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Henry Ossawa Tanner moved to France in 1891. He wasn’t the first African American to cross the ocean in search of what some consider “artistic acceptance.” Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, and Josephine Baker are just a few of the artists who chose to live out their lives in France instead of in the United States. Today? Add the likes of Kanye West and Ta-Nehisi Coates to the list.

We all know the grass isn’t necessarily greener on the other side of the fence. But, it’s worth noting that quite a few African-Americans, when the door opened up, made their way to France and stayed there.

As Richard Wright once told interviewers in 1946, he “felt more freedom in one square block of Paris than there is in the entire United States of America.”

Sometimes I wonder if I should move to France.

Tanner’s mother had been born a slave. His father was a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Critics and journalists in United States couldn’t seem to talk about Tanner without also pointing out that he was, in the vernacular of that day, “a Negro.” This designation frustrated Tanner and so it seems a bit ironic that he would come to be known as the “first African-American artist to achieve international fame in modern times.”

I imagine Tanner simply wanted to be known as an artist. It’s difficult to know, isn’t it, the degree to which labels impact and influence others’ perceptions of us. Even Jesus couldn’t get away from certain labels and the perceptions they engendered: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” “Isn’t this Mary and Joseph’s boy?”

A student of Thomas Eakins’ before Tanner’s departure to France, Tanner’s early paintings reflected much of the beauty of African American life. Some of his well-known works included a portrait of the artist’s mother, his most famous work “The Banjo Lesson,” and the stunning painting Tanner titled, “The Thankful Poor.” This last was Tanner’s final depiction of African American life.

In France, Tanner found the haven he sought, and it was there his art moved toward depictions of a religious nature. There was great demand for this type of religious art in those days and Tanner worked hard to meet the demand, winning the acclaim of critics in Europe and the United States alike. These religious works of art include, “The Resurrection of Lazarus” and “The Annunciation.”

But, there was also a painting depicting Nicodemus’ visit to Jesus. This is the painting featured in this issue of our journal, and for our consideration, as a spiritual practice.

Nicodemus was a Pharisee, a teacher of the law, and he went to see Jesus—the embodied Christ—by night. Henry Ossawa Tanner’s rendition of the encounter shows the two, Jesus and Nicodemus, sitting in what appears to be a courtyard or maybe on a balcony. The focus of the painting, quite clearly, is Jesus. Brown skin, dark beard, Jesus sits on a low wall, the city sprawling out behind him, and Nicodemus is close by, sitting with a look of anticipation on his face. Or, maybe the look is wonder.

In the painting, it’s not easy to tell if Nicodemus has brown skin, too. His hair and beard are white and, Tanner has skillfully executed the painting in a way that the light illuminates Jesus, enhancing his features and making sure we know this Jesus is not white. Nicodemus, in contrast, seems merely gray—in the shadows, both literally and figuratively.

The book of John tells us Nicodemus went to Jesus at nighttime, with some questions of his own. Nicodemus went alone, transporting his soul, ensconced in his physical body, into the very presence of Christ. Despite being a Pharisee, Nicodemus stepped away from his talking points and chose, instead, to go straight to the source. Through this encounter we know and have memorized the words of John 3:16, where Jesus looks Nicodemus in the eye and says, “For God so loved the world . . .”

Indeed, it is the whole world God loved. The whole world, in its entirety, is the focus of God’s sacrificial love toward us. He does not favor America over France. He does not choose blonde hair over afros and cornrows. God meets us as we are. Where we are.

So, here we who view this painting are, meeting Jesus in the night, as a sort of hanger-on to Nicodemus’ encounter. There is space in this painting to imagine ourselves there with them. There is shadow and light. There is distance between Nicodemus and Jesus. So, where would you insert yourself? Are you in the shadows or the light? Would you sit right down at Jesus’ feet, or would you stand at Nicodemus’ shoulder?

And what about this brown Jesus, sitting on a ledge talking with one of the religious leaders of his day? What would it mean to you to discover Henry Ossawa Tanner’s depiction of the Christ to be more accurate than those iconic images of Jesus we see so often, the ones that pop up when we Google Jesus+Christ and then click the tab for “images”?

