This Triptych is comprised of three studio models of The Stations of the Cross. They are a personal gift from the artist. Standing before them, if we look carefully, we overhear the conversation between art and theology. When, in contemplation, we are attentive to beautiful and accomplished art, that conversation continues, even in silence.
So much of Christian faith is expressed and communicated in words, but words have their limitations. The Scottish theologian P T Forsyth, died almost exactly 100 years ago. His writing was once described by a reviewer as "like watching fireworks in a fog". Forsyth was well aware of his own stylistic limitations. But in fairness, the difficulty is experienced by every theologian seeking to talk with reverence about what for Christians is the deepest mystery of the universe.
"Words are hard to stretch to the measure of eternal things, without breaking under us somewhere," Forsyth once confessed. But few have wrestled with more determination to find thought and words worthy of such an urgent and sublime subject as the Cross of Christ. Some of Forsyth's most passionate and persuasive writing is found in such volumes as his slim masterpiece aptly titled, The Cruciality of the Cross.
Back to the triptych (above), and a theology of atonement without words. The first panel is brutal in its historical realism. Roman soldiers had done this work, and it was all in a day's work, hundreds if not thousands of time. The third panel conveys gentle tenderness as powerfully as the first portrays banal brutality. Between the indifferent act of crucifixion by a soldier, and the loving actions of those who loved Jesus, is the anguish of the Crucified, in the presence of His mother.
The centre panel has its own story, hinted in the detail. The extensive empty spaces surrounding Jesus, create a sense of stark contrast with the suffering Jesus. The flat, vacancy visually shouts a hard to grasp truth, that in the presence of such suffering every human word and artistic statement is silenced.
On one side, Jesus' mother stands, unable to help. Her presence is one of impotent love and infinite tenderness, physically helpless yet powerfully present. On the other side, beneath Jesus elbow, the outer edge of one of the other crosses, a reminder that Jesus is just one of three executed that day, and one of countless thousands in the history of Roman Imperial power and administration.
On the ground, the only other telling detail, a small pile of refuse, mere rubbish. Calvary was a dump, a place where worthless detritus was disposed of, and thrown away.
In the triptych, the crucified Christ stands between two panels, we could call them Cruelty and Love. In the central panel Christ stands between the determined love of the mother who gave him life, and that small pile of worthlessness which is a world broken, futureless and worthless.
Except, it is not so!
"For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life." "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting humanity's sins against them."
The Christian gazes on the cross with a hushed and grateful joy, with the quickened heart of the penitent and with the awakened wonder of the forgiven. Forsyth likewise for all his theological writing, acknowledged again and again: "It is beyond all thought, beyond poetry...God himself in that mighty joy, refrains from words."
Three panels. The first, sin in all its banality and brutality, the third, love that stays and will not go away. And in the centre, Jesus. Yes, it's all beyond words, beyond poetry. Though George Herbert, perhaps comes closest to stating the real mystery of Good Friday:
Philosophers have measur’d mountains,
Fathom'd the depths of seas, of states, and kings,
Walk’d with a staffe to heav’n, and traced fountains:
But there are two vast, spacious things,
The which to measure it doth more behove:
Yet few there are that sound them; Sinne and Love.
Wonderful art as they are, and profound the theology they convey, but these three Stations of the Cross, like every other art form and literary effort, ultimately fall short of our human capacity to explain. But then, they join every other human attempt to describe the love of God in Christ. How could it be otherwise when, "In vain the first-born seraph tries, to sound the depths of Love Divine."
Comments