Images of Jesus from Around the World
The next-to-last image, which hangs in our church's upper lobby, is by American artist Warner Sallman (1940). We are used to "seeing" Jesus this way. The stained-glass image after it is also American, but clearly very different. The window is in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, where in 1963 white supremacists bombed the Sunday School of this African American congregation, killing four girls. Imagine the meaning of a crucified Christ of color to this congregation. PScott has seen this one up close.
Rembrandt's Head of Christ, which hangs in The Louvre, is included here. There is a Byzantine image of Christ painted on a wall at St. Catherine's Monastery in Sinai. Moving upward. the representation of twelve-year-old Jesus among the teachers (Luke 2) is from Cameroon in Africa. There is a Chinese Jesus and a depiction of Jesus as a Jewish man from the eastern Mediterranean. The remarkable pencil drawing "Jesus with Dreads" is quite compelling. And at the top is the work of Mexican artist Jesus Ortiz Tejonar, bringing Jesus alive as a campesino.
Which of these stimulate your imagination? Perhaps during the year we can add images from around the world that we discover!
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