For this joyful day of celebration, we feature a contemporary Easter poem by ESN author and scholar of early modern literature David Parry. We’re honored to be the first publication to share it. [Read more…] about A New Easter Poem
Lent 2017
Good Friday: Jesus Dies on the Cross
Luke 23:44-46
By this time it was noon, and darkness fell across the whole land until three o’clock. The light from the sun was gone. And suddenly, the curtain in the sanctuary of the Temple was torn down the middle. Then Jesus shouted, “Father, I entrust my spirit into your hands!†And with those words he breathed his last.
Something is different. You had expected to hang around Golgotha for most of the day as Jesus endured a slow, painful death. Then, as soon as you settle in for the long hours ahead, the sky grows black. Then Jesus yells out and lets go of life. Not in weak despair, but crying in trust to his Father. A wall has been broken. Death doesn’t seem to be the victor at this cross, though Jesus’ body is lifeless.
He did not grasp to hold life together. Jesus left any despair back in the garden where we began. Later you hear that the temple veil had been torn in two at the time of his death. Something is indeed different. Your assumptions about life and death have been upended and you don’t know why.
Sitting in a Good Friday service at the cathedral, I’m trying to hold it together. Rejected in a relationship. Uncertain about my job. Lost. If I can just hold on and put back together what is ripped apart all will be okay. I bargain with God to let everything return to the way it was. Years later I’m back at the cathedral, bargaining about my parents’ health. Not merely praying for their healing from cancer, but also begging that my life would stay together so that I can remain in my comfortable life.
Yet, my selfish cries are not what I need. I need to be torn. To give up. To have the veil torn inside of me so that I can be open to God.
How many times do we use all of our energy holding together the dying pieces of our lives? The campus is full of people grasping an image for fear that without it they will be nothing: scholars, athletes, activists, performers. What if after all their work they don’t receive a degree or the tenure track position they’ve spent the last three years working on? Another way is unfathomable so they do everything they can to pull the pieces together even though the end is inevitable.
At times, giving up is what we need to do. Accept the tears in our lives so that we can gain life.
In the twelfth chapter of John’s gospel we struggle to really hear Jesus’ teaching: “Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.†So often we want to stay in the kernel that we know.
However, there is peace in giving up that which is dying in our lives. In the stillness of Jesus’ death, even in the uncertainty, a new peace was invading the world. A peace in which we don’t have to hold on to ephemeral hopes, but can entrust our lives to our steadfast and faithful Father. Though we may have to wait for the next thing, we wait with hope because darkness descended on Golgotha that afternoon.
Where are you torn today and need to hear Jesus’ cry of hope?
Jesus, help us walk in your steps.
Image credit: JESUS MAFA. The Crucifixion; Jesus dies on the cross, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. http://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=48390 [retrieved March 31, 2017].
Making the Second City Church Lenten Cross
Sculptor and art professor Theodore Prescott describes a collaborative Lenten project he led for a congregation in the city of Harrisburg, PA. We hope it provides rich reflection for readers as Holy Week begins. The project will also be featured in the forthcoming InterVarsity Press book Contemporary Art and the Church: A Conversation Between Two Worlds.Â
I professed faith in Christ in 1970, right as I was completing my M.F.A. in sculpture. I was living in Baltimore, where I studied at the Rinehart School of Sculpture, Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). The results of my conversion were mixed. My behavior certainly changed in some positive ways, but artistically I was stymied. I could not find any contemporary role models. The friends I told about my profession generally expressed incredulity, and a few responded with some eye rolling. I asked the director of Rinehart if he knew of any Christians at MICA. He thought a bit, and then said that there might be one in the Art Education program. Since I was looking for “artists”, not educators, I never followed up on that, which is a little ironic in light of my subsequent career. Finally, through a college friend, I learned of an artist who was a Christian studying in Philadelphia, and drove up to meet him. All of this illustrates how the terrain between contemporary art and the Christian faith seemed like a vast unmapped wilderness for me.Â
After a few years of seeking to understand the relationship between faith and art intellectually—during which time I was not making things—I began to produce sculpture again. I have never considered myself a “Christian artist” in the sense of always using discernibly Christian imagery to inform an audience about the faith. But the Christian faith offers the artist a treasure house of imagery and ideas to work with, so relatively early on I chose to make some crosses. My choice was partly because the cross was—and still is—such a cultural cliché, and therefore almost invisible. Someone should write a book about how a symbol with almost infinite richness and depth devolved into a cultural cipher. Walker Percy noted a parallel phenomenon with Christian words, writing that “the old words of grace are worn smooth as poker chips.” So I set out to make crosses that drew on the language and imagery of contemporary art, with the goal of gaining some artistic insight. Most of the crosses I’ve sold have ended up in art collections, not in churches. The Second City Lenten Cross is an exception.Â
