Before Lady Gaga was pissing off Anglican Catholics with her supposed worship of a Latino Judas, there was the music video “Like a Prayer” by Madonna, pushing her own supposed depiction of a black Jesus and Mary to the dismay of a very similar Anglican Christian mindset in the United States of America.
The video, directed by Mary Lambert, made the stirring decision to correctly draw parallels of the persecution of Yeshua to the plight of stolen Africans in America, being massacred by Anglican and very racist Ku Klux Klan members.
The video opens with a white woman running from her home. She stumbles to the ground where she looks and sees a burning cross. We then see a flashback to a conflict with an unnamed group of men attacking a woman, perhaps in a rape attempt, tho the explanation is never given.
Back to the present, the white woman, portrayed by Madonna, finds refuge in a nearby church where she witnesses a sculpture of a black Yeshua crying. She then proceeds to lay down and has a hallucination of falling thru the sky, as a black Myriam, mother of Yeshua, holds the Madonna character in her arms, allowing the protagonist to have an epiphany.
Reflecting on the USA’s often ugly past, the idea that Yeshua would have felt a spiritual connection to a black people in the early 20th century being persecuted isn’t quite that shocking.
Nonetheless, the fact that this did cause a controversy for the artist in the USA in the late 1980s is hardly even more shocking. The very thought of humanizing Yeshua, often erroneously thought of as a stand-in for Yaweh himself, must have evoked the prophetic message Yeshua himself gave in the Gospels, when he said that “many will do great signs and wonders in [his] name, but to these people, [he] will tell them, ‘You never knew me!'”.
The metaphor presented in the video is a simple yet profound theme, most likely in my humble estimation to be one of the most significant artistic statements of the made in the 20th century.
Naturally, the video ends with the Madonna character being arrested by a white police officer, correctly predicting the controversy that the video would undoubtedly stir.
Hitting on inward bigotries of a very white MTV audience must have been a powerful statement for Madonna, who was looking to captivate a more mature and adult audience, rather than the younger fans she had acquired early on in her career. The idea that Yeshua could be portrayed as black, rather than the typical white man European and American artists often depicted him as, surely struck a nerve that perhaps Yeshua would identify more with people who were being actually persecuted, rather than what was simply en vogue at the time. Nowadays, this visual motif is seen as a component of critical race theory, but the idea that Yeshua would be portrayed as a white man with flowing brown hair, blue eyes, and lean and muscular six pack of abdomens is honestly no different.
Yeshua could be anyone, and to some, like Madonna, that would happen to be a black man. I frankly would have to agree.
The Verse Universe 