‘Homeless Jesus’

I went to a local Lenten talk today at St. Francis Church and heard a Franciscan Capuchin priest, from the House of Peace, talk about the “Spirit of St. Francis”. St. Francis had a deep appreciation of the actual poverty of Jesus, born where animals were fed, homeless at age 30, died stripped naked on the cross and if it was not for one of his followers, Nicodemus, his body would be thrown on the garbage pile along with others killed by Romans.

When you look at Jesus this way, rejected and marginalized it is easy to understand how the sculpture of homeless Jesus sleeping on a park bench is so controversial. A statue of a ‘homeless Jesus’ sleeping on a park bench was rejected by cathedrals New York and Canada before finally finding a home in an Episcopalian church in an upscale neighborhood of Davidson, N.C. This statue startled this community. Jesus is huddled under a blanket with his face and hands obscured; only the crucifixion wounds on his uncovered feet give him away. Some neighbors feel it is an insulting depiction of the Son of God, and what appears to be a hobo curled up on a bench demeans the neighborhood.

This last remark reminds me of a suggestion a friend had the other night when he called me up to say the City of Greenfield, an upscale neighborhood near Milwaukee, had reversed its decision and would now allow a real estate develop to erect a 3.2 million dollar St. Vincent de Paul Thrift store in this upscale neighborhood, a store that should have been constructed for a fraction of the cost in the neighborhood served by St. Vincent de Paul, with the poor and outcast. He suggested that at the grand opening of the new store we bus people from North Central Milwaukee out to the new store to shop. City of Greenfield wants the money this new development will bring but do not want the people it is meant to serve.

I certainly believe that if Jesus would appear today he would certainly be a homeless person, maybe one of the people that hang out at the day shelter each day helping other homeless persons.

Any real reading of the Gospels show Jesus was a ‘rejected’ person with no place to rest his home. The people who killed this obscured man in Palestine are long forgotten but the name of Jesus, the homeless person, lives on.

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