I can’t imagine that Jesus would want this: a 33-meter statue of his likeness has been installed on a mound outside the Polish town of Swiebodzin, near the German border.
For those of you following along at home in America, that’s over 100 feet tall– about the size of a blue whale. Including the mound it’s perched atop, it may be taller than the famous Jesus statue in Brazil.
The priest who orchestrated the monument’s construction–and who has been inexplicably mysterious about how the statue was financed or even its exact height– seemingly built it because he wanted honor Jesus, and also attract pilgrims to the site.
But lots of the local townspeople have pointed out that all that money (and it surely must have been a lot; the statue weighs more than 400 tons and required some seriously heavy-duty machines to install it) could have been used for much better purposes.
Those townspeople are right: it’s a waste of money. More than that, it’s kind of an obscene waste of money when so many people are so in need all around the world.
But what really shouldn’t be hard to see is that this is quite an outsized and unnecessary statue (which has no functional purpose) for a man who so encouraged humility and was reluctant to be in the spotlight for anything other than teaching how to be a good person. No one ever mentioned that Jesus wore lavish jewelry or attended pricey banquets or wanted sculptures made of him– because according to the Bible, he didn’t. He gently refused most indications of contemporary celebrity status and rode into town, for example, on the back of an ass.
The editor of the Polish Catholic Information Agency, Tomasz Krolak, probably summed it up best: ”People should think more about building within themselves rather than making big monuments.”
Amen to that.
Tags: Jesus, monuments, Poland, Roman Catholicism, statues