When we look at Tanner’s depiction of the conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus, what do our instincts tell us?

Here’s what makes me stand still in the face of this picture, painted in 1899. I know this painting was created long after Tanner had settled in France. I know he’d abandoned paintings of African American life in favor of religious artwork that featured characters with European features and paler skin. But here sits Jesus, and there can be no doubting this brown skin is intentional. Despite his search for a haven free from racial entanglements and, indeed, his success in finding acclaim in France, Tanner made the deliberate choice to paint Jesus’ skin brown. What in the world can that mean? What does it mean, to you? What does it mean to me, this very particular person with my very particular history, sharing these words with you?

We can’t help but go through life in the bodies we’ve been given. Maybe Tanner recognized this, too? Even in France.

The way God worked it out, our souls inhabit the one body we’ve been given—from beginning to end. We make our way through this world, and we discover as we journey that it’s easier when the people we encounter are similar to us. When people vote like us and worship like us and speak our language and eat the same food we eat. When they look like us and smell like us and think like us, it’s easier to keep pressing forward. We don’t have to think so much when the people around us are like us. We don’t have to work so hard.

But I’m not so sure God intends for us to take the easy way out of things.

We are the ones who categorize and divide, drawing lines between ourselves based on class, education, race, culture, language, age, gender, sexuality, and more. Even—and especially—in the church. We draw our lines and build our walls and we declare ours the way that is right. That is the easy part. We grow so accustomed to gathering around us the people who look and think and smell and speak the way we do that, when Jesus shows himself to us, we—much like Nicodemus—have to sneak away from our comfortable brood in order to see the truth for ourselves. The hard part is stepping across the lines, tearing down the walls, and letting in the people who make us nervous because of the many ways in which we differ.

An example: One morning, not many days after Michael Brown died,On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown, an eighteen-year-old African American man, was shot and killed by Darren Wilson, a white police officer, in Ferguson, Missouri. https://www.justice.gov/crs/timeline-event/shooting-death-michael-brown-ferguson-mo (accessed 4 March 2023). I stood in front of a television, ironing a pair of pants. There were people on the television, showing me the same loop of protesters and police in riot gear and the lifeless body of a brown man on the street in a city in Missouri. I watched the news reports, with the steam from the iron rising up to meet me and the warmth of the denim pants just beneath the palm of my hand. I made the steady back-and-forth motion with the iron and watched the way the heat and steam released the wrinkles from the fabric, and I knew I needed to get myself to Ferguson. I knew I needed to see it for myself. I knew I needed to take my body to the place where Officer Wilson and Michael Brown tore off the bandage—again—and forced us all to look and see what we’d rather not, for reasons that are different for each one of us.

In Ferguson, the heat was oppressive and I stood in the street where Michael Brown died, his blood staining the asphalt at my feet. There was no easy way out. Not from where I stood. The stories were more complicated, more deeply entrenched, more nuanced and more painful than the quick flashes I had seen on my television screen. Crossing the lines—geographically, culturally, ethnically, racially—didn’t automatically solve everything. But I began to see, or to see again, the hard work of love.

I think Nicodemus must have felt the same way.

I’m not moving to France. My soul must work out its salvation, ensconced in this body, in this land of the free and home of the brave. This is my workshop, where unarmed black men and boys die in the streets while “no indictment” is the order of the day for those who gun them down, and attorneys charge the dead with “being armed with the sidewalk” on which they fell and breathed their last. This is the anvil of my faith, this land where single black women mysteriously die in custody, the word “suicide” stamped on their file and “case closed” looming ever near.

So I carry myself to Ferguson and stand on the bloodstained street. And I take my questions to Jesus by night. I know he loves the one who kills as much as he loves the black children who die, less than two seconds after a police officer exits his cruiser.

The hard part is for us to love like Jesus. Across the lines, ensconced in bodies that often cause us scorn and that sometimes facilitate our own scornfulness. Loving like Jesus loves is the hard part.

But, there is no other option.