More on: crucifixion

Rebel, but you cannot refuse. The son of the father or son of man could be anyone. You win some, you lose. Rebel, but you cannot. Refuse to think or do, and still you choose. At the end of time, no one can rebel. For you cannot refuse the Son of the Father or Son…

NOW THAT Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ has reached thousands of screens around the world and the frenzy of editorializing, pre- and post-release, has died down, two of the early questions about the film have been answered. Once the film entered the public domain, most of the fears about whether the film was…

I think he planned it, sort of, from the start; whether he knew they’d choose the fruit or not, he scattered hints around the garden, what to do in case they got themselves kicked out. A shirt of fur around the lamb. The stream converting water into syllables. Bamboo pipes. The caps of mushrooms round…

from The Book of Hours, 1440 The painter has left a whole corner empty, squeezed the painting into the top half of a diagonal. How gently they lay His body, His face crooked from pain. Nicodemus lifts Him below the knees. Joseph of Arimathea fixing the shoulders to rest, his chin holding Christ’s haloed head…

I watched him fall and rise upon that hill, heard his call as he released his ghost. I never dreamed civility would damn me. I was like others, a man of honor with a wife who wanted peace of mind by nightfall, children who needed discipline, routine. I could not be a revolutionary, abandon what…

No further task than this. Dazed, he lifts his head from his right shoulder. Jerusalem, below him, is an underwater drift of specks, flecks, swirling in the tidal blur he descended through. Such a small place, really: hovels, walls, dirt streets, young women shawled, lackluster soldiers sprawling at the temple gates…. Eloi! Eloi! Vinegar and…

than the angel who eclipsed your ordinary life to see his reflection in the dark of your eyes. More strange than when god thumped in your belly and tugged at your breast, hungry for earth, for what he had made. Strange to hear the command to take and eat of his body just as he…

From the Janus view of the Janiculum,                      a warren of restricted views. To one’s left, the Vatican. Across the river, the Jewish Ghetto                      created by an edict of a pope, “Since it is absurd and utterly…