Let's Wait and See.
CIA 2018 Lent Lectures 4
Waiting in the Silence. Seeing the Passion of Christ
We have now entered Holy Week and our journey to Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday draws us along the road of waiting. We have already considered how we draw near to God and encounter his presence; discover through prayerful attention how to engage with contemplative prayer — something akin to paying close and sustained attention to a great work of art like Pierodella Francesca's The Baptism of Christ; and how this encounter is the work of the Spirit in continual conversion to Christ. Now, in this final Lecture we shall look at the place of silence within a Rule of Life. Silence is the condition at the heart of the Passion narrative — after confusions and tumult of Gethsemane and the trials, after the grief of the Good Friday cross and the entombment, and before the joy of the empty tomb and the risen Christ, we have 36 hours of silence and waiting — from the beginning of the Sabbath of Good Friday until the dawn of hope at sunrise on the first day of the week, we have what the church calls Holy Saturday.
"Holy" Saturday is anything but in our commercialized Easter, just as Christmas loses its wonder in the din of the market. It is the day we buy the leg of lamb for the Easter lunch, the last few Easter eggs for the children and grandchildren and pay the obligatory visit to the Garden Centre! A kind of breather between Good Friday and Easter Sunday for ministers to write their sermons, and the rest of us enjoy a Saturday in the Bank Holiday weekend.
But Easter Saturday is the great day of silence in the Christian year.....a day not to be entirely frittered away in the ordinary, but to remember that in the midst of the Easter story is waiting. True, the New Testament gives us some glimpse that perhaps all was not mere silence and death in God between the death and resurrection, with mysterious words about Christ preaching to those spirits in prison (1 Peter 3:18–20). But while this has sometimes been associated with the interlude between Friday evening and Sunday morning, there is little in Scripture that points assuredly to this, and since by definition, this is 'out of time', then it makes little sense to say that this descent into hell was restricted to Holy Saturday. Indeed, some, like Luther, have argued that far from being a moment of premature triumph, prefiguring the resurrection, the descent into hell — which the creeds affirm, albeit as a somewhat late addition[1] — was the experience of fullest degradation, fully in the hands of the devil, death, sin and hell and under the wrath of God's judgment upon sin. As early as Melanchthon, Luther's followers began to interpret the descent into hell in terms of Christ's exaltation and triumph and set the church on the path of the triumphal account. Such is our desire to avoid all that the cross most profoundly proclaims, it is understandable how quickly we seek the avert the deepest horrors of the death of Jesus. To put it another way, we would sooner read Jesus's final words "it is finished!' (John 19:30) in a triumphant way, than Mark's "eloi, eloi, lemasabachthani", "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Mark 15:34). But both are true — the opening words of Psalm 22 which Jesus quotes in his native Aramaic might be followed later in that Psalm by the confident trust the sufferer expresses in the God who would save him, but at their vocalisation on the cross in Jesus' dying moments, Jesus is Godforsaken. John's tetalestai,— "it is finished"—is ambiguous. Yes, it could be read as a triumphant, 'death itself is finished!', but perhaps a more realistic psychological reading is the despairing cry "it's over."Jesus knows he will be resurrected, but part of his utter identification with sinful humanity is the despair of separation and the loss of life itself.
What is certain is that those who were present at the foot of the cross, and those who had fled in terror on that day of crucifixion, had no idea that Easter Sunday would re-write not just this story but history itself.
"Far from being the first day [of a three-day happening] the day of the cross is, in the logic of the narrative itself, actually the last day, the end of the story of Jesus. And the day that follows is not an in-between day which simply waits for the morrow, but it is an empty void, a nothing, shapeless, meaningless and anticlimactic: simply the day after the end. There is no remarkable tomorrow on the horizon to give that Sabbath special identity and form as the day before the Day of Resurrection. These were anonymous, indefinite hours, filled with memories and assessments of what was finished and past; and there was no reason to imagine that an imminent triumph might render those judgments premature and incomplete."[2]
While we cannot un-remember Easter's triumph, we can wait in silence with the utter hopelessness of death and hell that is both Jesus' experience, and his disciples', aware that it is also familiar to countless others in the depths of depression or oppression. To move too swiftly to Easter is the equivalent of moving too quickly through Advent to arrive prematurely at Christmas (often four weeks early!), and thus to avoid the pain and take the spiritual analgesic of Christmas joy and Easter rejoicing at all costs. We do the same with our physical death and suffering, fantasizing that there is some treatment or cure that removes all pain from life and death, and some psychological remedy for grief. But Holy Saturday reminds us that this is fantasy — a peculiar 21st century one, at that.
