Florida church displays parishioner’s hand-crafted Holy Week dioramas

A scene depicting Jesus riding a donkey on Palm Sunday is one of 10 Holy Week dioramas Ahmed Otero created for St. John’s Episcopal Church in Homestead, Florida. Photo: Ahmed Otero

[Episcopal News Service] Parishioners at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Homestead, Florida, again this year can experience the events of Holy Week represented in dioramas on display in the church’s narthex. They include figures of Jesus, his disciples, Roman guards, onlookers, others and animals involved in the events of Palm Sunday, the Last Supper, the garden of Gethsemane and Jesus carrying the cross. They end with the Crucifixion and Jesus’ Resurrection.

The dioramas – models that use three-dimensional figures to depict a scene – all are the work of Ahmed Otero, a parishioner who also is the church’s senior warden. There are 10 scenes of Holy Week events in all, as well as a model of the ancient Jewish temple in Jerusalem.

While five of his scenes overlap with the Stations of the Cross – a typical Lenten devotion depicting a series of usually 14 scenes representing the stages of Christ’s Passion and death – the others take place either before or after those depicted in the stations, he told Episcopal News Service.

All of Otero’s scenes spring from his love of the Christmas Nativity sets, sometimes called a crèche, that he saw as a child at the Roman Catholic church he attended with his grandmother in Cuba. “We had a different Nativity each year,” he said. “It was always kind of mysterious and interesting.”

The diorama of the Last Supper. Photo: Ahmed Otero

He started annually displaying one of his several Nativity sets at St. John’s four years ago. But after packing one away in 2022, he decided he wanted to create something similar for Lent that depicted the events leading up to Easter. In 2024, he displayed the Holy Week dioramas for the first time.

The human figures are about 10 inches tall, Otero said, and he owns them all, including many he has collected since childhood and some that he bought in Europe. He makes the scenery from cardboard boxes and Styrofoam containers, and he buys items at dollar stores that he can transform into parts of the scene.

When the dioramas debuted last year, they were displayed on one long table in the narthex. This year, he placed scenes on individual tables, beginning with Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem and ending with the Resurrection, to make the display more interactive. “It’s like a pilgrimage, as people start walking around each one,” Otero said. “It’s a whole journey.”

The scenes are important to him because, he said, the Nativity sets he saw as a child helped shape his faith and a lingering sense that he was called to be a priest. (He is now in the first phase of the ordination discernment process in the Episcopal Church in Southeast Florida.)

Diorama of the Crucifixion. Photo: Ahmed Otero

He makes sure students at the church’s school also have the chance to experience them. “The kids are being touched by these dioramas, too,” he said. “I’m wondering whether one of them in the future will become a priest or a lay leader – you never know.”

But it’s not just children who are benefiting from seeing the events of Holy Week depicted in Otero’s scenes. He said adult congregants have told him they have found them useful in recalling Holy Week events. He likened the scenes to stained-glass windows in medieval cathedrals that helped people understand and better remember the stories of the Bible.

He admitted that doing both Holy Week and Christmas scenes is a lot of work, but he does get help from his wife. She comes in after he has set everything up and makes any small adjustments that are needed, he said, and she helps tackle one of the bigger jobs – cleaning up afterward.

He also would like to get some of the students at the school involved, including teaching them how to craft scenery, making it a team effort. “We want people to get involved,” he said.

— Melodie Woerman is an Episcopal News Service freelance reporter based in Kansas.