What Jesus Would Have Wanted

Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of Jesus, Salvator Mundi, passed through the hands of some of Europe’s most powerful rulers on its path to Christie’s auction house, where it sold for $450 million last night. This is what Jesus would have wanted.

The price paid for this picture of Christianity’s holy man was the highest ever paid for any work of art. It will keep this masterpiece in private, rather than public, hands. To fully appreciate the scale of this auction, consider a few other things that you could do with $450 million:

Save 150,000 from dying of malaria.
Pay all of the living expenses of 405,000 low income families for one to two years.
Give free surgery and postoperative care to remove devastating fistulas from 655,000 women.
Remove cataracts from 1.42 million people, or save the sight of nine million people with curable blindness.
Provide free meals at school for ten million children for an entire year.

As Jesus said,

“Lo,
Maketh an image of my visage. And only the powerful may gaze upon me.
Gather the rich, for they are my people.
Spendeth all your riches upon me, so that no others may have me.
Where there is blindness, do nothing;
Where there is sickness, do nothing;
Where there is poverty, do nothing;
Where there is death, do nothing;
Instead buy my painting.”