Second City Church is an old church, located in the small, struggling city of Harrisburg PA. Its origins stretch back to the 19th century, but its current character was formed by the union of a youngish homeless PCA congregation with an oldish UCC congregation that had a church building. The pastor, Peter Rowan learned of a cross I had made in 1996, All My Sins, and thought it might be the basis for a congregational meditation during Lent. For that cross I began by writing down all of the personal sins of “thought, word and deed” that I could remember. That took me about a month. While it wasn’t an exhaustive list, it was long enough and dark enough to be thoroughly depressing. By the end of that month I understood viscerally C. S. Lewis’s description of his feelings while writing Screwtape. I then transcribed that list to sheets of a very heavy and durable art paper, writing with a thick permanent ink marker. After finishing, I quickly chopped the papers into many tiny bits lest they be read by someone.Â
During that time of remembering I was also making molds for four forms that could be assembled into a cruciform image. I had engaged a glass artist to work with me, and when the molds were completed we met at a glass studio, and she blew hollow glass forms into the molds. I then quickly poured my confetti-like paper bits into each glass form. Glass is blown at about 2000 degrees F, so the paper ignited immediately. Once all the paper was inside, the forms were slumped shut and annealed, during which time the remaining burning paper blackened much of the interior of the glass forms. Â
Materials (or substances) and processes are two preoccupations or interests for many contemporary artists. For me, both carry poetic resonances that are rich with potential faith associations. Here, a fiery consumption of my transgressions—“the handwriting of ordinances against us” (Col. 2:14)—through the process of making that cruciform image seemed to speak of Christ’s work in a fresh way. But I was surprised by the resemblance of the finished cross to medieval reliquaries, which connected it to historic Christian imagery and practice.Â
Peter Rowan believed that seeing and helping to make a cross like All My Sins might provide the church with a unique way to meditate on the meaning of Lent, so he asked me to create a cross for the congregation that would coincide with a series of sermons during Lent (2016) based on “The Seven Deadly Sins”. The resulting cross would be filled with the congregation’s written sins, and be placed in the church upon its completion. Neither of us was sure of what to expect. Participation was voluntary. After explaining to the congregation how I made the 1996 cross, we gave out heavy art paper, and permanent markers. About three weeks later we set up some paper shredders in the church social hall, and after the service people shredded their written sins. A few people expressed concern about their paper’s privacy, and seemed relieved when they placed it in the maw of the shredder. I’d guess about 75 people participated.Â
Roughly 50 people signed up to attend the glass blowing, so that they could personally put their paper in the hot glass forms. They came to the glass studio in shifts. Some came as families, with parents and children participating together. The glass artist, Rafe Henin, was intrigued by the communal and participatory nature of the event. People stood watching the forms being made, asking questions, and chatting together until it was time to put their sins in a form. It took about 10 hours to complete all of the forms.
I had made the forms for the molds out of apple limbs that had been peeled and simplified. I arranged them to suggest a crucified figure. Doing this connected our sin with Christ’s body, or as I Peter 2:24 says, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree…” In her recent and widely praised The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ (Eerdmans, 2015) Fleming Rutledge argues against seeing the empty cross as the “real” meaning of our faith, as though the crucifixion was just an episode on the way to the glory of the resurrection that empty crosses are meant to signify. She ends her chapter “The Primacy of the Cross” with this summary: “….the crucifixion is the touchstone of Christian authenticity, the unique feature by which everything else, including the resurrection, is given its true significance.”Â
It took several months before I had completed fitting and anchoring the glass forms into a panel that was painted with an intense red. After framing we installed it in the church social hall. Having looked at it there for about 6 months now, I can see that its imagery inhabits that ambiguous space between a cross and a crucifix that I aimed for. It can be “read” either way. Artistically it is definitely a child of this moment, with a pathetic affect to its demeanor. As a cross it is wobbly and inexact, looking back to primitive representations of the cross. As a crucifix it lacks the nobility and classicism of so many Renaissance depictions of the crucifixion, or the expressive anguish of many medieval and modern ones. Is pathos the right “tone” for the cross?Â
I can’t answer that. The cross is too deep and multivalent to have just one “true” aesthetic sensibility. But, I have been struck by the Second City Lenten Cross’s unintended resonance with one of Fleming Rutledge’s major concerns. She argues persuasively that we—especially in the American church—have lost sight of the “scandal” of the cross, in which there is no beauty, no naturally attractive religious message to help us improve ourselves. That seems about right for a cross that is literally full of the dead sins of people in Second City Church.Â
Images courtesy of Theodore Prescott
The Perfection of our Praise: Reclaiming our Inner Folly on Palm Sunday (Scholar’s Compass)
For this Palm Sunday, ESN author and classical college professor Brandon Spun offers a meditation in the tradition of Erasmus’s Praise of Folly or G. K. Chesterton’s meditations on the lightheartedness of the saints (See Orthodoxy, “The Eternal Revolution,” 5 paragraphs from the end of chapter). May it increase your joy in celebrating Christ our King!
