Off the Cross and Fine As Hell: On the Black Risen Jesus at XULA
A Reflection on a 12-Foot Risen Black Jesus and What His Beauty Means in a Historically Black Context
Over the last few weeks, I taught at the Institute for Black Catholic Studies (IBCS) at Xavier University of Louisiana (XULA), the only Black AND Catholic Historically Black College/University (HBCU) in North America. The IBCS, in its 46th year as an accredited graduate and continuing education program, educates and spiritually forms Catholic laypeople, layleaders, priests, theologians, liturgists, and more in the Black Catholic tradition. The IBCS, like its parent institution, is predominantly black in its staff, faculty, and student body, but there are also non-Black participants in the institution. One of the unique things about the IBCS is that it focuses on the pursuit of knowledge, wisdom, and understanding about the Black Catholic intellectual tradition and on spiritual formation.
During the three weeks of the institute's session, spiritual formation through attendance and participation in morning prayer at 8 am and noon mass is essential to community life. Both morning prayer and noon mass occur in the St. Katharine Drexel Chapel, the centerpiece of XULA's campus. From the first time I entered St. Katharine's chapel, it took my breath away. It is a modern, minimalist space with natural light streaming from the octagonal ceilings. A contemporary stained glass Stations of the Cross hugs the room on both sides with the actions of Jesus, his accusers, executors, and his community in blue against a yellow background. The limestone floor is the hardest thing about the chapel. The design of the space is simply beautiful, but the centerpiece of this chapel is Jesus at the center of it all, a Jesus who it is hard not to be locked in on during morning prayer and noonday mass.
Very similar to the breathtaking design of the St. Katharine's Chapel, the Jesus in the center at the front of this chapel is stunning. Standing 12 feet tall, he floats above the altar and the chapel. I remember seeing this Jesus for the first time last year and being taken aback, not just because of his size and scale, but because of his handsomeness and fineness. This Jesus, to me, is FINE. It feels unhinged to be talking about Jesus as fine, but if he is indeed fully God AND fully man, then it should be quite alright to acknowledge his human attributes as having humanly attractive qualities—and that's on the Council of Chalcedon. So yes, this Jesus is fine, fine as hell without going there, or fine and divine to put some respect on his person. He has a chiseled face with a nicely lined-up beard and goatee situation with locs that, though they haven't been retwisted since before Christ, still look good and fresh. With fabric draped around one of his shoulders and covering his legs, he floats over the space with arms wide open and nail-marked hands and feet. Those markings are slight and the only sign that the state brutally executed him—or, as was heard in morning prayer one day as we introduced the genres that signal Black bodies in religious struggle, utilizing the work of religious studies scholar Anthony Pinn, that he was the "first strange fruit swinging from the poplar tree." But in the context of the risen Christ in St. Katharine's chapel, I am never drawn to the markings of the body of Jesus, the body of Christ; I am drawn to this beautifully depicted Black Jesus risen high and lifted up.
Every day for two weeks, I prayed, worshipped, genuflected, and even preached at the feet of this Jesus. So as I prepared to leave XULA on Thursday, I took one last picture of him. A friend laughed and said, "You and this Jesus." I jokingly responded that I was taking the picture in case he changed while I was gone. My friend texted later and said:
P.S.: I realized that you love a Black Jesus. That's why you love that statue of the risen Jesus in the chapel. You Black as f*ck.
To this, I shared my revelation regarding what is really captivating about this Jesus. It's not because he is fine, but because he is Black and risen. As I said, this Jesus floats above the chapel space with arms wide open, showing only faint signs of what he's been through. Aside from those scars, he doesn't look like what he's been through. He floats because he has risen. He has faint marks because he has risen. And in the context of a chapel at the center of the only historically Black and Catholic university in the Western Hemisphere/an HBCU in the deep South, seeing a risen, resurrected Jesus matters.
A cursory research on the risen Christ in St. Katharine's chapel at XULA places it in the context of the chapel being one of the first significant architectural rebuilds in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The high ceilings and the risen Christ floating in the space are meant to symbolize the city rising from the wreckage of Katrina. Yet I think the other significance is that this is a 12-foot-tall risen Black Jesus in a chapel at the center of an HBCU in the deep South. It matters that the depiction of Jesus is not simply crucified and slain, but a Jesus full of life and welcoming each person who walks into the chapel. It matters that Black students, faculty, and staff at XULA, whether they are of the faith or not, see something other than a depiction of necessary violence and substitutionary atonement. This is this Black woman's Jesus—it's me, I'm this Black woman, a Jesus who is not locked into his crucifixion but can live into his resurrected life. Of a reading of a womanist theological interpretation of Jesus that everyday Black women can connect to, the late Delores Williams offers:
Womanist theologians use the sociopolitical thought and action of the African-American woman’s world to show Black women their salvation does not depend upon any form of surrogacy made sacred by traditional and orthodox understandings of Jesus’s life and death. Rather their salvation is assured by Jesus’ life of resistance and by the survival strategies he used to help people survive the death of identity caused by their exchange of inherited cultural meanings for a new identity shaped by the gospel ethics and world view.1
Williams goes on to connect the death of identity experienced by Black people brought to America and enslaved, and made to think that the deformed Christian religion forced upon them by colonizers was the way. But these people, our ancestors, relied on Jesus to help them forge a new identity, and that identity is based on life and life more abundantly as opposed to death by necessity. Of this, Williams poignantly states:
This kind of account of Jesus’ salvific value—made compatible and understandable by use of African-American women’s sociopolitical patterns—frees redemption from the cross and frees the cross from the ‘sacred aura’ put around it by existing patriarchal responses to the question of what Jesus’ death represents.2 (Emphasis mine)
Simply put, the Jesus of Black people need not be of the crucifixion as much as he needs to be the Jesus of the resurrected life. This does not negate the crucifixion; instead, it helps people who are almost too accustomed to violence in relation to their bodies see life as the symbol, not death. After all, the Eucharist in which we partake is a remembrance of Jesus's death and resurrection and a re-membrance, as in because of Jesus lives, we do not have to be consumed with images of death. This is what I feel is powerful about the risen Jesus in the St. Katharine Drexel Chapel at XULA.
Given this, maybe it isn't unhinged at all to call Jesus fine. Maybe recognizing his fineness is recognizing resurrection itself. This Jesus is beautiful not despite what he's been through, but because he has risen from it. His attractiveness is full humanity restored, not just surviving violence, but flourishing beyond it. The scars are faint because they're eclipsed by life so abundant it radiates from his floating form. His fineness is his resurrection made visible and that is deeply theological connected to the God who gives us beauty for ashes, BEAUTY.
In this chapel at the center of the only Black Catholic HBCU in the Western Hemisphere, that fineness becomes promise. For Black students, faculty, and community members who know too intimately what bodies look like after violence, this risen Jesus offers a different vision entirely. Not just the hope of survival, but the promise of beauty, of desirability, of life that doesn't just endure but flourishes. This fine, risen Black Jesus floating above us all is both personal revelation and communal covenant: that resurrection looks like wholeness, feels like beauty, and promises that we too can be fine, not in spite of what we've been through, but because we live to rise through it all.
1. Delores Williams, “Womanist God-Talk and Black Liberation Theology,” essay, in Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993), 145.
Ibid.