Amongst the pleasures of the Easter weekend was the BBC programme on Rogier Van der Weyden's masterpiece, The Descent from the Cross. Apart from the fascinating history of how this astonishing painting was commissioned by the guild of crossbow archers, and the subsequent story of how it was bought, purloined, stolen and almost ruined and then restored with near miraculous skill and patience, the images themselves were deeply moving and resonant of spiritual and theological depth.
What surprised me was my ignorance of this painting. In all my trawling and browsing last year, searching for paintings of Christ, especially the crucified Christ, I have no recollection of this painting. The artist was introduced to me by a friend who knows a thing or two about medieval and renaissance art, and I now have on my desk a postcard size reproduction of Van der Weyden's "Magdalen Reading", courtesy of that same friend. To have watched such a programme on Holy Saturday was one of the more reflective hours of a good weekend. And I suppose I'm left with a couple of thoughts I'd like to reflect on further.
In an age when we are more attuned to moving images, graphic realism, and a selection of secularised saviour stories, I wonder if part of the church's mission is to go on persistently presenting and patiently preserving, the deep symbolism and the subversive otherness of the Gospel story. Relevance, accessibility, the Gospel popularised to the point of caricature, impatience with profundity, dismissive noises when thought and reflection are required, the default assumption that attention spans are now measured in 5 second info-bytes – all of this is fundamentally challenged by a painting like Van der Weyden's deposition. And while I am entirely comfortable with the idea of a church culturally attuned, and alert to the meaning and message of the Gospel as it relates to 21st Century experience, I am equally sure that somehow the church needs to hear what my theological hero James Denney called "the plunge of lead into fathomless depths". That sound of lead sounding the depths is missing from much of contemporary Christianity.
The other thought is more straightforward, but complex too. The absence of symbol, art and representation in the worship and devotional life of my own tradition is, in an image soaked culture, now a missed mission opportunity. Sure, a number of churches have banners, ranging from the cliche to the art form, from the textual to the pictorial, but few if any survive repeated contemplation. A telling comment in a recent conversation with Sandy Stoddart, Professor of Sculpture at University of the West of Scotland comes to mind. Great art is never capable of exhaustive explanation; there is that which is beyond articulation, comprehension, cognitive control and aesthetic appreciation. There is a depth beyond us that draws us towards it. I would call it the transcendent, and a great theologian like Hans Urs Von Balthasar took 7 large volumes to explore that depth beyond, the place where the mystery of God's love is all but inaccessible – except that God in love comes to us in Christ, and what is revealed in Christ is the fullness of God, the one who fills all in all.
And until we recover a sense of that vast mystery of grace and mercy, and find ways to explore, contemplate, cherish and celebrate the reality of God whose 'eternity dost ever besiege us', (Helen Waddell), then our faith will remain prosaic, practical, partial, pragmatic, everyday accessible – and to that extent culturally conditioned. And we will, often without knowing it, long for that depth beyond, an encounter with the mystery of God who cannot be reduced to the measure of our needs, and for the chance now and again in life to stand in that place of bewildered wonder and nameless longing that is the place of adoration. A picture like Van der Meyer's has for many people, been a window where such moments happen.
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