Man of Sorrows

This 16th century, life-size wooden sculpture, “Man of Sorrows,” by an unknown artist, strips away all pretense of certainty in an uncertain world. It lays bare the vulnerabilities we share, especially the pain of the innocent who are forsaken, scorned, condemned. 

It is this visible agony that speaks, shouts, screams, of how in the long arc of history there are always those who view the outsider as a threat—that the way they speak, what they say, what they believe, and with whom they associate are a danger—and who view kindness as weakness, choose cruelty as an antidote to mercy, and see anger as strength.

Sitting in the bare, vaulted space of where this carving now rests, in Cologne’s Great St. Martin Church, a church that was nearly destroyed by the bombing of World War II—a destruction that followed a harvest of terror—I asked who are these people and those they cast out? And I was answered, we are them, they are us. Our natures are shaped by the challenges of survival in a past from which this Man of Sorrows would free us—that we are easily mislead and our fears, hopes, dreams easily exploited by the powerful. 

What can we expect of ourselves in such world? For me, it has become the simple expectation expressed by Micah, who warned against apathy and called the powerful to account. “Act justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly with your God.”