I found this T-shirt on the Facebook page of a homeless outreach organization that appears now to be defunct. (An e-mail I sent to the given contact came back as undeliverable, and a Facebook message I sent three weeks ago has still not been answered.) Designed by Landon Sheely, the shirt is a visual representation of Jesus’s provocative statement in Matthew 25:40: ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

The image of Jesus sitting alone in the shadows of a city street with a cardboard sign, begging for food, should force us to reconsider our attitudes and actions toward the homeless.

This shirt reminds me of Timothy P. Schmalz’s Homeless Jesus sculpture, which likewise is meant to stir Christians out of their prejudices and indifference and awaken in them a hunger for gospel-driven social justice.