The lectionary reading today (Luke 15:1-10) has the Pharisees accusing Jesus of eating with sinners. The photos of David LaChapelle’s “Jesus is my Homeboy” series seem to exemplify this, and I appreciated this blogger’s thoughtful response to these images.
When fashion and fine arts photographer David LaChapelle saw someone wearing a “Jesus is my Homeboy” T-shirt in 2003, he was touched by the simplicity of the message. It made him wonder who Jesus’ original homeboys (the twelve apostles) were—or rather, who they would have been had God chosen to incarnate himself in twenty-first-century America instead of in first-century Palestine.
“The apostles were not the aristocracy, they were not the well-to-do, they weren’t the popular people; they were sort of the dreamers and the misfits,” LaChapelle said in a 2008 interview for The Art Newspaper TV. If Jesus were here today, he said, he would be hanging out with the street people and the marginalized: the poor, the homeless, prostitutes, drug dealers, gangsters, and so on. And more than that, these people would have been his closest and most faithful band of followers.
And so LaChapelle created this…
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