Easter

Beauty and Revelation
James Tissot, God Creating

James Tissot’s painting depicting God’s creative work is likely to strike us as childishly simplistic in its portrayal of divinity. For it quite obviously displays what we consider to be the flaw of anthropomorphism, as if the artist was naive in his approach to faith. But what if our hesitation about anthropomorphism, aside from reflecting a proper theological concern, could also become an obstacle for us? What if the mysterious implausibility of God entering into and sharing the limitations of human being keeps us from appreciating how fallen human beings can – by the same graceful Providence – share in the beautiful fullness of God?

I believe that James Tissot came to realize this: Beauty is a form of divine revelation. And, that our joy when beholding beauty is our experience of God’s love manifest to and within us.

These themes are intrinsic to our participation in Holy Week. As we can learn from observing the traditional pattern for the liturgy on Good Friday, our focus in Holy Week is upon what God has done and is doing for us. The sign of this on Good Friday is our abstention from celebrating the Eucharist, and instead we receive communion from the sacrament reserved following the Maundy Thursday liturgy on the prior evening.

For God creates, God discloses, and God provides. Through all, God reveals self. God’s revelation involves God’s self-disclosing gifts. Within the divine attributes are those of initiative and efficacy, constitutive aspects of creativity. And so, when God creates human beings in God’s own image and likeness, God not only exercises creativity but also self-revelation.

Among the ways that we resemble our Maker is one that paradoxically can become a source of frustration for us. Positively, our Creator has given us intelligence and a God-reflecting capacity for creativity, initiative, and efficacy. In addition, God has given us an inclination toward experiencing freedom and an accompanying desire for its fulfillment. Employing these gifts can lead to an ironic and negative result: They allow us the freedom wrongly to imagine that God is actually a dispensable concept, and a coping mechanism which is just a reflection of our psychological needs and a projection of ourselves.

Reflecting on these things can lead us to recognize the heart of divine humility, that it should please God to create us in God’s own image and likeness. God has given us the capacity to imagine that we are self-made, and then to function in a parody of the divine role in Creation. This happens when we fool ourselves into thinking that we are the center of the universe. Expressions of this parody include our ideas that the universe is infinite, as are our own endless possibilities within it. Yet – and this is critical – only God is infinite, and we – like the universe – are finite beings, endowed not only with divine-reflecting capacities, but also with purpose, meaning, and identities that are not of our own making.

James Tissot, What Our Lord Saw From the Cross, a remarkable inversion of how we so often picture the scene

As we approach Holy Week, we have the opportunity once again to be those who watch, who listen, and reflect. As we do, we remind ourselves that we are bit players in the Divine Drama, whose Author has generously written for us a script that has a curious feature, ample provision for ‘ad-libbing.’ In fact, divine generosity is so abounding that we are allowed to create sub-plots within the overall story. To the point that we forget to reference the overall plot lines shaping the whole, as well as the Author’s purposes in creating them.

One thing that God achieved in the events of the Exodus was to remind both Pharaoh, as well as Moses and the people of Israel, that God was and is sovereign over history as well as over geography, the realms of both time and place. Forgetting this ancient truth, we neglect the comfort we can gain from the doctrine of Providence, that God provides for the needs of the world as well as our own, which God knows more intimately and with greater perception than we do. We should wonder that we are left free to imagine otherwise, a fantasy in which some of us at least occasionally engage.

But the humility we are invited to recover in this latter part of Lent, and most of all in Holy Week, involves opening ourselves to a very real possibility. That God’s way of overcoming our refusal and failure to live into the potential we have been given involves the beauty of a strange and unexpected gift. Christmas reminded us of part of this gift, that God became human so that humans could become God-like, and in the best possible way. Holy Week allows us to rediscover the gift that God chose to identify so much with us that, in the ‘Son of Man,’ the Incarnate divine-human being, God passed through human death into the fullness of human life so that we might be enabled by grace to do the same.

The Beauty of ‘Something Further’
An interior dome, Etchmiadzin Cathedral, Armenia

{This past week I had the honor of offering a homily at the funeral of my longtime friend, Tom, a neurosurgeon and person of faith. What follows is a portion of my homily.}

People in our culture who have been trained in the sciences and who work in medicine can face a particular challenge. They can find it hard to grapple with the intangible aspects of the spiritual life. Walker Percy is a great example of someone who overcame this apparent divide. For Percy, like Tom, was very smart and educated in the medical arts. Like Tom, Percy came to see something very important: we rely upon science to explain too much of the world. And, if we are honest and sensitive in our inquiry, we come to see how – through science alone – we cannot understand ourselves.

Tom, with his advanced work in surgery and in neurology, knew far more about our brains than most of us will ever know. And yet, he also was quite aware of the limits to such knowledge. He was sensitive to how ‘our minds,’ though inextricably connected to our brains, always somehow transcend what we know about brain function. And therefore, despite our continuing advances in understanding neurophysiology, there remains this ineffable, something further, about what it means to human, this thing that non-specialists like the rest of us, as well as priests and pastors, call our souls.

