In College I'm teaching a course on Jesus Through the Centuries. So far we've been working through the course text book by Jaroslav Pelikan. In its illustrated edition it's a sumptuous collection of artistic representation accompanied by the kind of text only a ridiculously erudite church historian could have written. But it's getting us thinking, talking, disagreeing, suggesting, questioning and wondering.
As we've watched films, read poems and hymns, gazed at paintings and read our text book, what's become clear is the way the image of Jesus can be captured and skewed, exploited and distorted, manipulated and marketed (see the picture above, used in the 2001 US elections!). But also how that same image can be represented so differently by artist and sculptor, poet and film director, and portrayed with heartbreaking beauty or heart-rending anguish, with playfulness or poignancy, with festal joy or fearful suffering.
The fun and challenge of the class is in negotiating the differences of taste and subjective response, as one student's revulsion is another student's approval; or the surprises we give each other as we see what was there to be seen but we never noticed till it was pointed out; and then those 'aha' moments when for the first time we are confronted with an image and we 'get it' – or better, it gets us.
In this Victorian painting, the Returning Knight is embraced by the crucified Christ, whose loving embrace is only possible because he has broken free from the cross – it isn't nails that held him there anyway, but a love more piercing. The sword is surrendered, the hands are in prayer, the helmet that hides the face is removed, and the once proud warrior is embraced by One whose hands are torn, whose arms are open and whose feet are still nailed to that place where all human suffering converges in the pain and cost of atoning love. Of course you might read the picture differently – and that exposes the rich suggestiveness of artistic representation. It allows us to be content with ambiguity, to be responsive to those hints of beauty and transcendence that bypass our rational exclusion zones and touch us in the deep places of the soul.
Or the Ladybird style of idyllic picturebook theology, like this picture from the mid 20th Century illustrated bible often given in Sunday School prizes. Easy now to mock, dismiss it as sentimental kitsch, and turn to those grittier or more oblique images of postmodern culture, from the brutalised Christ of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, to the Black Crucifixion (see below), painted by the Mexican Jesuit protesting against the anguish of the black urban poor.
What is clear is that Jesus
continues to fascinate and disturb, as enigma or dogma, as global icon or personal saviour, and as one whose message and significance transcends the limitations and specific contexts of culture and religious claims. It's one of the challenges to the Church in our own time to find its own ways of embodying attractively and communicating faithfully the Gospel of Jesus.
A Christian community that lives the Gospel of redemption by actively engaging with situations which are going wrong; which practices reconciliation and peacemaking as non-negotiable imperatives for followers of Jesus; that goes against the grain of consumer driven anxiety by demonstrating irresponsible levels of generosity; that insists on the value and beauty of each human being because it has learned to look on the world with the eyes of God; that so believes in resurrection that hopefulness is no facile optimism but the set of the heart towards the future. Whatever representations of Jesus are produced in art and film, poem and icon, – the real and the actual representation of Jesus is the Body of Christ living in the world, acting in the name of Jesus, in ways persuasively reminiscent of that fourfold witness we call the Gospels. As Paul would say – this is a great mystery – but none the less true and real for that.