Body of reverence: it's easy to forget to mourn the dead when their bodies become forensic evidence.

SINCE THE NINTH CENTURY THE DEPOSITION OF CHRIST has been one of the more popular subjects of Christian art. Beginning in Byzantium and spreading to the West, hundreds of forgotten and famous artists have painted and carved the scene of the crucified body of Christ being taken down from the cross, laid in his mother's arms, and taken to the tomb. Sometimes these works were called the descent from the cross, or--to capture their mournful sentiment--lamentations or pietas; and in time the scene became the 13th Station of the Cross.

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The litany of artists who created famous depositions, lamentations, or pietas reads like a who's who of Western art: Fra Angelico, Donatello, Filipino Lippi, Perugino, Bellini, Raphael, Rubens, Manet, Chagall. Mantegna has a breathtakingly soulful sketch of Christ's linen-wrapped corpse laid at our feet. Rembrandt painted an achingly sad masterpiece of the descent from the cross. And Caravaggio's Deposition From the Cross captures the raw grief and horror of Christ's mourners as only he could. Still, Michelangelo's pietas in Rome and Florence are Christianity's most famous--and perhaps most exquisite--representations of this scene of mourning.

EVERY DEPOSITION OR PIETA INCLUDES THE Blessed Virgin grieving the death of her son. In most Mary is holding or kissing Christ's right hand as he is taken down from the cross, and in pietas like Michelangelo's the grieving mother is holding the head or torso of her dead son. The beloved disciple John usually stands nearby, often accompanied by Mary Magdalene and the other mourners, including Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea.

The bowed corpse in these works is the dead and crucified body of Christ, the tortured and broken flesh of a beloved son and friend executed by the state. In this moment the grief of his mother and companions becomes ours. We weep and mourn with them. And we repent, because the death of this son is on all our hands.

The works of art are not merely lamentations at Christ's death. They are also about our own violence and cruelty, about our own indifference to the suffering of innocent victims everywhere. Standing before such a work invites us to recall the suffering of all the tortured and executed and disappeared bodies of Christ, and to acknowledge the marks our indifference and violence have left on these sons and daughters of grieving mothers.

FOR THE PAST DECADE A VERY DIFFERENT KIND of deposition has been appearing on primetime television. Nearly every major crime show now begins with a long slow examination of a murdered body and often lingers over this violated corpse in subsequent The works of a scenes in the morgue or crime lab. On the various Law & Order and CSI franchises, NCIS, Criminal Minds, The Mentalist, and Bones, we are treated to victims everywhere multiple viewings of dead bodies and their various insults and injuries. Clinicians and cops take down the murdered bodies and put their fingers and scalpels into the wounds of the dead.

But the tone of these depositions is not mourning or lamentation hut vengeance. Our repeated exposure to the cruelties inflicted on these bodies is meant to provoke our wrath and righteous indignation. On these crime shows the executed body at the start of the show points to a condemned (and possibly executed) body at the end of the program. Abel's bloodied corpse cries out for Cain's punishment.

In the deposition scenes on crime shows there is no grieving mother kissing the hand or holding the head of her dead child. There are no friends or companions gently taking the body, anointing the wounded flesh, or wrapping it lightly in fresh linens. Clinicians and cops do not weep, wail, or keen--they only seek to find and punish the killer.

THESE ARE NOT TALES ABOUT OUR SHARED sinfulness or about the violence and indifference of the human heart. On these crime shows someone else has killed these victims. The murderer is a mysterious villain the police must identify, capture, and punish. He or she is different from the rest of us, and we are innocent bystanders cheering on those avenging injustice in our name. The story ends well if the murderer is apprehended and punished. No one wonders what happened to the grieving mourners left behind. No one asks what our piece in this human villainy might have been.

We have not always thought of the murderer as a stranger or presumed ourselves innocent. In Murder Most Foul'. The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination (Harvard University Press), Karen Haltunen reports that 19th-century sermons spoke of murderers as common sinners and emphasized the shared sinfulness and violence of all humanity. But with the rise of crime stories, Americans began to think of killers as alien wolves preying on innocent sheep. This may explain why we then built the largest prison system in the world and launched endless wars on crime, drugs, and terror. We have met the enemy--and he is not us.

FOR OVER A MILLENNIUM DEPOSITIONS, lamentations, and pietas have invited us to share the grief of the broken, tortured, executed, and disappeared bodies of Christ. Mournful images of a disconsolate Mary bending over her dead son called us to grieve with all the world's widows, orphans, and aliens, and to repent of our part in all the violence that marks the bodies of victims everywhere.

Modern depositions on crime shows are a pale mockery of these great works of art and humanity, ignoring our shared responsibility for human violence and our mournful solidarity with every executed body. Turn off your TV and go to a nearby museum or church.

McCormick's quick takes ADMIT ONE

These are some of films that deal with grieving:

The Station Agent (2003)

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Lars and the Real Girl (2007)

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Things We Lost in the fire (2007)

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By PATRICK McCORMICK, professor of Christian ethics at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.