The Gospel of John in Pictures: John 2: Jesus and the money-changers

Thanks to the BBC/Public Catalogue Foundation Your Paintings project for Stanley Spencer's painting Christ overturning the Money Changers' tables (1921).  This episode is recorded at the start of John's gospel: Jesus goes to Jerusalem in time for the Jewish festival of Passover.  Angered by the sale of animals for sacrifice, and the bureaux de change of those trading Roman (and therefore 'idolotrous') coinage for temple-money, Jesus drives out the animals with a whip, and overturns the tables of the money changers (John 2:13-25).  A similar/the same episode* is recorded much later in Jesus' life in other Gospels.


Now I don't know whether Spencer's painting was specifically intended to depict this episode as recorded in John's gospel but given that it was originally intended as a panel for a triptych, perhaps this picture does demand interpreting symbolically.  John's commentary on this episode is that Jesus justifies his behaviour in terms of his own death and resurrection.  And perhaps there are echoes of this in Spencer's painting: the picture flattens out the figure of Jesus and the overturning table and in doing so strips this of the physical action from the story; it become formal and stylised, and so becomes more of an icon, an image of religious devotion.  The table is blood-red, after all.  Does the size of the table, and the darkening archway beyond create a shadow of a garden tomb blocked by a heavy stone across the doorway, and does Jesus' plain white robe demand something of a shroud in our eyes?


So I'm left with an image that owes most to John's telling of the story - with its symbolic interpretation as a sign of Jesus' death and resurrection, and an delicious ambiguity as an object of devotion: here is an image challenging the systems and traditions which can cluster around religious belief and practice whilst at the same time (as an altarpiece) being one too.

* a debate for discussion elsewhere!

The Gospel of John in Pictures: John 5 - John the Baptist

Puvis De Chavannes' painting, The Beheading of John the Baptist ostensibly portrays the end of John's life as recorded in both Matthew 14 and Mark 6 where Herod, having held John in prison for some time, gives in to a request from Herodias' daughter Salome at a banquet and has John the Baptist beheaded.


But perhaps the painting takes its symbology from elsewhere.  The details of the narrative are there, but the scene imagined.  Salome waits with the plate, the executioner is captured in all his physicality as he swings the sword to strike.  And John, John is there transcending the moment.  His stare is elsewhere - directed towards us. His head, surrounded by a halo, gives us the clue as to the other narrative reference - intended or otherwise.  In John's gospel Jesus says: "John was a lamp that burned and gave light, and you chose for a time to enjoy his light."  And so as the sword arches towards the illuminated head of John the Baptist we have, captured in a visual moment, the extinguishing of John's light as commented upon by Jesus. 


The bitterest irony of both the comment, and its visual representation, is that Herod is specifically named as one who 'chose for a time to enjoy his light': 'Herod feared John and protected him, knowing him to be a righteous and holy man.  When Herod heard John, he was greatly puzzled; yet he liked to listen to him.' (Mark 6:20)  And so the painting telescopes too Herod's fascination, and termination, of the 'light' of John the Baptist.


Finally, the painting depicts the end of John's life but by depicting John in the clothes he wore at the beginning of his preaching:  'John’s clothes were made of camel’s hair, and he had a leather belt around his waist.' (Matthew 3:4) this picture takes us back to the start of his life.  And John's clothes reach back farther into the past than that: they are the clothes which the Old Testament prophet Elijah wore (see 2 Kings 1:8), a prophet whom Jesus explicitly identifies with John (see Matthew 11:13 and Malachi 4:5). 


