Contemplating the Nakedness of Christ

Earlier this month on Pelican Brief, I authored a piece entitled "Why St. Francis Stripped Himself in the Public Square," in which I discuss nakedness in the Franciscan tradition, especially as it relates to humiliation and the contemplation of Christ's nakedness on the cross. Multiple sources on St. Francis's life tell us that the saint was fond of meditating on Christ's nakedness. Francis considered the state of nakedness to be a particularly intimate manner of conforming oneself to Christ, specifically in His humiliation. Bonaventure relates, for example, that Francis's desire to be stripped naked while dying a deliberate means of identifying with our Lord's nakedness on the cross.

While our Lord is always depicted with a loin cloth in images of the crucifixion, it is almost certain He was crucified in the nude. The Gospel accounts (Mt. 27:35, Mk. 15:24, Lk. 23:34, Jn. 19:23–24) all relate the soldiers casting lots for Christ's clothing (John specifically states that there were four garments, as well as his tunic) which obviously implies He was stripped. Roman history sheds a little light on the details: In the 1st century B.C., Dionysius of Halicarnassus describes the crucifixion of a slave, relating that the slave was stripped naked before being led through the Forum and crucified (Roman Antiquities 7.69). Another interesting text is the 2nd century A.D. work Oneirocritica by Artemidorus, a Greek diviner of dreams. The Oneirocritica mentions crucifixion in passing, "for people are crucified in the nude" the text tells us (2.53).

While depictions of Christ with a loincloth (perizonium) were almost universal, Catholic thinkers always realized this was an artistic convention and that the actual crucifixion was nude. The Church Father St. Melito of Sardis (c. 180) connected Christ's nudity with the darkening of the sky:

The Lord is disfigured and he is not deemed worthy of a cloak for his naked body, so that he might not be seen exposed. For this reason the stars turned and fled, and the day grew quite dark, in order to hide the naked person hanging on the tree, darkening not the body of the Lord, but the eyes of men. (On the Passover, 97)

St. Brigid of Sweden describes Christ as completely naked in her Revelations. She wrote in Chapter 16 of our Lord's flogging as follows:

[He] stretched His hands to the pillar, which His enemies, pitiless, bound. Now, while tied there He had no clothing, but stood as He was born, and suffered the shame of His nakedness.

The medieval spiritual master Thomas à Kempis mentions Christ's nakedness over twenty times in the Imitation of Christ. For example:

[Mary] indeed has seen her most dearly-loved Son hang there above her, with His Body naked and covered with blood.” And again, “Alas for the spite of those extortioners, who had not even so much pity for Jesus hanging on the Cross, poor and naked, as to give Him back some little thing, or to leave even a shred of one of His garments for His sorrowing Mother to keep as a remembrance of Him Whom she had lost! (Imitation, 121-122, 168).

What's theologically interesting across all these writers is the consistent framing: nakedness isn't mentioned as a historical curiosity but as a component of the shame and kenosis (self-emptying) of the Incarnation. The humiliation of exposure was the point of Christ's nakedness. That theological emphasis may actually explain why visual art resisted depicting it—the loincloth in paintings and sculptures was a form of reverence, not a claim about historical accuracy. This also explains why St. Francis found Christ's nakedness such a rich subject for contemplation: the God who created all things chose to die owning nothing, not even the dignity of clothing, having been stripped by his executioners of the last material thing he possessed. For St. Francis (who had literally stripped off his own clothes in the public square of Assisi to renounce his father's wealth), this was not a peripheral detail but the very heart of the mystery. The nakedness of the cross was the nakedness of total poverty, total vulnerability, and total gift of self. To contemplate it was to contemplate what it actually cost God to become human and to die as the lowest of criminals died.

