In
following the calendar of the church year, we always observe the Sunday
preceding Lent as Transfiguration Sunday, and we read a gospel account of Jesus
ascending a mountain with his apostles Peter, James, and John.
There, in a vision, the apostles behold a radical transformation in
Jesus’s appearance, and they see and hear him discussing with the ancient
prophets Moses and Elijah his impending death and resurrection.
Luke’s
presentation of this scene serves to warn us that whatever our initial visual
image of Jesus may be, we should not stand pat with that image, however powerful
or persuasive it seems. Rather, if
we are to begin to encompass the depth and complexity of the meaning of
Jesus’s life and death and resurrection for the world, we must be prepared to
re-imagine Jesus far beyond his literal historical form as a first-century
Palestinian Jewish male.
Fortunately
for us and our imaginations, authors and artists have been re-imagining and
transfiguring the image of the historical Jesus ever since that was first done
by the gospel writers themselves. And
this morning I want to share with you a sampling of the transfigurations of
Jesus found in various works of art. Alas
I have to share them with you in black and white and not in their original
color. (Kinko's charges $1.29 a page.) I invite you to turn now to your packet of photocopies.
The
first image there is Christ Pantocrator,
Christ the Creator of All, a magnificent icon dating to the 6th century. First, Jesus’s face has been transfigured from that of a
Jew into that of a Greek. Then a
supra-human quality has been suggested by encircling his head with a gleaming
gold halo, symbolic of his divine, pre-existent glory as the Logos, that is, as the Word, who has brought everything into being.
Jesus’s identity as “the Word who creates all” is further
symbolized by the gold-and-jewel-covered, hand-written copy of the New
Testament—the Word of God—that he holds in his left arm.
On
your second page of reproductions, this iconic tradition, typical of the Eastern
Christian churches, is continued in an 18th-century transfiguration of Jesus into
Christ Enthroned, the King of Kings and Lord of the Universe.
In
both of these first two re-imaginings of the historical Jesus, the artists have
sought to convey a transcendent, divine nature. They have sought to convey to the viewer that Jesus is much
more than a first-century Jewish rabbi, that Jesus is also, in truth, the divine
creator and ruler of the cosmos.
Your
third reproduction is a copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s fresco The Last Supper, which he completed in Milan in the year 1498.
Here Leonardo continues an artistic tradition of transfiguring Jesus into
a European who sits at a European table in a European room with a European
landscape visible outside, through the windows—even as Leonardo dresses Jesus
and his apostles in what is meant to pass for “biblical” garb.
Leonardo
painted in the full bloom of Renaissance humanism. So he presents Jesus not, as in the icons we’ve just seen,
as a divine figure, but rather as a man who has just startled other men by
saying to them, “One of you will betray me.”
(Judas is the one sitting the third on Jesus’s right, our left.)
Now, the point of Leonardo’s representing Jesus in such a humanistic,
Eurocentric fashion was to encourage his European viewers to discover their own
place in this scene, and to have their own reaction to Jesus’s announcement of
betrayal.
In
the fourth reproduction in your set, we see the same event in Jesus’s life
portrayed less than a century later by a German Lutheran artist, Lucas Cranach
the Younger. Cranach dispenses with
Leonardo’s pretense at biblical dress and represents Jesus and his disciples
as good German burghers. What’s
more on the left side of the painting, we find two disciples who’re given the
faces of leaders of the German Reformation, Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon.
The man kneeling in the left foreground is Cranach’s deceased patron,
Prince Joachim of Anhalt. Cranach means to convey that Jesus invites to his table
peoples of times and places vastly different from Jesus’s own time and place.
Now,
European artists aren’t the only ones who’ve transfigured Jesus into a
person of their own race and ethnicity, in order to better identify with him.
In your fifth picture we come to a 20th-century Chinese artist, Johnny
Shek, and to his representation of Jesus commissioning his apostles to go forth
to make disciples of all nations and to baptize them in the name of the Triune
God. The landscape, dress, and
facial features of everyone in this scene are unmistakably Chinese. Thus does
Shek proclaim through his art that Jesus came for the whole world, including
Shek’s own people, the Chinese.
The
next painting, from East Africa, depicts Jesus’s triumphal entry into the city
of Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. Here,
the people, the landscape, and the village posing as Jerusalem are distinctly
African.
Next
come two representations of Jesus’s Last Supper that also transfigure Jesus
and his historical setting—in the first, Jesus is portrayed as a peasant
celebrating a feast in the village of Solentiname, Nicaragua; and in the second
he is drawn as a Native American hosting the meal in a teepee.
Now
let’s turn to some of the transfigurations of Jesus made in various artistic
representations of his crucifixion.
The
first image we come to is a sculpted wooden crucifix by the renowned Italian Renaissance artist Michelangelo.
Again, note the European features of Jesus, and Michelangelo’s
representation of Jesus’s crucified body as having none of the visible signs
of torture or agony. He portrays
Jesus as one who’s able to transcend all pain and suffering.
The historical Jesus was almost certainly crucified naked, as
Michelangelo accurately represents here. Most
Renaissance artists shied away from full nudity in this scene, providing Jesus
with a loin cloth, however wispy, but Michelangelo is here his usual bold self. Representations of a fully nude crucified Christ do, however,
become much more frequent during the 20th
century.
