In His Image or in Mine?

It was a bet I knew I would win.

Now don't get the impression that I promote gambling in my seventh-grade CCD class.  We spend most of our time talking about morality and how to form our consciences, how to keep the Commandments and live the Beatitudes.  In my experience, gambling doesn't come up very often.

But one night one of my students said, "You know in the Bible where it says Adam and Eve are white? Well…"

I cut him off.  "What do you mean?  It doesn't say that in the Bible."

"Yeah, it does," he insisted.  Several other heads nodded in assent.

So, I did it. "I'll give you a $100 if you can show me where it says in the Bible that Adam and Eve are white."

It is every religious educator's dream to have her students hungrily thumb through Scripture, seeking out information. This was not quite that scenario.  My students were trying to win a hundred bucks and prove to me that our first parents were of a certain race.

I realize, of course, that this wasn't really about the bet.  It was much deeper than that.  It was about something very fundamental:  race.  Our identity.  Our ability to identify with others because of our likenesses.  And my students wanted Adam and Eve to be white.  They wanted to identify with them.

This wasn't the first time, as a teacher, I'd come up against this.  One time, a few years back, I substituted for a high-school religious education class.  Near the end of class, I asked if anyone had any questions.  A young African-American man raised his hand and asked, "Was Jesus white?'

Come to find out the previous summer this seventeen-year-old boy had been told by a Christian camp counselor that Jesus was white.  In the mind of the young man before me, the message was that Jesus was now "off-limits," "not like me," "other." 

I have to tell you: I'm not exactly the leading candidate for race relations and Church teaching.  I'm a 40-something white mom, living in small-town, mainly-white America.  It doesn't seem like I would have first-hand experience with race relations.

But I do.  I have an adopted son who is African-American and a sister (also adopted) who is Hispanic.  Our family tree has a lot of different-colored leaves.  I know what it is like to hear the sting of, "Oh, then she's not your real sister" or "So he's not your real son."  Imagine being told, "Christ is not like you.  He's not really for you."

For many of us, the Catholic Church is white.  Our statues of Mary are a fair-skinned blonde lady, our fellow parishioners look like us and God is an old white guy with a flowing beard. 

Of course, most of us know that none of this is accurate.  But we go on with it, because it appeals to our sense of who we are and who God should be.  Yet in these subtle ways, we are teaching our children that Christ is not like many people.  And that is why my seventh-grader assumed that the Bible said Adam and Eve were white.  (Yes, they thought Jesus was white, too.) 

What's the lesson here?  You can't have that statue of Mary in your house?  No, but consider this.  Do you ever contemplate Jesus as any other race than yours?  Have you ever appreciated art depicting the Madonna and child as African-American, Asian, Native American, or any other culture than our own?  Is it difficult for you to imagine?  Why?

Are we made in God's image, or do we make Him in ours?  I suspect we all believe the former, and we all do a bit of the latter.  To make ourselves more comfortable, we diminish God the Father, God the Son (and all His creation).

I didn't have to pay out the $100, of course.  We did, though, have a great class discussion on what's in the Bible, on depictions of biblical figures in art, and on why any of this matters.  It matters, of course, because we are made in His image, and that image is larger and more grand than we usually think.  Just ask my seventh-graders.