I had been ruminating on this subject when my friend Rob Marco asked if I'd be interested in running a piece he wrote called "The Naked Christ," a contemplation on the spiritual meaning of our Lord's nakedness. I told him I had recently been reading and writing on the same subject and was eager to run his piece here. Apparently, he told me, other outlets were hesitant to run content on this subject, which I was puzzled by. Why would one not contemplate this aspect of the Passion? To place limits on contemplation of the Passion is to place limits on the grace that flows from it. Christ's nakedness on the cross, rightly meditated upon, confronts the soul with its own poverty before God in a profoundly visceral manner.

Anyhow, I now present the guest essay "The Naked Christ" from Mr. Marco.

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Catholicism still holds a modicum of respectability today; not so much in what it professes, which the world opposes, but at least as a mainstream religion—that is, so long as it stays in its lane. As long as it wears respectable clothes.

And yet there's a reason why people don't speak the truth and the prophets stand alone. Elijah wanted to die rather than be tasked with what he was called to. Jeremiah, too, as well as Jonah and Job—they all wished for death. Being a prophet is a heavy burden. Telling the truth comes with a high cost.

The theme of nakedness is prevalent in Scripture from the very beginning. Adam and Eve before the Fall were unaware of their nakedness and unashamed, but after their sin they sought to cover themselves and hide. Shem and Japheth sought to cover their father Noah's nakedness when he fell asleep drunk and uncovered.

It is common practice to strip the clothes of those one wishes to humiliate. Jews were stripped of their clothes by the Nazis before they were sent to the gas chambers or executed. During the Armenian genocide women were stripped naked and crucified in public display. We see also in meditating on the Sorrowful Mystery of Christ's crowning with thorns this stripping of garments in public as a means of humiliation. His own clothes they stripped, and re-clothed him in their own clothes of mockery—a scarlet robe. Then they mocked him for his claims of being a king.

Just prior to the Lord's meeting with Pilate, we see Peter—to whom we can all relate and see ourselves in—denying his affiliation with Jesus. He wants to strip his identifying discipleship garments in order to blend in with the rest of the crowd.

One thing about humiliation and shame is that it always seems to involve the public, or at least people outside of ourselves. Did Christ suffer humiliation? He does not regard the esteem of men, and is humility itself, so I can't say the humiliations we may experience in our faith life are comparable. He knew who He was and to whom He belonged. The searing of shame that we suffer in our humiliations, by contrast, is often in proportion to the degree of attachment to the esteem of men.

In our faith, we often wear a cloak of our own choosing. We take the good, respectable parts of our faith (feeding the hungry, praying, going to church like a good citizen) and wear it like an identity badge. It allows us to worship within the bounds set by those in power, and live our lives relatively comfortably as "good people" without the weight of oppression—to "wear respectable clothes." But true, raw faith is naked, that which we wrestle with in the closet of our own heart, such is reserved for the Father's eyes only. If we do claim to be bold in proclaiming our faith publicly, we often do it on our own terms and of our own choosing.

Stripping, however, is at the hands of others. As our Lord recounts to Peter:

"I tell you the truth, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go." Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God (John 21:18).

The Wikipedia definition of humiliation is strangely in line with how a Christian would understand it as a vehicle towards the virtue of humility: "Humiliation is the abasement of pride, which creates mortification or leads to a state of being humbled or reduced to lowliness or submission."

Though it is pious custom and in keeping with the virtue of modesty to regard Christ on the crucifix as covered with a loincloth, the reality was far less modest.

Though nakedness is our natural state when we come into the world as babies, because of the Fall we quickly learn to cover ourselves to alleviate our shame. The “free and natural” state is not that we all live in nudist colonies, for such outposts are indeed outliers. When I think of my encounters with naked bodies or images of them, it is few and far between—myself and my spouse, and then only under cloak of the most intimate privacy. To see a naked man or woman in the flesh outside of that sanctuary and in public would be not only jarring, but especially rare in a civilized society, even one as debased as our current generation.

And yet, when the God of the universe debased Himself to take on human flesh and make Himself known to Jew and Gentile alike, He held nothing back; God the Father spared no expense in the divine economy when He sacrificed His son, His only Son, to die for our sins. The baby born in a rough stable felt the sting of cold for the first time, the warmth of his mother’s breast, and his grasping finitude in a reality altogether new. Nothing in the history of heaven or earth had been done like this before. Never before had God been adored so naked and small, writhing and crying in a manger.

