Amongst the books that would make up any single bookcase of the books I need to have easy and frequent access to is Jesus Through the Centuries, Jaroslav Pelikan. I used it as a textbook and based an entire module around the title. It is a selective but authoritative and diverse guide to the multitudinous approaches to portraying the figure of Jesus. Every single artistic attempt inevitably portrays the artist's own assumptions, cultural imagination, historical context and religious tradition.
This particular image was displayed on screen throughout the sermon this morning, which was on Mark 4.25-31. You know, that bit where Mark tells us Jesus was asleep, on a cushion!? I love that detail, Jesus making himself comfortable and sleeping through a Galilean squall until he was awakened by the panicky noise and hurt hollering of his disciples.
The service had begun with Psalm 107.23-32. Only when you read that passage do you realise that Mark's description of Jesus the storm chaser and wave calmer reveals him to be more than an exhausted carpenter turned Rabbi. "So they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he brought them out of their distress. The storm sank to a murmur, and the waves of the sea were stilled." (Ps 107.28-29) No doubt about it; this passage is right in the foreground of Mark's telling of the story. And the disciples' question, "Who is this that even the wind and sea obey him?" is as theologically loaded as they come.
For us in worship this morning, the contrast of the disciples' fear and Jesus asleep on a cushion, faced us with the reality of our own fears, and the reminder that Jesus wasn't asleep because he didn't care. In the storm, Jesus in in his element. What the disciples feared most could only happen to them with the permission of the calmer of storms. That for mark is the game-changer. The disciples' question has only one answer - this is the one who comes into the world as the saving presence of God, the one who announces and begins to demonstrate the reign of God.
Oh there's more to think and wonder about, but that one question, "Who is this?", goes on whistling and roaring in the mind long after the wind is silent and the waves are gentled. The picture my Monica Lui Ho Peh is an astonishing capture of that nano-second just before the divine fiat that transforms chaos into creation is spoken. Perhaps the truth is that when fear is at its strongest and our hope at its lowest, the one asleep on the cushion is neither complacent nor unaware. But yes, perhaps faith has an essential energy of desperation when, like those disciples, we shout in God's face and ask for deliverance.
To read Mark 4.25-31, then look at that picture on screen is to discover the power of visual exegesis, and to recover the theological precision of art. Sometimes I am helped by text and image, exegesis and art, perplexity and prayer, and the comfort of knowing that sometimes I'm just as scared, and just as slow on the uptake, as those first followers of Jesus who faced their worst fears, and left us a story about how to face our own.
Comments