Scripture
He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.†(Luke 19:40, ESV)
Reflection
Palm Sunday clarifies the purpose of Lent. It reminds us that our repentance is ordered toward a God who uses the foolish and weak things of this word to confound it. Viewed through Palm Sunday, Lent serves as preparation for an encounter with folly.
It may be helpful then to explore the meaning of folly. My students will tell you that I am indeed the man for this job!
There are two sorts of fools. One is consumed by a superficial gravity. He may or may not bear signs of worldly success, but he has bought into the urgency of his life and his work. In the slow process of dying, he is the man of whom Sir Walter Scott speaks in the Lay of the last Minstrel:
For him no Minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonor’d, and unsung.[i]
How often do we in the academy find ourselves caught up in just this sort of folly? How often in our own lives does the impersonal seem to triumph over love? The seriousness of worldly affairs threatens to obscure, even to extinguish the unique character of Christian life. If the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? (Matt 5:13)
Yet, there is another sort of fool who is of the Shakespearian spirit. This fool is alive to and in love with life, playful, yet not averse to gravity. It is this fool which Lent seeks to reclaim in us because it is he who knows how to celebrate the triumphal entry of Christ on Palm Sunday.
Though the cares of the world crowd about him, such a fool will, now and again, sweep them aside to attend to his true business of love and worship. In him, a sacred center yet stands.
The fool for Christ can celebrate because his existential center of gravity is no longer fixed in this world. It has been secreted off to a far country, in which Love alone is Lord.
Remembering the Right sort of Folly
Without the right sort of folly, every task we set our hand to becomes an exercise in a secondary and damning righteousness, one which ever falls short of mercy and compassion (Matt 5:20; Luke 6:38). Worldly gravity, of necessity, attends to the business of life having forgotten the one thing needful (Luke 10:42; Matt. 9:13; 1 Cor 13).
This is why the specific Christian character of Lent is so important. When repentance aims only at moral purity, when repentance seeks to earn forgiveness, or worse to place one beyond the need for it, Lent becomes a journey deeper into the self, rather than a journey unto God.
Palm Sunday reminds us that we have not yet arrived at a true Christian conception of righteousness until there is something in it which possess the folly of love (Matt 5:20, 6:16; Luke 6:27-38; John 3:16, 2 Sam. 6:14). It reminds us that we repent not unto forgiveness, but in light of it.
The practices of Lent are geared toward something much bigger than the gravity of ethical praxis. Indeed, Lent is often a good time to repent of our narrow religion of the self.
Palm Sunday helps us remember that all ethics, all projects, all renewal, if it is truly Christian is marked preeminently by the personal, by the presence of love which now and forevermore bears a human face.
This human face was seen to enter Jerusalem upon a donkey. The King of Kings presented himself as something not unlike the King of Fools. He claims a place in our hearts in no very different manner.
When he makes a heart his throne, he does so by fashioning for himself a seat proper to indomitable love. What kind of seat do you imagine this might be? What might Palm Sunday suggest?
Palm Sunday reminds us that the real business of man is not accomplished by fixing stern faces or laying up heavy burdens, but in crying out with raised hands, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!†“Hosanna in the highest!†(Matt 21:9)
We are meant to discover at the end of Lent, not the strong man of God, but a face which shines with a welcome we have longed for, a face of one who was and is strong in love alone. Paradoxically, we discover in that face, in the welcome of God, something even more terrible than the cross. We discover a love which would cause even the stones to cry out.
