Images of Christ

I’m really enjoying the religion and media class at LTSG that Kristin Largen and I are leading. Our students are very thoughtful and engaged, and I’m learning a lot. I’m looking forward to the discussion on Friday that Kristin has invited us into, where as preparation each of us is to find an image of Christ and discuss it.

One of my hobbies has been collecting images of the Last Supper (most of which pay homage in some way to Leonardo DaVinci's version). It took me a while, but I finally tracked down an image I vividly remember encountering for the very first time on a subway shelter stop in Vienna. Here's the image from the Swedish photographer Elisabeth Wallin's official site:

And here's the photo I took when I first encountered it:

At first I was struck by this image because I was startled to find such an explicitly religious image on a public transit stop. But the more I pondered it, the more intrigued I became, because this is one photo from a series that Wallin did recreating famous images of Jesus' life using people who identify as LBGTQ. She doesn't have many of the photos from the ecce homo series at her site (at least not in a free version), but I also found this brief youtube set, which includes more of the images that I first encountered in Vienna.

So many of the stories we have of Jesus from the Bible tell of him accepting hospitality from people and communities whom religious authorities of the time decried. Most of the people named there -- tax collectors, for instance, a Samaritan woman -- are no longer outcasts in our society. But I think that many people in the LGBTQ community still are, transvestites more than most. So to image Jesus in the midst of such a community, with he himself in high heels, conveys -- to me, at least -- some of the tensive nature of his presence, some of the ways in which God disrupts our notion of what is to be loved and graced by God's "en-flesh-ment" in our midst.