The
next three pieces of art represent even more dramatic transfigurations of
Jesus-crucified.
First,
in 1938, the Jewish artist Marc Chagall transfigures Jesus on the cross into the
embodiment of every suffering Jew in the world. Note that Jesus’s loin cloth is a traditional Jewish prayer
shawl and that the scenes surrounding him are of pogroms being carried out
against Jews in eastern Europe.
A
year later, in 1939, an African-American artist, W. H. Johnson, portrays the
scene of the crucifixion, with Jesus and the three Marys present at the
crucifixion all being drawn as black persons.
Johnson thereby inviting African-Americans to see in the scene a
representation of their own sufferings.
Both
Chagall and Johnson portray the crucifixion of Jesus as an event symbolizing the
suffering of their own people.
Next
we come to a Native American artist’s portrayal of the crucifixion, with Jesus
sculpted as a totem, as an emblem of the artist’s own ancestral family and
clan.
Images
of the crucifixion of Jesus have been visually linked by many artists to scenes
of the preceding night’s Last Supper. So
I next offer two examples of this linkage from 20th-century art, two Last Suppers: first, one by the Spanish-American artist Salvador
Dali, and second, one by the German artist Harald Duwe.
Neither
Dali nor Duwe was Christian in any usual sense of the term.
And Duwe’s painting is surely an example of art that’s intended to
shock people into asking questions rather than to inspire them to faith.
In
Dali’s Last Supper, the pointed
finger of a half bare-chested Jesus leads the eye upward to a fully bare-chested
figure whose arms are outstretched in a crucifixion pose, as if to say, “I,
the crucified Christ, am present at this table.”
In
the next picture, we move from Dali’s surrealistic style to Duwe’s realistic
style. Here we see twelve men
gathered around an empty chair, where in other paintings Jesus would have been
seated. Each of the twelve is
reacting to what they see on the table. One
of the twelve is a self-portrait of Duwe, the man standing in the middle with
jacket, sweater, and spoon. The
other eleven are portraits of real-life friends of his.
On the table we see not only bread and wine but also in a bowl the
severed head of the crucified Jesus and on metal dishes his dismembered heart,
hand and foot. Duwe seeks to shock
his audience into asking, “Do I really think the crucified Jesus is present at
this table?” And he expects our
answers to be as diverse as the expressions on the faces of the twelve men he
portrays.
I
close with two other representations from 20th-century
art, works that, like Duwe’s, are intended to provoke and shock viewers,
rather than to inspire them. Both
of these are photographs rather than paintings, and the second has been much in
the news of late!
The
first photograph, by Bettina Rheims and Serge Bramley, transfigures the Jesus of
the Last Supper into the modern image of a countercultural figure, replete with
the sneakers on his feet and his provocatively exposed chest.
The disciple whom I presume to be the Judas figure is the one standing to
Jesus’s left in the garb of a priest, the only establishment-type figure in
the photograph. The photo seems
meant to provoke viewers, including traditional Christians, into asking, “Is
Jesus today to be found inside the church or outside it?”
And
now we come at last to Yo Mama’s Last
Supper by Renee Cox, a photo in an exhibit of Black photographers at the
Brooklyn Museum, a photo that has been denounced by the Mayor and by many
Christians. The version of the
photo copied here is, alas, the edited one printed in the Daily News. We see
Jesus transfigured into a nude black woman, with arms outstretched, as in
crucifixion. The face and figure of
this woman are those of the artist herself.
Behind her is a gold-colored panel meant to play off of the artistic
treatment of Jesus that's found in art works like our first icon.
At her sides are twelve male disciples, eleven of whom are black.
Presumably the Judas figure is the white man immediately to her left.
As
we’ve seen today, there’s nothing new about depicting Jesus as a black
person—that’s been done for decades—or about depicting Jesus naked—even
Michelangelo did it! There’s also
nothing new about linking the scenes of the Last Supper and the Crucifixion, and
nothing new about using such a scene to shock an audience into asking questions
rather than to inspire them to faith.
What
does seem relatively new here is transfiguring Jesus into a woman—although you
may remember that the Cathedral of St. John the Divine a while back displayed a
figure of Christa. And what seems
to me quite new here is transfiguring Jesus into a black woman.
Cox is, of course, trying to provoke people into asking new questions and
thinking new thoughts, into asking, for example, whether the figure of a savior
transcends gender as well as race and ethnicity.
I
may not agree with the personal theology of artists like Duwe or Cox.
But I welcome their provocative challenge to established thinking.
And instead of taking offense at their work, what I owe them is my
thoughtful and creative response.
So
to Renee Cox I say: thank you for taking your place in a long line of artists
who have proclaimed that the transfigured Christ transcends race and ethnicity
and style of clothing; thank you for provoking us into acknowledging that the
transfigured Christ transcends gender as well; and thank you for provoking me, a
white man, into acknowledging that white men who claim to be followers of the
transfigured Christ have for far too long betrayed the image of God found in
women and in all persons of color.
Let
us pray:
O God, we
give You thanks for the help we receive from artists in transfiguring Jesus, so
that we can re-imagine Jesus in ways that transcend the human barriers of race
and gender. In the name of Christ,
we pray. Amen.
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