They say crucifixion is a slow surrender. We could sure see that. His head was drooping, His eyes closing. It seemed to me like His suffering was nearly done. I could not help thinking that He was smiling slightly though; His sacrifice was salvation after all, His spirit was destined to leave its mortal vessel and return itself to divinity.
All present whistled and applauded. We thanked the man who had placed our Lord so vividly upon the cross. We paid the man $750, along with fourteen pounds of prime Sirloin from the local butcher and one of Ms. Dorris Garner’s famous pumpkin pies.
The artist commissioned to carve the work was known to have Italian ancestry, on his mother’s side I believe; yet still, the statue exceeded our wildest hopes.
Why, that looks just like Jesus! Uncle Lee said. Praise be!
The next day, Uncle Lee – who, I hasten to add, is no one’s uncle – was one of three who raised the statue on the Church wall. Standing back to examine their handiwork, he did cry out and fell to his knees. A miracle! he shouted, a gosh-darn miracle! At first, the others did not see the miracle, neither could the town priest, though they gathered eagerly to witness it, nonetheless.
Uncle Lee, still on his knees, raised a trembling finger and pointed to the eyes of the statue. They have closed, he said, his eyes were open, now they are closed!
They cast their nervous gaze up towards the statue, and fear and wonderment did engulf them all. What had been open was now closed! They examined it from every angle. No other conclusion was possible, the Lord had visited our church. He had taken solid material and moved it so quiet that no one present noticed. They said the four of them wept then, holding each other close beneath their savior.
In the days that followed, the church filled with speculative chatter. Just about everyone in Bradford came to observe and interpretate the miracle. Talk was Jesus had been so flattered by such a convincing and devotional likeness that he had come to inhabit the statue personally. In raising him high, the parishioners had also reenacted his death, and so now the sins and improprieties of our town had been washed away.
Frankly, Bradford needed this miracle. Our factories and power stations had shut back in the early nineties. By ninety-eight, when the statue went up, we had died a slow, indifferent death. Unemployment was rife. Small businesses had shut. And something evil had entered town, keeping curtains shut well into the daytime. Some folk walked the evening streets ashamed, pock-marked skin over bones, their teeth decaying, their eyes sunken and hollow. It was like they were drained of all hope and vitality. Like God had abandoned us.
Word spread around the whole county. Soon, every Sunday, our church was packed to the rafters. It was filled with joyous and hopeful voices once again, and the sound of cameras clicking. Flowers were thrown to the lectern, babies held heavenwards, and blessings beseeched. Offerings of dollar bills were made so frequent that a donations box was set up at the door. This became an unofficial admission fee, $3 per entry. That money, so I am told, fed the poorest homes in town.
The miracle of Bradford also received plenty coverage from both local and state news. Glamorous TV women wearing designer dresses were a common sight in our streets, nodding into the camera as weeping townsfolk offered their thoughts and thanks for the miracle. God has closed the eyes of Christ, Uncle Lee shouted, so that everyone else would open theirs! We put those words all over our old bedsheets and the like and displayed them just about everywhere.
Our priest started a petition, requesting that the Vatican should send someone to see what he took to calling, this new Medjugorje. Within a week, they said the petition was a thousand names long.
That’s when the artist returned to Bradford. He was mighty curious. Said his phone had been non-stop, his hall flooded with letters. He had been asked to carve more statues for dozens other churches nearby, and so he had come to see the miracle for himself. We all thanked him for his work and told him his fingers were like God’s own tools. We took him then, to the church, and stood silent in expectation. Eventually, he said in a hushed tone that he could see no change.
I felt the confusion ripple through the congregation. How could he not see that wood he’d worked had turned to flesh and back again?
He stood directly beneath the statue and pointed up: said, when we observe a face front-on, we do not see up a person’s nostrils, though the same face looks different from down below. This is called perspective. He invited us all to join him there, to see for ourselves that this angle showed the eyes of Christ still half-closed, just like he carved them.
At first, no one said anything or went to join him. Then, we took a hold of that man, lifting him away from the church and running him out of town.
The Vatican petition was quietly destroyed and never spoken of again.
I’ll admit, we were worried some time after that. We expected someone to go spreading lies about our Lord and Savior. But it never happened. Maybe the artist found his nest feathered now he was a miracle-worker. Or maybe he saw all the good happening in our town and realized that the Lord can take many different shapes.
And who is to say the Lord wasn’t there anyways? Scientists can’t disprove these mystic matters, try as they might. Perhaps no one will ever truly know what happened, but the people of Bradford will always remember fondly that glorious summer when the Lord Jesus Christ stayed in our town.
