Let’s look to the picture above. A woman wearing a red dress, with the upper part of her body being left naked, is drinking, smoking, and laughing cheerfully, together with three men, all conducting a simple party in a rather small room. Unmistakably, the woman is pictured as a prostitute of a cheap sort, who is trying to seduce those three men. If we look closer to her, soon we find that on the other side of each of her two hand palms there is a mark of wound left open. Actually who is this woman who is showing her wounded right hand? Jesus? Why a woman?
We know that in chapter 7:36-38 the evangelist Luke relates a famous story about an unnamed prostitute washing Jesus feet, weeping, and then anointing them with perfume (concerning this episode of the Gospel of Luke, click here). But now, in the imagination of the Philippine painter of the painting above, Emmanuel Garibay, the Jesus of the famous Emmaus Story in the Gospel of Luke chapter 24:13-32 , who is breaking bread and then giving it to two of his disciples, is the prostitute Jesus who will give her sexy body to any gentleman who wants to enjoy it. Not only does Jesus love woman, he himself becomes a woman, still a prostitute. The son of god became a whore in order to be able to sympathize with all prostitutes in this world. Jesus loves whores of the world, perhaps because he is in some way related to a whore as his physical mother (see Gospel of Thomas 105; cf. Gospel of John 8:41).
Hopefully, this painting and its message are not viewed as repugnant by orthodox Christians who worship Jesus as God unadulterated by the world’s impurity altogether, housed in exclusive and closed church buildings.