Walker Percy might have put it in terms like this: We can learn the names and composition of the myriad of chemicals that are a part of human brain function. And therefore, as conscious subjects, we can approach our brains as objects of study. Yet, paradoxically, we, as the subjects of our studies, can never really know ourselves as the objects of our studies. There will always be something beyond, something further and equally real about ourselves, even if not fully measurable. And this ‘something further,’ believers call our souls. For even the most brilliant neurologist, even the most perceptive psychologist, can never really know him or herself, just as I – at least in this life, on this side of the veil – can never really know myself. Only God can. And only God does.

Etchmiadzin Cathedral

Physicians can map how our physical bodies eventually fail us when we get older, and cease to function ably as before. But what our physicians and scientists cannot map – at least not yet – is how our consciousness can survive this breakdown in our physiological function. Yet, somehow we continue in self-awareness, and in our awareness of others, especially that great Other One. And we will probably never be able to map, in terms we understand, how we come to have conscious contact with our Creator and Redeemer. For our conscious contact with God happens through God’s loving embrace of us. This is the embrace into which we have all been received – even if we are not conscious of it, and especially when we have not chosen to refuse it.

Tom consciously chose to recognize and accept this embrace. And he put his trust in it, even if – as an accomplished scientist – he could not explain it. For that, we honor him and his memory, as we continue to have fellowship with him in the Communion of Saints. And as we share with him in our celebration of the Eucharist. For just as our Lord Jesus continues to be present with us, and in us, so all the saints – both Tom and ourselves – and all the faithful departed stand before the throne of the Lamb. In Christ, we are joined together, so that we, too, might also be lost in wonder, thanks, and praise.

Tom knew and believed all this. And that is why we are here today. We can honor Tom for his contributions to the sciences and to the practice of medicine. Here, in this church and in this community of faith, we can join others in honoring what God has done in Tom’s life and work. And more especially, we are here today to honor what God is still doing in Tom’s continuing life. For Tom’s life and consciousness continue, even now, in and through God’s loving Grace and favor. His death is the veil that only appears to separate him from us. It disguises the way he is still really connected with us through his Baptism and ours, into Christ’s death and Resurrection.

Chora Church, Istanbul

Most enduring is this truth. And it is a truth for all of us to embrace: we have continuing fellowship with Tom, through Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit. Thanks be to God!

The Believing Eleven

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Peter Paul Rubens, The Rockox Altarpiece, 1613-1615 (center panel)

 

It is evening on the day of Resurrection-discovery. John tells us that ten of the disciples are hiding behind a secured door out of fear. Judas is deceased, and Thomas is away.

Jesus suddenly appears to the unprepared disciples, and shares with them his peace. He shows them his hands and his side, and then – as a direct consequence of seeing the places on his body associated with his death – the ten disciples rejoice when they see their Lord. In other words, their recognition of him, and that he was somehow alive again, brings them joy by restoring their belief in him.

When hearing this story from John’s Gospel on the second Sunday of Easter, we may be prone to considering it apart from what happens just before it. The disciples, who are hiding out of fear, have already received an eye-witness to the resurrection of Jesus. Mary Magdalene, to whom Jesus revealed himself at the tomb that morning, had come and told the ten the Lord was alive, and that he had appeared to her. Clearly, and prior to Jesus’ unexpected appearance, the ten disciples are still doubting her personal witness. Even after receiving what should have been trusted testimony from Mary Magdalene, a fellow follower of Jesus.

So why – in popular imagination – isn’t this well-known Gospel reading from John 20 commonly referred to as the “doubting disciples” reading? Why should Thomas be singled out, when his joyful recognition of the risen Jesus depended on nothing more or less than what the 10 had needed, and received, before him?

And why have so many painters in the Western tradition privileged Thomas’ purported unbelief in the Risen Lord, rather than depict the earlier reluctance of the ten others to arrive at joyful confidence about the Lord’s astonishing return? Apparently, in many painters’ eyes (especially Caravaggio), more visual drama was to be found in images of a doubter’s hand placed within an open wound.

Caravaggio, Doubting Thomas, 1601 (a famous traditional presentation of the event in John 20)

A further detail to notice, which our familiarity with so many paintings helps to obscure, has to do with how Thomas responds to Jesus. According to John, Jesus appears to the not-yet-believing ten, and – unbidden – shows them his hands and his side. Seeing the traces of his wounds on his risen body brings them joy. Jesus then appears unexpectedly a week later, this time showing himself to the one not present on the prior occasion. And just as he had done previously, Jesus offers Thomas the same opportunity he had provided to the others.

