A Southern California church, known for its cutting-edge Christmas displays, this year features a bleeding Trayvon Martin in its Nativity scene as part of a commentary on violence, the Raw Story reports.
The artist, John Zachary, said that George Zimmerman’s acquittal this summer in the shooting death of the unarmed 17-year-old deserved further discussion. To that end, he created a scene depicting the teen with blood spilling from his chest onto a straw-covered floor at Claremont United Methodist Church. Trayvon’s figure is surrounded by more traditional Nativity images, including the holy family and the three wise men, in the scene called, “A Child Is Born, a Son Is Given.”
The Hollywood production designer said that the statement fits the traditional Christmas narrative—King Herod’s edict to slaughter all infants in Bethlehem in an effort to kill the Messiah—and is also an intentional blending of Christmas and Easter stories. While Mary, Joseph and others celebrated the birth of Jesus, he said, “other parents [are] in agony because their children had just been killed.”
Zachary said that an image of Trayvon lying dead on the pavement affected him emotionally. “What if Jesus was lying there bleeding to death? I was kind of thinking of that,” Zachary said of the Nativity scene.
Read more at the Raw Story.