But sitting in my pew during last evening's Maundy Thursday liturgy, I couldn't help but evaluate the corpus. From a distance, the skin tone is brown; from a closer vantage point, the features more European than Mideastern.
A White Savior with a tan, perhaps.
The film that led me down this slightly subversive path --- available via Amazon Prime and viewed earlier in the week --- is entitled "White Savior: Racism in the American Church." This is a 2019 production of Spark House, Minneapolis-based and affiliated with the publishing arm of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA).
The film has received many positive reviews and appears to have been included in many church-based study programs, but critics tend to dismiss it as "woke," a familiar way some use to dismiss what they consider to be excessively "liberal."
But then I am excessively liberal and proudly woke. So the film left me with many things to think about during Holy Week --- including the St. Andrew's crucifix.
I'd recommend it.
American Christians, from orthodox to cultural and all along the spectrum between, like to maintain the polite fiction that we acknowledge but one god. The truth of the matter is, we're polytheists, all busy creating divinity in our own image.
So a useful question to ask during Holy Week and into Eastertide --- which Jesus is it whose resurrection you plan to celebrate?
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