A New View of Easter

I rose early last Easter Sunday, shortly after daybreak. With a thermos full of coffee and a few well-chosen medical supplies, I left the house and headed for the cemetery.

I had a date with Jesus.

Our rendezvous had been planned since the previous fall, ever since the day I bumped into Mary's favorite son while strolling through the graveyard's maze-like mausoleum. He was a statue, almost life-size, carved in wood, propped up at the end of the corridor. The arms were outstretched, hands upturned to display the famous gaping nail wounds, painted Day-Glo red for maximum shock value.

Though the artist obviously meant for this Jesus to appear transcendent, God-like, reaching out to beckon us all lovingly to his side, to me he looked like some poor guy saying, "Hey, man, can I borrow a Band-Aid?"

I'm serious. My first impulse when I saw the thing was to jog home for some gauze and surgical tape. I meant -- and mean -- no disrespect.

Honest to Jesus I don't.

Now 41 years old, I have, at various times, been an Episcopalian, a Methodist, a Baptist, and even a "nondenominational Born-Again." In short, I've seen my fill of bleeding Jesuses. The only thing they have ever inspired in me -- beyond a certain revulsion -- is sympathy.

So as I first set my gaze upon this new wooden Jesus, all I wanted to do -- and I really wanted to do this -- was to bandage those hands.

But I resisted the urge. I went home. I tried to forget about it. Still, I couldn't get that powerful little notion out of my mind. I kept thinking of those mangled wooden hands, imagining them all wrapped and bandaged, safe and sound. Yet the very idea of a bandaged Jesus, a healed Jesus, runs counter to our expectations. It's abnormal. It's spooky. "A triaged Jesus! What the hell is this? Hey, where're the damn nail holes?" It's obvious that, with or without the whole sacrifice-and-salvation view of the crucifixion, a lot of people just plain like to see Jesus bleeding.

The history of Christian religious art is, in many ways, one long odd tribute to our fascination with the bloodstained corpse of the poor carpenter from Galilee. The crucifixion, clearly, ranks among the most powerful and oft-repeated images in Western art. From Hieronymus Bosch and Michelangelo to El Greco and Rembrandt, from Paul Gauguin and Pablo Picasso to Andres Serrano and Salvador Dali, few major artists seem able to resist doing Jesus on that cross.

Whenever artists dare to tinker with the sanctified symbol of the gleefully murdered Christ, a hailstorm of controversy inevitably rains down on them. But these are often the most daring and, one could argue, spiritually transforming images of Jesus that we have. In Man of Sorrows: Christ with AIDS, painter W. Maxwell Lawton transposes Jesus' suffering into modern terms by taking him off the cross and showing him shirtless and silent, his nail wounds replaced by telltale body sores. Arthur Boyd's Crucifixion, Shoalhaven gives us a cross erected in the midst of a flowing river, and its naked, crucified Savior breaks tradition by daring to be a woman, thus insisting that Jesus truly represented all humans, regardless of gender.

These works are controversial, to say the least. Serrano's Piss Christ is perhaps the best, and least understood, example of what happens when an artist throws the cross into a different light. So incensed were Christians by the infamous photograph of a crucifix floating in urine that they never bothered to ponder the deeper meaning of the work -- or recognize its visual beauty -- calling vehemently for an end to the National Endowment of the Arts funds that helped pay for the exhibition.

Perhaps a crucifix floating in a vat of blood would be more to their tastes.

Even back in the days that I believed Jesus died as a sacrifice for the sins of the world, I was uncomfortable about our obsession with the gory exhibitionism of so many Christ images. I preferred the laughing Jesuses, the meditating Jesuses, the living Jesuses, to the battered, blood-drenched ones. Even resurrected, Jesus always seemed to be leading with his wounds. Whenever I found a crucified Jesus that did not repel me, it was usually one that minimized the wounds and maximized the humanity. My favorites include Gauguin's Yellow Christ -- a jaundiced Jesus draped on the cross, breath-stopping despite its lack of oozing wounds -- and Dali's Corpus Hypercubus, showing Jesus floating before the cross in a crucified pose, not a sign of nail prints -- or even nails -- to cast the ghastly shadow of sadism onto the otherwise heightened beauty of Jesus.