It should be fitting, then, that the gate the Lord entered into the world through—the womb of a virgin—as a writhing babe be also the state he leaves it: naked and helpless, nailed to a tree.

Apologist Steve Ray makes the case that Jesus was crucified naked upon the cross, and seems to be one of the few at least bringing this point to pious consciousness:

The Persians had devised crucifixion around 600 B.C. as one of the most gruesome and demeaning ways to die—agonizing, and highly visible in the most degrading and humiliating way. It was meant to torture the victim with a symphony of pain that seared through every fiber. Nakedness only contributed to the total dehumanization as men even lost control of their bodily functions. This was all on shameful display, to the embarrassment of families and the mortification of travelers.

This is a point of contention for some Catholics, who find it impermissible to consider Jesus naked on the cross. It has been argued that the Jews were a modest nation. Authors and biblical commentators often claim that a cloth was applied to avoid offending the Jews. However, these defenders provide no evidence for their claims, and we know that the Roman soldiers had no respect for Jewish sensibilities in general (see, e.g., Acts 18:12-17). There is no reason to believe that the Romans covered Jesus’ private parts with a loincloth. In fact, it would be unreasonable to think they did.

This reality deserves to be meditated upon. We receive the flesh of Christ under guise of bread because our natural sensibilities cannot handle God entering into us—for no one can see God and live (Ex 33:20). “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain”. (Ps 139:6). The Transfiguration is, in a sense, a stripping of the veil for a short period of time, seeing God as He truly is. In the same way, I would argue that meditating on the nakedness of Christ on the cross can be a powerful moment of transfiguration for the Catholic who is not afraid to face that image.

And the image is a stark one. To see Jesus writhing naked on full display—shifting his weight in agony from right to left and left to right with no comfort and no respite, while those below wagged their heads at him in scorn (Mt 27:39), while the scripture is fulfilled: “But I am a worm, and no man: the reproach of men, and the outcast of the people” (Ps 21:7). The image of Christ in this meditation is akin to his nakedness as a baby in a completely different reality than the one he had previously known secure in Heaven with his Father, squirming and crying out for comfort in a new world. Eli! Eli! Lema sabachthani he calls out to that same Father, who seems to have exited the studio, left him to the scorn and derision of a hostile audience. And to regard him at his most vulnerable—emotionally, physically, and visually—not for the sake of devotion, but for shame’s sake was just what the Romans had envisioned. It was exactly that shame, naked before the world, that the Father did not spare for his Son. God had transfigured himself once again, revealing not his divinity but his naked humanity in the most full-frontal savagery.

We should not be scandalized to meditate on the naked Christ as if it were a room we should not trespass in. For the beautiful, disfigured, naked human body of our Lord and Savior unveiled for all the world to see can teach us just how far God is willing to strip us of our own dignity and pretensions to unite with us and make us more like His Son. When the loincloth is removed, we realize that Christ’s nakedness is our own. When we enter into His passion, we find ourselves fully exposed with nowhere to hide from the glaring light of Truth; when we come face to face with our shame, the things we have done under blanketing guise of night, we become like Adam in the garden—naked and afraid, seeking to cover ourselves. And yet it is then that God lovingly clothes us with the raiment of dignity. He suffered the brazen indignity of nakedness before the world on the cross so that we might become like newborn babes in Baptism, made pure and new.

I fully understand why we would cover the most intimate parts of Christ’s body on the corpus in churches, for modesty and purity does not require us to relive the degradation the Romans had intended for him every time we step into Mass. And yet, to meditate on the depths God would go to reconcile us to Himself, even to expose His Son to such shame, is itself a kind of mystery. For the shame the Romans intended was not the shame that remained. The glory of the Resurrection is that we will be united with our bodies one day, as we will be with Christ in the flesh.