Peter Stuart:
What images come to mind when you think of the Resurrection of Jesus? And how should artists go about picturing it?

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Gordon’s Tomb or the Garden Tomb

For myself, I have two main mental images, both drawn from my time in Jerusalem during one Holy Week many years ago. The first is my memory of what’s known as Gordon’s Tomb or the Garden Tomb, a lovely serene spot in Jerusalem which came to prominence a century and a half ago and which Protestant pilgrims often make the centre of their devotion today. I think many Sunday School pictures of the Resurrection draw on this particular ‘Garden Tomb’. When I read the Gospel accounts of the empty tomb, my memories of Gordon’s Tomb automatically surface within me, even though my mind is saying ‘no, no, no’. ‘No’, because the problem is, archaeologists are certain that that’s not the place where Jesus was buried. But no matter, we all need visual aids for our meditations.

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Church of the Holy Sepulchre

My other mental image is very different. It’s one of light bursting out, driving out darkness. And it comes from the Easter Eve service in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (or as the Orthodox Church calls it, the Church of the Resurrection), in Jerusalem.

This building covers the traditional site of Jesus’ tomb, and of His crucifixion nearby, and archaeologists and other scholars make a strong case for the accuracy of the tradition. Unfortunately the building itself is an ugly hotchpotch – so be warned if you’re going there. But the Easter Vigil there is incredibly powerful. In the darkness a light is kindled within a hollowed-out rock space believed to be what’s left of the original tomb, and the flame is handed out to runners holding bundles of tapers which they light and race with to every corner of the labyrinthine building, and then light each worshipper’s taper. There’s an explosion of light, and utter pandemonium. Not at all ‘Anglican’- but this picture actually comes from Peter Benge, Vicar of St James Lower Hutt, who’s on study leave in Jerusalem right now!

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Jose Clemente Orozco,  (1883-1949), The White House, 1925-28

Phyllis Mossman:
But back to the Biblical sources. What actually happened at the actual resurrection of Jesus? After all, no witnesses were there inside the tomb. And the oldest Gospel account, that of Mark, is very mysterious. The women found the tomb empty, and were afraid, and fled. Full stop.

This painting by Mexican artist Jose Clemente Orozco, painted in the 1920s, captures something of the starkness of the description in Mark… ‘Then they went out and ran away from the tomb, trembling with amazement. They said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.’ (Mark 16:

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Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606 – 1669), The Resurrection of Christ, oil on canvas ca. 1635/39,  Munich

The Bible doesn’t really tell us what actually happened at the moment of the Resurrection, so artists have had to use their imagination and artistic licence. Matthew, of all the four Gospels, seeks most to fill in the gaps of the mystery. The 17th Century Dutch artist, Rembrandt, paints the moment, described by Matthew (28:2-4) when the guards flee from the angel descending from heaven.
‘Suddenly there was a violent earthquake; an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled away the stone, and sat down on it. His face shone like lightning; his garments were white as snow. At the sight of him the guards shook with fear and fell to the ground as though dead.’
Powerful words and a powerful painting to illustrate the passage. The use of light and dark is very dramatic as is the strong diagonal across the composition.
Now compare that image with this one by …

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Piero della Francesca, ‘The Resurrection’

… the 15th century Italian artist, Piero della Francesca, of ‘The Resurrection’

Here’s a very powerful muscular Christ rising out of his tomb, holding his winding sheet around his body and in the other hand the red cross banner of his triumph over death. He stares directly and compellingly at us. The tomb has been portrayed as a classical coffin or sarcophagus, rather than a Palestinian rock tomb. The guards are sleeping, as described in Matthew.

It also reminds us that when Christ had earlier predicted he would rise from the dead. He challenged his enemies by saying: ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up again.’ He was speaking about his body (John 2:19-22). We see this risen body then as a strong victorious body.

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Michelangelo ‘The Risen Christ’, marble, c. 1518-21

Peter
How are we to imagine the Risen Christ? (and therefore our own resurrection)?

