CRISTO DE LA EXPIRACION:
A church in Colombia houses a remarkable Crucifix
miraculously carved 250 years ago by a mysterious stranger
by Vicente Silva Vargas
January 19, 2019
The story, passed down from generation to generation and recorded in a few historical and church records, is always told the same way:
In the middle of the 18th century, on a beach in Cartagena de Indias (a colonial coastal city in Colombia), a group of Dominican novices found a large piece of wood, which they took to their friary with the intention of having a statue of Christ carved out of it.
As Providence would have it, they showed the wood to an elderly man who was lodging at the friary at the time, and who said he was a wood sculptor from Florence, Italy. However, he asked the novices to look for a different piece of wood that would be adequate for making a life-sized crucifix.
A few days later, the young students — whose names are unknown — found the same piece of wood on the beach, but inexplicably, it had become larger. This time, it was accepted by the sculptor, who only required two conditions in order to do the work: that they should leave him to work alone in silence in a designated room — actually one of the friars’ cells in the friary; and that his meals were to be given to him through a small window in the cell door.
For several days, the friars and novices only heard the saw cutting the wood, the chisels giving life to the sculpture, and the gouges carving out the details. They saw nothing of the nameless artist but his calloused hands when he received his food and water — he who, according to the legend, had arrived hungry and clothed in rags to Cartagena that was the principal Spanish port of the Americas.
Two weeks later, the noise of the tools ceased, the meal window didn’t open again, and the anticipation the religious community had felt during the first days turned into concern. According to Atilio Otero, a cultural researcher, “the religious must have been very nervous, because after just a few hours of not hearing anything in the room, they decided to knock the door down to see if the sculptor was alive or dead.”
What they found, Otero tells Aleteia, was something exceptional: An image nearly two meters tall, dark in color with bright highlights, portraying a powerful image of Jesus gazing into eternity at the moment of his death on the Cross.
Next to the Crucifix, there were no tools and no sculptor. And the the food that had been provided every day for two weeks was untouched. According to a booklet published by San Pablo Publishers, the unexplained disappearance of the artist — as mysterious as his arrival — “gave rise to the legend that he was actually an angel sent by God to make the venerated image.”
Descriptions of the image — one of many symbols of that city, which is a World Heritage Site — attract Colombians and foreigners alike, who come to visit the colonial church of Santo Domingo to see the mysteriously carved crucifix for themselves.
Gustavo Arango, a famous Colombian journalist and writer, said in an article published in 1992 that the sculpture of Christ "is missing the wound in his side. Not even blood is depicted. This Christ doesn’t even look humiliated. His head isn’t bowed. He lifts his eyes from the earth, far from his executioners and those who pray to him, seeming to be in dialog with Someone, but to understand it, you have to be the one who was crucifiedbe the figure represented by the carved wood".
"It represents — as very few works of art have been able to do — the exact moment of death, the final tension of muscles and tendons, the final spasm of a body before abandoning itself, the gaze of one seeing his last vision, the last breath eternally leaving the chest of the emotionally powerful and venerated Cristo de la Expiración."
It seems it was my day for Crucifix wonders - starting with the image that emerged in a fetal sonogram, and now this. A famous image I was not even aware of till I came across the article today.
Just as there are not enough days in the year to commemorate all the saints whose stories are known, the number of miracles known and recorded in Catholic history is equally endless. I've often thought one could easily sustain a site infinitely if one could devote each day to recalling the story of one saint, recounting a known and recorded miracle or other unexplained wonders, and picking one masterpiece of religious art to examine with the eyes of faith.