So this image encompasses the whole of John's life, and his past as viewed prophetically by Jesus, and in his posture - his hands open in acceptance, his pose echoing so many of those images of Jesus himself at the point of trial and execution - this points forward to another execution too.  As Herod himself is reported to have said of Jesus, after the execution of John the Baptist: “This is John the Baptist; he has risen from the dead! That is why miraculous powers are at work in him.” (Matthew 14:2)

The Gospel of John in Pictures: John 1: Nathanael

I started writing about images depicting episodes from John's Gospel much earlier in the year.  Here is another.  Mark Cazalet's Nathaniel (asleep under the fig tree)* does and doesn't portray a visionary moment from John.  Philip, already a disciple of Jesus, persuades Nathanael to come with him to meet Jesus:

When Jesus saw Nathanael approaching, he said of him, Here is a true Israelite, in whom there is nothing false.
How do you know me? Nathanael asked. Jesus answered, I saw you while you were still under the fig-tree before Philip called you.
Then Nathanael declared, Rabbi, you are the Son of God; you are the King of Israel.
Jesus said, You believe because I told you I saw you under the fig-tree. You shall see greater things than that.
He then added, I tell you the truth, you shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.  John 1:47-51

Unlike Cazalet's painting the narrative doesn't suggest that Nathanael was asleep but perhaps what Cazalet's image is doing is intensifying and compressing into a single 'moment' some of the allusions already playing out in the narrative.  Jesus' statement about 'the angels of God ascending and descending' sends his readers back to Genesis 28:10-22 and Jacob's dream at Bethel of a stairway to heaven, with angels ascending and descending on it; in John's gospel Jesus himself is the stairway to heaven.  And perhaps by depicting Nathanael as asleep under the fig-tree, Cazalet gives us a visual reminder of sleeping Jacob, where the text of the gospel gives us a written one.

* The conditions of use of the The Methodist Church Collection of Modern Christian Art mean that I can't use the image directly within this blog but I hope that you'll follow the link and appreciate both this painting, and the many other beautiful things in the collection.

'Seeing' religious art

Some interesting discussion on The Guardian's Cif Belief pages at the moment responding to the question 'Do we need faith to see religious art?'  Here's a brief quote from Catherine Pepinster's response:

Is [religious art] really appreciated by those who don't believe? Can they fully understand it, indeed conceive of these other minds in another time and place where faith held sway?

That must depend on the extent to which the viewer can accept the possibility of the divine, or the existence of the religious impulse. I suspect that there is a growing tendency, for all Richard Dawkins's efforts, for people to accept that there is such an impulse.

Doom

Holidaying friends brought me back a postcard of The Wenhaston Doom, a C16 painting of resurrection and judgement:

Other people have written more knowledgeably about how this time-capsule from our mediaeval ancestors survived the protestant iconoclasm of the C17 under a coat of whitewash, emerging after a rainy night on a later restoration project to speak to us so eloquently of ways of thinking and worship now irrevocably lost.  My interest is in how this piece of art brings both a future, and the spiritual, into our present. 

It's a curious piece of social commentary that the rich - king & queen, cardinal and pope - are shown at the centre of the picture being welcomed into heaven.  The message from the painting to its mediaeval audience seems clear: those of high social status are righteous, and will inherit an eternal reward.  This view is supported by the Bible text beneath the picture from Romans 13:1-4

Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.  Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.  For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and you will be commended.  For the one in authority is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.

But perhaps the painting's message is more complex.  The four rich people are all naked, apart from their identifying headwear; under the trappings of prosperity, all humans are equal.  In its own time, and perhaps in ours too, a salutory reminder to those of us insulated from human suffering by prosperity and social status often derived from education or profession of how fragile these things are, and ultimately how meaningless.  For our society, increasingly divided by disparities between rich and poor, this painting reminds us of some essential equalities. 

Also interesting is how this painting externalises the consequences of how lives are lived.  Human beings are notoriously bad at evaluating the future consequences of present actions; in one of my past roles this was called 'optimism bias'.  There is no optimism bias in this picture, no hope of 'getting away with' a life lived with no understanding of the consequences of injustice commited in the present, no comfort that things will work out with our best interests preserved.