Like Piero della Francesca’s image, here’s an immensely solid Christ, this time in marble. It’s difficult to imagine this Christ going through walls to appear among the disciples. Strong, yes, and triumphant, and rather like a Greek god. The outward symbols of the Passion are there, but to me the statue speaks more of timeless immortality than of the Resurrection of the Crucified and Incarnate One. Somewhere along the road Apollo has picked up a cross which happened to be lying around.

Phyllis

Michelangelo carved this marble figure for a Church in Rome in the early 16th century. It’s interesting that this work was not well received at the time, and it has probably remained his most unpopular sculpture since. The nudity of Christ was part of the reason. But, decorum aside, the physical beauty of Christ’s body can be seen as a visual metaphor for his spiritual perfection. By being raised from the dead, Christ has overcome mortality and imperfection.

Peter
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Frederick Horsman Varley (B. England 1881 – d. Canada 1969) ‘Liberation’   

This is a modern painting, with its muscular Nordic Christ. However we respond to it, it does manage to combine three essential elements: physicality, power and yet a new mysterious otherness, a translucency. This Christ perhaps could appear and disappear in our midst.

And it also made me think of C.S. Lewis’s image of the waterfall to describe the continuity of the human person both within this life and also into the next. When we look at a waterfall, in one sense its material identity is utterly different from one moment to the next. We’re not looking at the same water. And yet it makes sense to say it is the same waterfall, because the continuing form is there. Now you and I are slow waterfalls of matter; there’s not one atom in our bodies which was there seven years ago. But we’re still the same person. Our recognisable ‘form’ remains. What happens at my resurrection will not depend on the reassembly of a finite number of specific atoms which are peculiar to me. Who knows what other bodies some of these atoms in my hand have been part of?

Here in this picture, the ‘form’ of Jesus continues, and yet the fluidity of his and our physical human nature is captured, at least to some extent.

The artist was Frederick Varley who worked in Canada in the mid 20th century.

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Titian’s Noli me Tangere, about 1514

Phyllis
And how did the disciples know that this being they were encountering was indeed Jesus? There was some confusion, to say the least.

Think of Mary Magdalene in the garden. Here is Christ appearing to her on the first morning after the Resurrection as painted by the 16th century Venetian artist Titian. At first the Magdalen thinks Jesus is a gardener; and when she realises who he is, he tells her not to touch him – ‘noli me tangere’ (do not touch me) – as we are told in John 20: 14-18. Jesus does not want his followers to hold onto his physical presence.

Or think of the reference in Matthew to the eleven disciples seeing Jesus on the mountain in Galilee where ‘When they saw him, they knelt in worship, though some were doubtful’ (Matthew 28:17).  And there was genuine doubt.

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Caravaggio ‘The Incredulity of St Thomas’ 1601-02, Oil on canvas, 107 x 146 cm, Sanssouci, Potsdam

John’s Gospel contains the classic Resurrection story of Doubting Thomas, a story which ends in a declaration of faith after Christ shows Thomas His wounds and invites him to touch. (By the way, there’s no reference in the text to Thomas taking up the invitation, and some artists have therefore gone well beyond the written record.)

Caravaggio was an Italian early Baroque artist. His work is confrontational and extreme in its realism. Caravaggio insisted that reality was his teacher, so he was a master of naturalism, using local street people as his models, striking light and dark effects, and dramatic composition.

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Michael Smither ‘Christ and Doubting Thomas’

This painting by contemporary NZ artist, Michael Smither, is entitled ‘Christ and Doubting Thomas’.

In a similar way to Caravaggio, Smither displays a powerful rendering of the Gospel narrative, using pared down figures, simple folk as the protagonists, in understated settings.  Gestures and facial expressions are exaggerated to forcefully convey the scriptural message.

