Although today is the Feast of the Presentation, it’s vaccination that’s on everyone’s minds. Have you gotten yours yet? Both shots? Or just the first? Are you in a prioritized category? Have you signed up yet online, and will that make any difference? Have you started making plans for life after vaccination? Like, travel plans? How long do we have to wait before we can do that? If only we could celebrate the Vaccination of Jesus, rather than the Presentation of Jesus! Somehow that might make us all feel better!
Recently a friend shared with me images of the murals by the Mexican artist Diego Rivera in the Detroit Institute of Arts, which I had never seen before. I had certainly never laid eyes on the most controversial image of the twenty-seven panels of this incredible installation of 20th century art: the panel which is known as “Vaccination.”
To any and all, the painting looks like a modern version of a Nativity scene, presented in the curvy but boxy, crayon-colored style of Rivera. In the center, a golden haired child, painted with that odd combination of blockiness and roundness. On one side, a nurse (his mother?) holds the child in swaddling clothes. On the other side, a doctor (Joseph?) firmly holds the child’s left arm while carefully sticking a needle into fleshy, baby biceps. In the background are three men; let’s assume they are wise men. They are scientists, dressed in lab coats, and hunched over a microscope. In the foreground are animals: a horse or donkey, an ox or cow, and three sheep or rams.
As an image for our times, when anti-vaxxers have been confronted by the real and necessary promise of vaccines that do more than just save lives (they also restore a crippled society), this marvelous painting by Diego Rivera, with all its religious overtones, is stunning.
When it was completed in 1933 (during the depths of the Great Depression), the whole monumental work in the Garden Court of the DIA caused a great stir. But this one panel - Vaccination - was the subject of the most pointed and urgent criticism. Various Roman Catholic groups took aim at its composition and imagery. And The Detroit News reported that “the Rev. H. Ralph Higgins, senior curate of St. Paul’s [Episcopal] Cathedral… objects particularly to the so-called vaccination panel… ‘The painting should be washed from the walls, because it inevitably must impress the spectator as a satire of that family dear to religion,’ Mr. Higgins said.”*
On the Sunday after the murals were first open for public viewing, in March, 1933, more than 10,000 people went to see them. I’m guessing that’s significantly more people than went to hear Mr. Higgins preach that Sunday.
Now, Diego Rivera was a notorious atheist (and, worse, a socialist!). He called religion “a form of collective neurosis;” one of his famous murals includes an inscription that reads “Dios no existe;”** and he once quipped that “I’ve never believed in God, but I believe in Picasso,” firmly establishing his atheist credentials. In fact, though, according to the New York Times, Rivera “denied that the panel, ‘Vaccination’ was intended to caricature the Holy Family. On the contrary, he said, he had rather tried to sanctify science as contributing to the saving of life.”***
But the story of this particular mural gets even better. Good authority has it that the face of the baby was modeled on the Lindburgh baby, the news of whose kidnap and murder had been in all the papers while the murals were bing made. Dig a little deeper, and you’ll find, also on good authority,**** that the face of the nurse/mother/Mary was inspired by Jean Harlow; the doctor/father/Joseph was modeled on the museum’s director; and that the three scientists/wise men (each with distinctive flesh tone and hair color) are supposed to be a Catholic, a Protestant, and a Jew. Boringly, the animals, which to me surely look like references to the stable-residents in Bethlehem, are said to represent creatures from whom was supplied serum for the production of vaccines.
Rivera’s atheism is said to have stemmed from his objection to the vicious effect of the Roman Catholic Church on the indigenous peoples and cultures of Mexico, when the church came, arm in arm with the conquistadors; and also from his reflection on the explanation given to him when he was five years old, as to why his twin brother had died at the age of two: the explanation being something along the lines of “God needed another angel.”
I suppose that Rivera could not have foreseen a progressive church for which the image of the vaccination of the baby Jesus could represent a beautiful confluence of the life saving work of Science and Savior, without any need to insist that their spheres of interest, inquiry, and influence are separate from one another.
In the Epistle reading from Hebrews assigned for today, the writer says, “Since God's children share flesh and blood, Jesus himself likewise shared the same things, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death….” This notion, that God became like us - flesh and blood, and all - through the sending of his Son, in order to save us, undergirds a great deal of Christian theology. It’s trying to make sense of why God acted in this way; why God chose to express his love in this way; why God used the soft power of the Incarnation, rather than deploy armies from heaven to save us from the power of death and the devil.
Diego Rivera may not have believed any of that, but in some way he clearly understood it. And his Vaccination mural is a stunning depiction of the Incarnation, whether he wanted it to be or not. The juxtaposition of the incarnate Savior, endowed with the face of a kidnapped and murdered child, receiving the gift of vaccination, is what you might call inspired.
You can almost imagine an elderly couple, down on their luck in 1933, both unemployed and hungry, and maybe out of hope, going to the Detroit Institute or the Arts on a Sunday morning in March, since they had nothing else to do, and a couple like that was not very liken to darken the door of the Rev. Mr. Higgins’s cathedral.
I can see them standing in the Garden Court and taking in the color and the rhythm, and the action, and the figures of Rivera’s immense and detailed murals, with their heads bent back, and their necks craning, as they take in the murals of Detroit Industry. The couple is old and tired and poor. If ever they had imagined that God had made any promises to them, they’d long ago concluded that God had reneged on those promises.
And standing before the north wall, they look up to the right, in the corner, where this panel of smaller scale shows a scene at once so modern and so ancient, so weird and deeply familiar at the same time. It’s a child (who looks disturbingly familiar to the old couple) being given a vaccine. Are those his parents? Or a doctor and a nurse? And who are those three men behind them?
But doesn’t the whole thing just look like hope? Doesn’t it look like life? Doesn’t it look like salvation? And aren’t there words echoing now in the hearts of these two old folks, whose lives are coming to a close in a world where there was not much hope left for them: “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace; for mine eyes have seen thy salvation, which thou hast prepared before the face of all people.”
Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
Feast of the Presentation of Our Lord in the Temple, 2021
Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, Philadelphia
* Clifford Epstein writing in the Detroit News, March 1933
** “God does not exist.”
*** from The New York Times, March 22, 1933, “Detroit in Furor Over Rivera Art”
**** That authority is Linda Downs, who literally wrote the book on the Detroit Industry murals.
Vaccination by Diego Rivera, from the Detroit Industry murals at the Detroit Institute of the Arts