Rhetoric Race and Religion
Every once and a while Jesus shows up in strange places.
The first time I saw Jesus appear in a peculiar place was as an adolescent at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) thanks to my friend Birghapati, a Hare Krishna. Upon discovering I was a Christian, Birghapati opened up the book The Hidden Glory of India to share with me how Jesus, after surviving his crucifixion, traveled to India, learned under a guru, and taught there for several years. The section on “the lost years of Jesus in India” was only two pages, but in that short chapter was an entire universe of problems, possibilities, and peculiarities for me to fathom.
Encountering Jesus in a strange place thrust me into a world of healthy, albeit challenging, questions, which in turn spurred my personal spiritual progress and taught me much about religion at the margins. Your own experience of Jesus in a strange place could prompt your own discovery or, if contemplated in a community, a group’s grasping of the nature, and reality, of Jesus — even as he appears in strange places.
With the proliferation of new media sources (television shows, podcasts, webpages, social media sites), Jesus pops up everywhere and millions of people see him, or hear about him, in a relatively short period of time. He appears on hospital windows, spaghetti dinners, in Middle Eastern dreams, and in newly syndicated TV shows like “Black Jesus” — a scripted comedy on Cartoon Network’s “Adult Swim” from “The Boondocks” creator Aaron McGruder.
Each time Jesus materializes there is undoubtedly controversy concerning orthodoxy and who has the authority to adjudicate Jesus’ authentic appearances and presence. But, what if instead of immediately denouncing these outlier apparitions of Jesus, we all took the opportunity to ask a few relevant questions?
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