Think also of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. It took a while for the penny to drop with them. Clearly there was both continuity and discontinuity. Here are two pictures of this moment of recognition at the Supper at Emmaus:

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Caravaggio ‘Supper at Emmaus’
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Ivo Dulcic ‘Supper at Emmaus’ 1916, oil

On the left is Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus’ and once again we see insistent realism, and striking light and dark effects. And on the right  Ivo Dulcic ‘Supper at
Emmaus’ 1916, oil – a more modern take, by the Croation artist, Ivo Dulcic, painted in 1916. Duclici uses vibrant colours and distorts form in an expressionistic way.

This is from Luke 24 when two of the disciples were going to Emmaus, near Jerusalem, and talking about the death of Jesus and the finding of the empty tomb. They encountered Jesus but didn’t recognize him. His response was to say they were “slow of heart” in not recognising that resurrection was exactly what the prophets of the Old Testament, starting with Moses, had said would happen. Jesus then interpreted Old Testament scripture to them while they walked. When they arrived at their destination, they invited him in to eat with them. It wasn’t until Jesus broke the bread and blessed it and gave it to them that they actually recognised him, “that their eyes were opened”.

Thus in this Emmaus story we see a parable, a foreshadowing of the way Jesus walks with us today, and touches us through the ministry of the Word and this Sacrament of the breaking of the bread.

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Duccio di Buoninsegna ‘Appearance on Lake Tiberias’

Peter
We have something else to explore; the difference between the disciples’ encounters with the Risen Christ, and that of Paul on the Damascus Road. Thinking of the disciples, take for example, Peter on the shores of Galilee, in this morning’s gospel.

This is illustrated by the early 14th century Sienese artist Duccio, in a panel from a large double sided Altarpiece called the Maestà commissioned by Siena Cathedral. On the back of the Altarpiece are scenes of the Passion of Christ. This is one of them, and it’s typical of Duccio, with warmth of feeling, gravity, drama and a lovely setting.

This post-Resurrection encounter has strong echoes of the earlier call of the disciples at the beginning of Jesus’s ministry, when there was also a miraculous haul of fish.  It’s almost a repeat, though it’s also significantly different, because it has the restoration of Peter after his denial of Christ, and his renewed commissioning.  (Note the emphasis in the story on eating together, in a familiar setting, and Peter again impulsively entering the water.)

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Michelangelo, The Conversion of Paul

Phyllis
And now the encounter of Paul with the Risen Christ in a painting by Michelangelo. This was painted for the Pauline Chapel in the Vatican, created for Pope Paul III, the great Church reformer at the time of the Reformation when the Catholic Church was under threat from Luther and the other reformers. This was painted at a time when the Catholic Church commissioned works that expressed judgement, salvation, the passion story, and conversion, in order to help reform the Church from within so it could withstand the threats of Protestantism.

Peter
What’s missing from this story about Paul in the Acts of the Apostles is the physicality of the Galilee story about Peter. True, there’s a light, and a voice, and somehow Paul (who had never met Jesus in the flesh) accepted that it was Jesus he was encountering. But it’s less ‘earthed’. And yet Paul places his experience on a par with the earlier appearances of the Risen Christ to the disciples. (1 Corinthians 15:5-8 ‘….he appeared to Cephas, and afterwards to the Twelve. Then he appeared to over five hundred of our brothers at once, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, and afterwards to all the apostles. Last of all he appeared to me too…’

Paul’s experience seems to be a bridge between the mysterious but definitely physical encounter of the disciples with the Risen Christ, and the subsequent experience of Christians down the ages, including our own experience.

Whatever else the Ascension of Christ means – and it has a rich and varied meaning – it means the end of the encounter of the disciples with a physical Jesus they could see and touch and hear, and whom they knew from their pre-crucifixion knowledge of Him. 

How have Christians subsequently experienced the Risen Jesus? In many and various ways, by countless people. Some experiences seem to come close to that of Paul on the Damascus Road. Others are far less focussed and yet no less convincing to those who receive them. The Easter message of our Archbishops this year puts this helpfully.

