ecce homo: the incarnation, or, how god became gross

Since my encounter with the bleeding Jesus this summer, I've come across many other depictions of the tortured Christ. For conciseness, the article on Wikipedia reads:

Ecce Homo (Latin for Behold the Man), were the words used by Pontius Pilate when he presented a scourged Jesus Christ, bound and crowned with thorns, to the hostile crowd shortly before the Crucifixion.

Ecce Homo therefor can also refer to any work of art in which Jesus is depicted wearing a crown of thorns.

While most renditions of the Ecce homo are filled with sickeningly sweet pathos, I have found only a few that are truly repulsive like the one I saw this summer--that shocking physicality, the grossness. And the phrase "Behold the man!"..it is a command to look, to address, to fully experience what is before you--and yet the viewer cannot look at it very long.

The most striking of these works have been sculptures, and for good reason. Sculptures bring out that physicality that requires us live within the same space as the work. Also moving are the eyes--sunken, hollow, verging on a lost hope, an empty soul, an animal whimpering. Last, the wounds--most vividly in the sculpture from this summer--which ask you to imagine the pain in yourself, to internalize the suffering.

It reminds me of the controversial crucifix submerged in urine photograph, "Piss Christ," by Andres Serrano. How strange that an image of a man crucified on a cross does not shock us, but put it in urine and we are livid. "How dare someone put our Savior in urine"--yet we are so numb to the fact that we represent him on the world's most tortorous killing machine. Christians unwittingly bear witness to the foolishness of the cross--how could the savior of the world be bloody, disfigured, scourged and naked? It's unspeakable!