However warm the promised punishment for the wicked, this painting could just be viewed as cold comfort for those who suffer(ed) an impoverished present.  A future heavenly reward for the 'good' and a future hellish punishment for the 'bad' might offer the comfort of a changed perspective on current circumstances but little else of present benefit.  You can't eat this painting or its vision.  Material comfort came, and comes, not just from the painting itself but from the response it tries to provoke in those who I think are the real targets of its message.

This portrayl of judgement as a single point in the future should remind us, as perhaps it reminded those who saw this before it was hidden away, of the very real needs of our world and the ability of our actions now to influence this.  By bringing a future into our present, along with a spiritual dimension to our present lives, this painting reminds us of how far a response to its message of essential human equality could carry, with all its consequences of good towards those without a crown or a cardinal's beretta.

Encounters: story-telling.

Recently I've been thinking about story-telling in the last two chapters of John's Gospel, which strips out the 'cast' that populates the stories of Jesus' resurrection in the synoptic gospels to tell the story from the perspective of individual encounters between Mary Magdalene, John, Thomas and Peter, and the absent/present figure of Jesus.  Some paintings of some of these episodes help. 


Lavinia Fontana, Christ appears to Mary Magdalene c.1581

Fontana's painting gives us Mary's encounter from her perspective.  Mary arrives at the tomb to find the body of Jesus missing: 'she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus.  He asked her, “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?”  Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.”' (John 20:14-15)  In the narrative, Jesus is not dressed as a gardener, only mistaken for one; the painting takes us into Mary's world-view and her split-second moment of mis-identification.

In John's resurrection narrative Thomas is absent when Jesus' other disciples

Caravaggio, The Incredulity of Saint Thomas c. 1601-1602

see him, refusing to believe their story: "“Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”  A week later, Jesus appears again, inviting Thomas: “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.” (John 20:25,27).  Caravaggio's picture shows this curiosity pushed to its limits.  As with Fontana's picture, so with Caravaggio, the artist imagines his way beyond the details of the story.  There is no indication that Thomas took Jesus up on his offer but it's clear that it's Thomas' searching doubt which becomes the focus of the picture, clear from the intensity of the gaze of the three disciples and the glow of the painting's light upon their curious faces.  Only Jesus remains fully in shadow: is he the least known? The least knowable?  Whilst his hands accept Thomas' investigation perhaps the shadow across his face implies that in the narrative of the painting, Jesus cannot be known by this investigation.  A visual depiction perhaps of Jesus' subsequent words to Thomas: “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

Following Jesus' encounters with Mary, and Thomas, the story continues with Jesus appearing to Peter and six other disciples, who are out on a fishing trip on Galilee.  Duccio's painting is itself a commentary on different ways of story-telling through painting.  The 'realistic' expressions on the faces of the disciples in a  

Duccio, Christ’s appearance on Lake Tiberias 1308-11 (Maesta Altarpiece)

painting whose composition is so stylised betray a shift away from an earlier style of painting which followed conventions about the portrayal of sacred things to allow pictures to act as 'signs' (icons) - directing their viewers towards sacred things.  For me this is a shift towards painting the sacred in terms of the everyday of the painter.  Just as Fontana gives us Mary's reality from John's story of Jesus' resurrection, so Duccio also uses his 'reality' to bring the sacred into the world we know; heaven in ordinarie.

With grateful thanks to my 'picture researcher', Sonia Mundey.

The insignificance of Jesus' crucifixion

Visual arts relish the crucifixion of Jesus: the courtroom drama of the trials, enormous crowds, the potential for enormous crosses silhouetted against a darkening sky - there can be moments of bathos too: who can forget the portly and aging John Wayne as the centurion at the foot of the cross in The Greatest Story Ever Told drawling "Surely this was the Son of Gaaaaaad"?