‘Because the New Testament does not try to explain the actual mechanics of the Resurrection, neither do we. We can only stand under the grace of the resurrection and let it understand us as an unrepeatable miracle of love. Love is its only meaning because love is the only survivor of death, and because God is love all the way through. The only people to whom the Risen Christ appeared were people who loved him – or, as Luke says, the witnesses that God had already chosen.

‘The Resurrection, therefore, is made physical, visible and possible for those who experienced it through the love that was in them. This is because God is love and because God loved the world so much that he gave Christ to these people in a new and living way. With them, if you believe that this divine love is stronger than death, then you can believe in the message of Easter.’

Phyllis
And the Archbishops quote Jay B. McDaniel :

‘We understand resurrection when we taste a freedom and freshness that lies in the very depths of our lives. From my perspective as a Christian, this freedom and freshness is the living Christ, the resurrected One. He does not have a body that is located in space and time. He is more like the wind, or our own breathing, or the sky. The resurrected One is the very freshness of God, the very freedom of Holy Wisdom, as a centre that is within us and beyond us, ever-present yet ever-new. There is a freshness and freedom in the very centre of things. In this freshness and freedom, we find our roots and wings.’

How on earth (literally) are we to image this?  Perhaps our last two images this morning may go some way to helping us.
 
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Robert Lentz ‘Tree of Life’ 

Robert Lentz is an American Franciscan friar of Russian origin, who paints icons and writes about art and spirituality.  Lentz here is drawing on the same basic idea as we at St Alban’s have been doing this Easter with our ‘flowering Cross’ outside the church doors – the Cross as not only an instrument of death, but as living wood, a tree, the tree of life foreshadowed in the Genesis Creation story of ‘the tree of life’ in the Garden of Eden. From Jesus’s loving sacrificial offering of Himself on the Cross comes life. Life for Jesus, life for those who are united to Him, life for the New Creation which flows from Him. The renewal of all things begins at the Cross, and is rooted in sacrificial love – which issues in Resurrection Life. And looking at this picture we also think of the organic metaphor of Jesus as the True Vine, with us as fruit-bearing branches when we abide in that Vine. And it links the Risen Jesus with creation, with this earth, hidden though He may be.

In this phase of history as we journey towards Christ’s Second Coming, we have to hold two things in tension: the Risen Christ’s eternal authority as the Son of God reigning in the glory of the Trinity, and that same Christ’s presence within us as we continue to journey through the darkness of this world, though now with the light of the Easter dawn on our faces.  Artists down the ages have struggled with this tension, and tended to emphasise the present glory of Christ in Heaven, sometimes in a way which unhelpfully distances Him from us. The story of the Risen Jesus journeying with the two disciples on the road to Emmaus can help us here, including His sacred meal with them, which He continues with us around the Table of Sacrificial Death and Risen Life which we know as the Eucharist

Peter
St Paul wrestles with this tension in Romans 8. ‘Up to the present, as we know, the whole created universe in all its parts groans as if in the pangs of childbirth. What is more, we also, to whom the Spirit is given as the first-fruits of the harvest to come, are groaning inwardly while we look forward eagerly to our adoption, our liberation from mortality.’ How does an artist go about expressing that cluster of vivid images?
And balancing that passage in Romans are Paul’s words in Colossians 3: ‘Were you not raised to life with Christ? Then aspire to the realm above, where Christ is, seated at God’s right hand, and fix your thoughts on that higher realm, not on this earthly life. You died, and your life lies hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, is revealed, then you too will be revealed with him in glory.’
And a little earlier in this Epistle Paul wrote the marvellous phrase, ‘Christ in you, the hope of glory.’ (Colossians 1:27.)

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John August Swanson, ‘Festival of Lights’.

So here is our final image, John Swanson’s ‘Festival of Lights’. We’re on our way. Think of it next Easter when we follow the paschal candle into the church – follow Christ the Way, the Truth, the Life. We’re on our way. For Christ is Risen, Alleluia!
A presentation in St Alban’s Anglican Church, Eastbourne, on 18 April 2010, by Phyllis Mossman and Peter Stuart.

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