So, to look at the pictures. The one I want to focus upon first is a late picture by Andrea Mantegna (1431– 1506) — his The Dead Christ. A little while after the death of Mantegna, on the 2nd October 1506, his son, Ludovic, informed Mantegna's patron, Francesco Gonzaga, that he had found in his father's studio a painting of the dead Christ. It was the final part of the commission for the apartments of the wife of Federico II Gonzaga. It can be found today in the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan.
It shows in uncompromising detail the body of a man in his physical prime, muscular, but with the pallor of death. Square-shaped wounds are visible in his hands and feet, and the glimpse of a longer wound underneath his right breast muscles. His legs and loins are covered with a shroud, loosely folded over them. It is the angle that is astonishing, as if one were looking from a praying position — like the three other figures to the left of Christ — weeping with them as we position ourselves at his life-less feet.Famed in the 16th century for its virtuosity in perspective, it gives visual expression to the finality of death in a previously unknown manner
Hans Holbein the Younger painted the same scene, but from an angle turned through ninety degrees so that we are looking from the side. His dead Christ is more emaciated from the suffering and deprivations.
An earlier depiction of the deposition of Christ by Giotto (ca. 1303 – 6) a fresco from the Arena Chapel, Padua, begins the journey to this truly psychological depiction of human suffering.The figures seem monumental, with Mary, his mother, clasping the dead body to her, while Mary Magdalene holds his feet. St John makes a gesture of grief and despair, while Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus stand solemnly by to the right of the painting. To the left, the other women who had stayed near the cross, wail and lament. Even the angels above grieve as they swoop over the earth. Compare this to the later, but still Gothic, Pieta by the unnamed 'Master of the Avignon Pieta', where the figures, while still depicting grief, are situated against the usual flat golden background of the Early Gothic. Jesus' body is strewn with stripes from the flagellation, and the three figures are John and the two Marys. This scene is not meant to be naturalistic so much as an event in the meditations of the man praying in the left-hand side.
The same scene painted by Rogier van der Weyden (1399 – 1464) in ca. 1435, utilises all the colour and power of the newly invented oil painting. He had a large studio, and his fame and art spread throughout Europe from its base in the court of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy. This is his greatest work, and one of the truly great paintings in all of Western art. Rather than figures in a landscape, these mourners are like people in a tableau, all on the same stage surrounding a cross that is almost another altar niche against the wall of the church in Louvain for which it was painted[3](rather than the imagined golden backcloth of the later — but stylistically earlier — Avignon pieta.) Mary's collapse in grief mirrors the limp body of Christ being brought to rest on the ground by two figures dressed in Flemish contemporary dress — the bearded Nicodemus and the richly attired Joseph of Arimathea. With her heavy hips, she is dressed blue, with her gold-edged cloak fallen from her. Her face is white with shock — indeed, it seems paler than that of her dead son. John,in red, is on the left, reaching to hold the emotionally dead Mary, and his grief is controlled and grave, while others assist in holding Mary, or weep openly. Mary Magdalene is at the feet end of the body, and seems abandoned to her grief, as she had been earlier abandoned to her love while she anointed Jesus feet while still alive. These two figures bracket the painting on both sides. Much of the emotional expression is revealed in the hands: Mary's as limp as her collapsed body, the Magdalene's writhing in grief, the mourner on the left holding a cloth to dry her tears, the open hand of the man holding a pot of embalming oil in his other, poised in blessing, and of course, the wounded hands of the Saviour.
Fra Angelico completed another deposition scene begun in 1432 – 34. This has a similar configuration of people, but it is much more formal, and still. It was originally in the Strozzi Chapel at Santa Trinita in Florence, but is now housed in the museum at San Marco.
Contrast this with one of Caravaggio's most spectacular paintings with its movement and dynamism.Painted in oil on canvas in 1602 – 3, it is now in the Vatican Museum, although originally it was in the Oratorian church in Rome, Santa Maria in Vallicella. It was paid for by GirolamoVittrice, and was associated with the populist, pauperist wing of the catholic Church — and Caravaggio reflects this in the figure of Nicodemus, with his simple brown robe and his bare feet. The dead weight of Jesus' muscular body (not the slim figure of Michelangelo's Pieta) is born by Nicodemus, who strains to bear the body, (look at that bulging vein on his ankle) assisted by John, whose grip on the torso opens the wound in his side. This is a real, heavy dead body. Mary is an aged woman, (not the young woman of Michelangelo) and behind her two other women, Mary the mother of Cleopas and the Magdalene (probably the one whose hands are raised in grief-filled prayer.) Rubens admired the painting and used some of its motifs in his own Entombment of 1613 – 15. The composition is a sort of fan opening up from the bottom right hand corner, crossed by a diagonal that runs from the bottom left hand to the top right. Nicodemus looks directly at us, while St John looks at Jesus' face. Remember how this would be above the altar and at the point of say 'This is my body given for you' by the priest, Nicodemus seems to say, "yes, and this is what it looks like — no idealised semi-god, but a real man who is a dead weight, going, so far as the figures in the picture believe, to his final resting place below." But that great rectangular grave slab reminds us that this is also the Cornerstone whom the world rejected, but which would become the foundation of faith and the church.