A lot of this visual drama may be mis-placed.  Crucifixions were commonplace enough in the early first century.  Following the death of Herod in 4 BC there were outbreaks of revolt throughout Judea. Varus, the Roman legate of Syria took two legions and brutally pacified the country, particularly in Galilee:

Upon this, Varus sent a part of his army into the country, to seek out those that had been the authors of the revolt; and when they were discovered, he punished some of them that were most guilty, and some he dismissed: now the number of those that were crucified on this account were two thousand.  (Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 17.10.10)

Commonplace, and perhaps in easy public view: "those who passed by hurled insults at him" (Matthew 27:39). 

Odilon Redon's painting The Crucifixion strips out much of the over-dramatisation, depicting a moment of strange everyday intimacy which would only be possible without theatrics.  Mary, Jesus' mother, and his disciple John are shown by the cross in a painting of this moment:

When Jesus saw his mother there, and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to her, "Woman, here is your son", and to the disciple, "Here is your mother". From that time on, this disciple took her into his home.  (John 19:26-27)

The picture is not prescriptive; the lack of detail both leaves space for the imagination to play but also suggests, very subtly, something other-worldly.  For me this picture achieves with greater credibility something that more over-dramatic portrayals strive for but fail to deliver: the way that an ordinary public execution in a culture in which these were commonplace brought something heavenly into the lived experience of Christians. 

Life, Interrupted

Historical studies of the life of Jesus leave us with the enigma of the end of his life - that his followers believed that he had risen from the dead:

Much about the historical Jesus will remain a mystery.  Nothing is more mysterious than the stories of his resurrection, which attempt to portray an experience that the authors could not themselves comprehend.  But in the midst of mystery and uncertainty, we should remember that we know a lot about Jesus.  We know that he started under John the Baptist, that he had disciples, that he expected the 'kingdom', that he went from Galilee to Jerusalem, that he did something hostile against the Temple, that he was tried and crucified.  Finally we know that after his death his followers experienced what they described as the 'resurrection': the appearance of a living but transformed person who had actually died.  They believe this, they lived it, and they died for it.  In the process they created a movement, a movement that in many ways went far beyond Jesus' message.  Their movement grew and spread geographically.

E.P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus

The early Christian communities soon began to ask their leaders how they would share in the resurrection experience of Jesus; Paul writes:  'But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?”' (1 Corinthians 15:35).

The artist Stanley Spencer, in paintings such as The Resurrection with the Raising of Jairus’s Daughter or The Resurrection, Cookham, pictured this resurrection experience in terms of the every day.  The dead clamber out of their tombs in much the same condition as they entered them, dressed in contemporary clothes.  Life, interrupted, appears to continue on much the same terms.  For Spencer, resurrection seems to be less transcendental and more part of our present, lived experience.

Heaven in ordinarie

One of the pictures above my desk is Clive Hicks-Jenkins' The Prophet Fed by a Raven. 



The prophet's clothes might be yours or mine, drinking from the brook helped by a chunky mug; Elijah has become present in our time.  His eyes might be closed in prayer - or is that a sideways glance down (modesty?) or inwards (reflection?) and away both from the food and the supportive raven.  No black-feathered raven this: red and fiery with tail feathers which might be tongues of flame - a premonition of the chariot of fire and horses of fire which separated Elisha from Elijah, separating present from past?

So, for me, the painting brings the spiritual into our present: heaven in ordinary.  Which is what I hope this blog will be about.

Now Elijah the Tishbite, from Tishbe in Gilead, said to Ahab, "As the LORD, the God of Israel, lives, whom I serve, there will be neither dew nor rain in the next few years except at my word."

Then the word of the LORD came to Elijah: "Leave here, turn eastward and hide in the Kerith Ravine, east of the Jordan.  You will drink from the brook, and I have directed the ravens to supply you with food there."

So he did what the LORD had told him. He went to the Kerith Ravine, east of the Jordan, and stayed there.  The ravens brought him bread and meat in the morning and bread and meat in the evening, and he drank from the brook. (1 Kings 17:1-6)