Jesus, the Womanist: Embodying the Good Friday Text

(John 18:28 - 19:16)

As I read and re-read the Good Friday lectionary text for this WomanPreach! & RISE Together Holy Week series, two things immediately stand out—the violent manhandling of Jesus’ physical body and his purple robe. 

I am a self-proclaimed millennial womanist, so for me that means whenever I encounter a woman in the text, I center the message on her and make her Black. That is the simplest way for me to begin a sermon that is faithful to the womanist project, but as I continue to grow post-seminary, I have learned to look for other womanist signifiers. Some are more obvious than others, but they are almost always subversive. Womanist interpretation reads power, agency, and wit when the text speaks of death and degradation. 

Then Pilate took Jesus and had him flogged. And the soldiers wove a crown of thorns and put it on his head, and they dressed him in a purple robe. (John 19:1-2) [i]

Alice Walker’s definition—womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender[ii]—makes purple the signifying color of womanism. Over the past few weeks, I have found myself giggling with delight when I see another Black woman on zoom wearing purple. Seeing purple has become a visual secret sister handshake. It is amazing how a color can hold so much meaning. Seeing purple immediately puts me at ease. And so, when I opened my Bible to do my first reading of the Good Friday text and saw the purple robe, I knew everything would be alright. When I saw the battered Jesus draped purple, I saw another Black woman. I saw myself. This is the beginning of an embodied theology. 

Place yourself in the story. Pay attention to Jesus’ body. 

As you read the Good Friday text— John 18:28-19:16—notice the repeated references to the treatment, movement, trafficking, and abuse of Jesus’ incarcerated body. Notice phrases like handed over, took, taken, summoned, and brought out. Jesus was stripped, beaten, and violently passed around to groups of men as they argued over who owned the right to violate the sanctity of his body. To use Dr. Cannon’s words [iii], these heteropatriarchs—soldiers, police, and chief priests—worked out, worked on, and inscribed their death-dealing ideologies, theologies, and systems of value on the flesh of Jesus. And this Word becomes flesh in the body of a Black woman. 

In White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response, Jacqueline Grant writes: 

For Christian Black women in the past, Jesus was their central frame of reference. They identified with Jesus because they believed that Jesus identified with them. As Jesus was persecuted and made to suffer undeservedly, so were they. His suffering culminated in the crucifixion. Their crucifixion included rape, and babies being sold. [iv]

It is far too easy for Black women to identify with Jesus’ suffering. See the Christ embodied in a Black woman. A body captured and held in chains. A body passed around without consent. A trafficked body. A body that has been broken. A body whose blood has been shed in the quest for freedom. 

Pilate therefore said to him, “Do you refuse to speak to me? Do you not know that I have power to release you, and power to crucify you?” Jesus answered him, “You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above; therefore the one who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin.” (John 19:10-11)

As I consider Pilate’s line of questioning and Jesus’ sharp-witted responses, my mind immediately goes to the now confirmed first Black woman Supreme Court Justice, The Honorable Ketanji Brown Jackson. How many of us called and texted our sister friends delighting in her unbossed, unbought, and unbothered Black woman facial expressions that said it all without saying a word. We rolled our eyes and exhaled deep, heavy, negro spiritual sighs as we followed duplicitous lines of questioning and ideological grandstanding. And we lifted her up as she dried those all too familiar for colored girls who are sick and tired of being sick and tired tears. 

As we bear witness to the ways Black women embody Jesus’s suffering, we must also remember that Black women embody his divine power. Black women have the power to heal like Jesus healed and pray like Jesus prayed. Black women have the power to teach like Jesus and call out evil in high places like Jesus. Black women have the power to party like Jesus and love like Jesus. Black women have the power to tell stories like Jesus and the power to both make it plain and confound like Jesus. Black women have the power to feed the 5,000 from their humble kitchens, keep us calm in the storm, and save us when we are drowning. For as Dr. Grant reminds us, “This Christ, found in the experiences of Black women, is a Black woman.” [v]

Amen and Ase.

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[i]  All scripture references come from the New Revised Standard Version

[ii]  Walker, Alice. 1973. In search of our mother's gardens: womanist prose. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

[iii] See Cannon, Katie G. “Womanist Perspectival Discourse and Cannon Formation.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 9, no. 1/2 (1993): 29–37. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25002198; and, Mae Henderson, “Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Re-Membering the Body as Historical Text,” in Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex and Nationalities in the Modern Text, edited with an introduction by Hortense Spillers (New York: Routledge, 1991).

[iv] Grant, Jacquelyn. 1989. White Women's Christ and Black Women's Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, p. 212.

[v]  Ibid, p. 220

Aria M. Kirkland-Harris is a licensed minister, millennial womanist, and community development consultant who is committed to the stability, health, and wholeness of African American churches and communities. She lives out this call through her work in local church, denominational, and academic contexts. Minister Kirkland-Harris was licensed to preach the Gospel and exercise her gifts in ministry by the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Richmond, VA where she currently serves as their Director of Stewardship and Community Development. She is also the Womanist Graduate Fellow at the Katie Geneva Cannon Center for Womanist Leadership at Union Presbyterian Seminary where she studies Black women’s approaches to achieving economic independence. As a consultant, her clients have included The Gift of Black Theological Education and Black Church Collaborative, the Baptist General Convention of Virginia, the Progressive National Baptist Convention, the Baltimore-Washington Conference of the United Methodist Church, and Enterprise Community Partners’ Faith-Based Development Initiative. Minister Kirkland-Harris holds a B.A. in Political Science and Psychology from Columbia University, a M.Ed. in Curriculum and Instruction from George Mason University, and a M.Div from the Samuel DeWitt Proctor School of Theology at Virginia Union University.