What We Do With Jesus - #4
This is the fourth in a series based on the story of Tucson’s Garden of Gethsemane, but meant to help us examine what we do with Jesus today.
We Deface Him
Felix Lucero could only look after his sculptures for so long because of the simple fact of his mortality. God had spared his life on that battlefield in France, but like Lazarus before him, he would still have to taste the sting of death. After his many years of hard work, toil and heartache, Felix Lucero met his maker in the year 1951. His descendants, his sculptures and his memory remain with us. We have had a difficult time taking care of the sculptures. In fact, we have often been flat out destructive to them.
There have been times, places, and cultures in which we have revered religious art and religious thought. In the days of the New Testament’s writing, a piece of even a pagan manuscript would be saved from potential destruction, just because of the value of the creative word captured upon priceless parchment. In other times, due to shifting convictions or the lack of a sense of respect for religion or the people who practice it, we have been known to destroy religious art as we also devalue and dispose of religious thought. We rarely look back at these times with pride.
For years Lucero’s sculptures stood unprotected by the foot of the Congress Street Bridge. It is likely that many passers-by stopped to pray among them or at least, to marvel at their craftsmanship. At some point though, they began to be defaced, and the onslaught has never ceased. Having been to the garden recently, I was surprised to find newly missing fingers from the hand of one of the disciples just the other day. Now that disciple appears to be signaling his love for rock n’ roll while a houseless man bowed before the crucifix to sign the cross and pray.
I hear there are new plans taking shape to repair the sculptures and the park. We have done this before. The sculptures sit in an enclosed and often-locked parklet with tall walls these days. Built in 1982, this enclosure’s purpose is to keep the vandalism at bay. It doesn’t seem to work. In 2012 it was so bad that the Knights of Columbus decided to raise $51,000 to hire artist Greg Schoon to repair the sculptures and for the park to be rehabilitated. Heads and hands were missing, and the artist consulted photos and hand models from the area to attempt to re-create the pieces accurately. Just a few years ago a vandal wrote, “Hail Satan” and drew a pentagram across Jesus’ forehead, beheaded Judas, and placed the head with an inverted cross drawn on it in Jesus’ hands.
One can only hope that heaven doesn’t have windows down to earth at times like this. Poor Lucero would most definitely be grieved to see his life’s work being so unloved and mistreated. But speculation aside, if Jesus was God incarnate…the Word made flesh, then he needs no windows. If Jesus is present in this world, he is not distant. If Jesus sees and cares about our work, then he is most definitely grieved at all defacing and destruction. He is grieved by the destruction of all works that display beauty and goodness. He is grieved when we deface sculptures, our fellow human beings, and even ourselves.
The Garden of Gethsemane displays to us the depths of human depravity in all of the persistent vandalism now, but it truly always has, for in the Garden there is a cross. When Jesus walked among us we devalued him. When we pressed the crown of thorns into his temples we defaced him. When we sin in thought, word, or deed we strike blows against his very heart. We have never stopped. All of our renovation efforts, the renovating of the self, the renovating of society, the renovating of technology, have failed to ward off the incessant vandalism.
This is a terrible critique of humanity, and it isn’t getting any better. But yet the cross of Jesus Christ stands, and not just in Lucero’s garden, but over the entirety of history. It stands and proclaims that Jesus is ever aware of our depravity and even our disrespect and devaluing of his sacred heart. He isn’t just aware of it. It is why he entered in. Jesus is the great renovator in the garden of creation. And he doesn’t just patch up the people he created. He dies for them.
