Kenosis of the King

Sometime in and around 1987, a young artist by the name of Andres Serrano took a photograph entitled Piss Christ.  This picture, which depicted a small plastic crucifix submerged in a jar of the artist’s own urine, was almost immediately engulfed in a media firestorm.  At the time, many “conservative” Christians were outraged, charging that the work was nothing more than an open assault on the dignity of their Savior.  Moreover, they were equally troubled by the fact that Serrano had been given a $15,000 grant by the taxpayer-funded National Endowment of the Arts.  In other words,  not only was Serrano being given a public forum to display his “art,” but American Christians themselves were being forced to fund his blasphemy through the taxes they paid to the federal government.

To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t aware of the controversy until four years later when I began my freshmen year at Wheaton College. Moreover, I don’t really recall the particulars of how this subject had again arisen in prominence.  But what I do recall are the discussions that I had with many of my friends in those days.  You see, like many of their conservative parents, my friends were outraged by the subject of Serrano’s work; and no doubt with good reason.  They were correct in understanding it as a willful attempt to openly mock the Christian community.  But I remember sitting there in the school cafeteria, listening to their arguments, and feeling very much on the outside.

You see, to me, our reaction to Piss Christ represented at least two massive failures on the part of the Christian community.  The first failure was the failure to meaningfully engage in the cultural debates of the day.  In opting to voice our opinion in the form of shrill polemics, we lost an opportunity to actually discuss the nature of art with those that openly rejected our worldview.  How different might those conversations have been if we were able to look at Serrano’s work and judge it on the merits of whether it succeeded in making the statement he desired to make?  Might we have built a few bridges that could have crossed some incredibly turbulent waters?  Might some those bridges have even lead a few to recall the “home” they didn’t even know they longed to see …?  If art is one of the mediums through which a culture expresses its worldview, then we, as Christians, have an obligation to become conversant with the art of the day; and that includes art that we find to be distasteful or even obscene.

The second failure was actually a failure that went largely undiagnosed in the Christian community.  When many Christians saw – or more accurately, heard about – the photograph, they immediately felt an instinct to protect the dignity of their Savior.  It was as if the urine that surrounded the crucifix somehow soiled it in a way that that the nails in His hands did not.  It was as if one man’s bodily fluids were somehow more demeaning than all of the sin that Christ bore upon the cross.  But I wonder …  What might have happened if instead of protesting, we went to Serrano and the culture at large and said: “Why no feces?  Why no mutilated corpses of child soldiers floating in the urine?  Why no fat-cat bankers making millions on the backs of the poor and the oppressed?  Why no aborted fetuses?  Was there room in the jar for syringes of heroin?  Why no television sets selling false dreams to the drugged and satiated masses?  Why no shattered wedding bands?  Why no pornography?  Why no kids with missing fathers?  You thought you were being vulgar, sir, but in truth, you weren’t being nearly vulgar enough!”

Do you see what I’m saying?    As Christians, many of us have lost sight of the true nature of the cross and all that went with it.  We’ve lost sight of the fact that the King’s suffering began the moment that the “kenosis” (from the Greek word κένωσις found in Philippians 2:7) took place and He became limited and restricted by his frail, infant, human body.  We’ve lost sight of the fact that Christ descended from perfection into the vulgar and defiled creation that has been shattered by the countless sins of Christians and non-Christians alike.   And in losing sight of that, we’ve lost sight of so much more …

Earlier this year, on April 17th,  2011, some Catholic protestors took some hammers and broke into a museum in Avignon, France.  Piss Christ was damaged “beyond repair.”  I wonder, do the protestors feel better now?  Has Jesus’ dignity been restored?  Has the Gospel been brought to the masses?  Or once again, have we simply looked foolish beyond words in front of a watching and waiting world?