We should therefore not be misled by Thomas’ oft-quoted comment to the other disciples, prior to his own epiphany, about what he needed in order to believe. According to the text, Jesus – upon appearing in the same house a second time – bids Thomas to touch him. Yet, Thomas immediately responds to Jesus’ words without any mention in the Gospel of him having physical contact with the risen Lord’s wounds. Jesus then asks Thomas a rhetorical question, “Have you believed because you have seen me?” Naturally, Thomas’ implied answer is ‘yes.’

For all these reasons, we will do better to find a different and more positive descriptive phrase by which to refer to this well-known passage from John 20. “Jesus meets the disciples according to their needs,” though wordy, would do better.

P. Steffensen’s altarpiece painting behind the altar of Zion Lutheran Church, Copenhagen

 

This post is based on the traditional Gospel reading for the second Sunday of Easter (April 7 in 2024), John 20:19-31. The story within it concludes with these words: “Jesus said to Thomas, ‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed’.”

Note: The altarpiece paintings by P. Steffensen and Rubens provide an interesting counterpoint to the prevailing tendency of painters to focus on Thomas placing his hand in the side of the Risen Jesus.

 

Finding Beauty During Holy Week

James Tissot, The Resurrection

 

I had the privilege of seeing the original of this image by James Tissot at a recent exhibit of his work in San Francisco. I have known about this painting for some time, but was struck by how relatively small it is (image size approximately 8″ x 12″). Given the size, Tissot’s attention to detail is astonishing, especially when seen alongside his large oil paintings.

Like the one above, Tissot’s biblical paintings were largely done with opaque water color paint (now commonly termed “gouache” paint) and graphite on textured gray paper. This sets the water color paintings apart from his oil paintings in terms of their technical quality and pictorial finish. Nevertheless, they are in some ways more remarkable because Tissot was using the less forgiving medium of water colors instead of oil paints, which provide greater flexibility for painting over unsatisfactory or undesired results.

Choosing a single image for consideration in the context of Holy Week presents a certain challenge. For which of the events that we commemorate this week provides the most suitable reference point for our reflection? Considering this question, and possible answers to it, can help us gain insight about how we understand Holy Week in relation to Easter and more specifically whether we view the Passion (the arrest, trial, torture, and crucifixion) of Jesus as an essential part of the Easter story.

We know that it is not just among Christians, but also among Jews and Muslims, that notable differences concerning belief and practice exist among pious adherents of a shared religious tradition. A significant variable for Christians concerns how -in our prayers, worship and practices this week- we approach the relative significance of the key liturgical ‘moments’ that we commemorate during the ‘Holy Three Days’ (or Paschal Triduum). According to the biblical concept of time, these three days commence at sundown on what we now call Maundy Thursday. And so, the first ‘day’ includes remembrance of the Last Supper, Jesus’ arrest and trial, as well as his Good Friday crucifixion. The second ‘day’ then begins on Good Friday evening, just after when Jesus would have been buried. And the third begins after sundown on Holy Saturday evening, and includes the twenty four hours during which Jesus’ resurrection occurred and his empty tomb was then discovered.

When considering the significance of the events we commemorate at this time of the year, some Christians think primarily in terms of Easter Sunday and what Jesus’ resurrection will mean for them. Many others include in their reflection a spiritual consideration of the events we associate with Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. The broader ‘catholic’ liturgical tradition reflects this wider perspective in the liturgies appointed for Palm Sunday at the beginning of Holy Week. For example, The Book of Common Prayer liturgy for Palm Sunday commemorates Jesus’ journey on a donkey down from the Mount of Olives and his entrance into the Holy City, which leads to his ‘cleansing of the Temple’ and the subsequent conflict this provoked. A central feature of the Palm Sunday liturgy is a reading of the full Passion narrative from one of the first three Gospels. John’s Passion narrative is always read every year on Good Friday. And, on both Palm Sunday and Good Friday, the Passion story often incorporates readers who give voice to individual parts within the narrative.

In light of these observations, and as we prepare to enter the ‘Holy Three Days,’ I invite you to consider Tissot’s painting titled, The Resurrection. As you view and reflect on it, here are some details you may want to take into account:

  • Tissot portrays the moment of Jesus’ resurrection at night (rather than ‘Sunday morning,’ with lanterns partially illuminating the scene
  • Matthew’s Gospel mentions Joseph of Arimathea placing Jesus’ body “in his own new tomb, which he had hewn in the rock;” Tissot adds a dressed stone frame around the tomb entrance
  • though the crucifixion was enacted by Roman soldiers, Matthew suggests that the guard of soldiers sent to the tomb belong to the chief priests and the Pharisees and are primarily local citizens
  • the risen Lord still bears the marks of his torture and execution, though his wounds are transformed into points of light
  • diaphanous angels appear on the righthand side of the tomb opening

These and other observations about this resurrection painting make it relevant to our observance of Holy Week, as well as to Easter. I offer this image and these comments as a way into the mystery of this week.

 

The image above is James Tissot’s painting, The Resurrection, which with many of his other biblical paintings is part of the collection of the Brooklyn Museum.