As I write this, we are in the midst of Holy Week - the eight days from Palm Sunday through Easter in which we remember and reflect upon Christ's saving work on our behalf. It is a story that never grows old. It continues to generate new insights into the meaning of Christ's suffering, death, and resurrection.

The Pietà was probably the first great work of art I ever saw in person, when it was on exhibit at the New York World's Fair in 1964. I was only seven years old, brought up in a secular home, and I was one of millions who viewed it, passing slowly through the Vatican exhibit on a conveyer belt. I barely knew the story of Jesus, and didn't understand at the time the meaning of his death, yet the statue moved me with its depiction of the solemnity and grief of Mary and the lifeless form of Jesus. Though Jesus was dead, the statue was alive. While I didn't recognize it at the time, the vividness of the statue was a theological statement in itself, namely, that what is dead and lifeless - even a chunk of marble - can be the source of life and faith.

In the middle ages, the monastery served as a hospital for victims of the Black Death which had killed from 35%-60% of the entire population of Europe in the 14th century, and had multiple recurrences over the next 300 years, including during the period when Grünewald created the altarpiece.

What is notable about the painting is not only the artistry itself, with the symbol-laden central crucifixion scene, but a detail that might be lost on the modern viewer. That is, that the body of Jesus is pock-marked with the sores that accompany the plague. Grünewald included the sores as a theological and pastoral statement, not a historical one. Jesus, in his death on the cross, bore in his body all the sufferings of humankind, even the sufferings of the victims of the plague at St. Anthony. Gregory of Nazianzus, a fourth century Bishop of Constantinople famously said of Christ, "what has not been assumed has not been healed." Several decades later, the great theologian Athanasius put it slightly differently: "what has not been assumed has not been redeemed."  In other words, if Jesus did not become truly and fully human, then we are still in our sins. Grünewald's portrayal of Jesus shows the fullness of Christ's humanity, "who, though he was in the form of God ...emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death- even death on a cross" (Phil. 2:6-8).