It is only in light of such love that our lives come to possess some share in that righteousness which exceeds that of the Pharisees. Only then do we begin to attain to the freedom and folly of divine love.
Questions
- How is the folly of praise connected to Lenten repentance?
- Who or what situation in your life could use the presence of foolish love?
- If we bear his yolk, what sort of beasts of burden are we?
- Can you think of fools in history or literature who might be signs of the Kingdom?
Prayer
Praise him sun and moon; praise him heights and depths; praise him foolish academics; praise him busy students; praise him all ye burdened by the seriousness of the world. Though we be hypocritical, O Lord, we trust that you shall accept and perfect our praise. Teach us again to love your love and to spend ourselves in knowing and sharing that love.
This Palm Sunday and Easter, may we find that you have vouchsafed for us a spirit of joy and praise, and in light of this mysterious gift, may we worship you, our forerunner, our Author, our finisher, our King.
Notes
[i] “The Lay of the Last Minstrel.” Poets’ Corner – Sir Walter Scott – The Lay of the Last Minstrel – Canto VI. Accessed March 07, 2017. http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/canto06.html
Image credit: Entry into Jerusalem, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. http://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=55433 [retrieved April 8, 2017]. Original source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Entry_into_Jerusalem_-_Google_Art_Project_(6834070).jpg.
Fifth Sunday of Lent: Jesus Speaks to His Mother and the Disciple
During Lent, ESN writer and InterVarsity graduate/faculty staff member Jamie Noyd shares her reflections. She invites us to meditate with her on six of the stations of the cross on which Christians have reflected over the centuries. See the post for the first Sunday of Lent here, the Second Sunday of Lent here, the third Sunday of Lent here, and the fourth Sunday of Lent here. You can explore Jamie’s other work for ESN, on the book of Ruth and the idea of pilgrimage, here.
John 19:25-27
Standing near the cross were Jesus’ mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary (the wife of Clopas), and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother standing there beside the disciple he loved, he said to her, “Dear woman, here is your son.†And he said to this disciple, “Here is your mother.†And from then on this disciple took her into his home.
Looking on the scene of the crucifixion is painful. Roman guards drive nails through Jesus’ flesh and his body writhes in pain. You hold your breath while they raise the cross with Jesus pinned to it. As you let it out, you step away from your watch and walk around. In the midst of imminent death, the taunts of the guards and the crowd continue. Life goes on here outside of Jerusalem’s walls as people travel through.
Making your way back to Jesus’ cross, you encounter an unexpected moment. Instead of a man fighting to stay alive or just giving up, you see one compassionately speaking with his mother. Jesus is more concerned about caring for his mother’s future by setting her up with a protector, his disciple John, than any anguish he is going through. “Dear woman†he calls her as he brings together disciple and mother into a new family. Neither would be forgotten.
In the university—whether you are a student, professor, or staff—crises seem to arise each day.
- Department budgets need to be cut and staff let go
- A rewrite of a journal article is due by the end of the day—after teaching 3 classes
- Missing financial aid payments have to be tracked down or else you can’t register for next semester
Our knee-jerk reaction in these moments can be to shut out everything else until we address the crisis. That student standing outside the door or call from a friend will just have to wait for another day.
Yet, paradoxically, when I focus on my needs, they seem to never be met—and they continue to grow. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal  reports how studies have shown that giving away time to others actually makes us feel less, not more, stressed. The self-focused perspective that besieges us in such situations is usually the opposite of what would benefit us most.
Though we may want to follow these words, it’s not easy. Fortunately, the shadow of the cross draws us into new ways of prioritizing life and relationships as we look beyond ourselves to the needs of others. I’ve had students tell me how when they have a deadline to meet and a friend contacts them with a need, they often find time to both help the friend and finish the work.
During these times we can take ourselves back to the cross and watch.
The shadow of the cross looms over a mother and a friend.
Breathing becomes labored for the crucified and for the ones he loves.
Through these breaths, come words of compassion.
Take care. Build a new family. Trust.
Centered on Jesus, we can build a community of care around us as we reach out and invite others in, even in the midst of pain.
In your schedule today, where can you touch someone else in need? Who can you invite into Jesus’ family?
Jesus, help us walk in your steps.
Image credit: Giotto, 1266?-1337. Crucifixion, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. http://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=48740 [retrieved March 27, 2017]. Original source: http://www.yorckproject.de. |