Sandro Botticelli also injected a sense of dynamic movement in his Lamentation over the Dead Christ of 1490 – 92, painted in tempera on a panel, and now in the AltePinakothek, Munich. This is a painting under the influence of Savonarola's fervent preaching, culminating in the bonfires of the vanities, replacing his earlier allegorical themes so beloved of the Medici court. The figures surrounding Christ are both familiar to us by now — Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary Magdalene and St John the Evangelist, to which Botticelli has added, somewhat incongruously, St Jerome and St Paul.
The final painting is one we have seen in a previous lecture. JacoboPontormo is most associated with that movement called Mannerism, or 'the style', which Caravaggio reacted so strongly against. But Pontormo,(1494 – 1556) in this painting at least, is one of the greatest Renaissance painters. This weirdly coloured painting tears up all those careful products of the Italian Renaissance, like perspective, in one highly emotive and spiritualised work of anxiety and grief. Pontormo himself (described by that first art historian, Vasari, as an eccentric and melancholic) places himself in the picture — he is the figure in the far right. He owes a great deal to Michelangelo's work, not least his Pieta sculpture with its highly burnished marble and beauty itself, in the face of the Virgin, looking down upon her dead son (although she has kept her looks in such an astonishing way as to appear younger than he). This is Pontormo's masterpiece, painted for the Capponi Chapel of Santa Felicita, Florence in ca. 1527 – 8. It is said that for three years he allowed no one else to enter the chapel while he worked on this painting, and its result is otherworldly, lit by some light that shines from almost every direction. Andrew Graham-Dixon notes how this work was produced after the sack of Rome, and when Florence was going through one of its periodic political convulsions, and that uncertainty is here visibly expressed in this painting of separation. The sense of whirling movement derived from the pink shapes of robes and flesh — all circularity — echo the political turmoil, and Pontormo's religious sensibility. The Virgin, upon whose lap Michelangelo placed the body of Jesus, is now empty. This is a painting of separation and anxiety. His body seems weightless, while the Virgin levitates, and the heightened colours — steel blue, rose red, lemon yellow and acid green lend the painting a strangely eerie quality (the colours could be found on any Farrow and Ball colourchart!) At 'the widowed centre' [4]of the painting — the Virgin's lap — is the emotional center of the work, "the physical root of her wrenching sorrow."[5] In his place we see the Magdalene's hand, grasping a piece of cloth, as if wiping the face that has now been moved, while Mary's own hand reaches out in a vain attempt to hold on still to the son who is leaving her. This poignant moment of deepest sorrow and regret is echoed throughout the painting, with its sorrowful eyes, none of which seem to look in the same direction — as if the painting is about to explode in such overwhelming grief that nothing will be left.
In all of these depictions of the dead Christ — being taken down from the cross, or entombed — there seems not to be a single word spoken. All is silence, but for the sound of weeping.
Silence expresses the humility that acknowledges that my speech, my ideas, my power must become subject to God's, and so I keep silent to listen. Amongst the virtues of silence are the awareness of the sins of the tongue (contempt for others, domination, and malice), growth in the ability to listen deeply to others, as well as to our own inner world of the heart, an acknowledgement that at some point words fail in their adequacy (apophatic sense that words fail to do justice to the divine) and the ability to deepen concentration. In this context at the beginning of the Daily Office, as we become present to the God who hears our subsequent prayers, this enhancement of concentration and listening places the priority firmly with God. This is a quality most necessary in a world of noise — of traffic, of ubiquitous music (and 'musak'), and of speech that skitters across the surface of things and those screens that mediate reality to us.
Silence and stillness are part of our becoming present to God, as we saw in Lecture 1, where we postponed this aspect until now.
Stillness is associated with this, and the importance of bodily posture in preparation for prayer is well documented. Accompanied by a slowing of breathing, and a posture that is the opposite of frantic activity, this attention to our own body in stillness, as well as a deliberate avoidance of unnecessary noise, is more than a psychological trick. It is a signumof the God who precedes me, who is present before I am attentive, and before whom therefore, silence and stillness is appropriate worship.