? Does God look like a human being? Did Jesus look like me? Does it matter?

In a theology course years ago, I learned that God is neither male nor female. Neither did God make only men in his image, as the King James Version translated Genesis 1:27. Rather, all humans were imbued with the divine spark—the imago Dei.

Yet when I search “imago Dei” online, the first image that comes up is a section of the Sistine Chapel, depicting God as an old man with wavy white hair extending his arm toward a reclining Adam. Painting in Rome in the 16th century, Michelangelo depicted both men as white.

When public theologian Christena Cleveland spoke at a university on the topic of religion and culture recently, a student approached her to ask, “Does it make Black people uncomfortable that God is a white man?”

That assumption is so deeply embedded in our culture—in movies, churches, and everyday conversations—that we can forget it isn’t true. Cleveland writes, “Like many culture-shaping ideas, we don’t even question the idea or how it shapes our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. For most of us, regardless of what we might want to believe or claim to believe, the image that immediately comes to mind when we imagine God is that of a powerful white man who is for and with powerful white men.”

So Cleveland embarked on a quest that she describes in her recent book, God Is a Black Woman. She was spurred on by the backlash she experienced after writing an article for Christianity Today in which she stated Jesus was neither blond nor white. Readers sent her hate mail and death threats—some delivered to her home. In response, she set out in search of a God who might be with and for Black women. In her case, she chose to seek out Black Madonnas around the world. She was looking for God in spaces and images that looked like her.

I devoured her book, resonating with her hunger to find out “whether God was on my side.” In theology class, I had asked our professor, “If God has no gender, why don’t we use both feminine and masculine pronouns for God in our evangelical context?” The response: “Well, that’s just not what the text says.”

Does God see all of me? How am I created in the image of God?

These questions aren’t merely heady speculations for classrooms and seminarians. They matter because they impact how each one of us is welcomed into the family of God, and how deeply we can know we belong.

This year we mark the 100th anniversary of an iconic piece of art that originated on the cover of this magazine. As the Companion team grappled with its complicated legacy, we wondered how to tell this story. Conversations with friends and colleagues throughout the denomination helped us better understand the cultural context the Covenant occupied in 1924, as well as harm the image has caused. We lament that too many Christ-followers have had to ask, “Am I really created in God’s image?”

Eventually, we asked Covenant artist Mia Larson to help us create a cover that invites readers into this dialogue. The wrestling is real. Many still feel comforted by the idea and image of Jesus who appears to be white. But we also bear witness to the alienation and separation our friends of color experience when we seem to reinforce that myth.

The writers of the New Testament don’t tell us what Jesus looked like. In The Faces of Jesus, Frederick Buechner writes, “Perhaps, when you think the world is on fire, you don’t take time out to do a thumbnail sketch. Nobody tells us what he looked like, yet of course the New Testament itself is what he looked like….You glimpse the mark of his face in the faces of everyone who ever looked toward him or away from him, which means finally of course that you glimpse the mark of him also in your face too.” May we each find the face of Jesus imprinted on ourselves and in each other.