Luke
9:28-36
One of my favorite professors in
college was Dr. Gerald Fitzgerald, who introduced himself to his freshman
classes, “I’m a poet who teaches to support my habit.” He had the thickest South Boston accent I’ve
ever heard, which I won’t try to reproduce, but after he introduced himself, he
asked us, “Why is there poetry?” to which, of course, everyone responded with
blank stares and a feeling that we might have signed up for a required course
with a lunatic. After a few seconds of
silence, he said, “Okay, then. How many
days are there in April?”
Now, I know you’re doing what we
did. You’re saying to yourself, “Thirty
days hath September, April, June, and November.” Poetry is one of the ways we remember. Dr. Fitzgerald went on from there to say that
poetry is also one of the ways we teach and learn, not only about set facts but
also about what it is to be a human being alive within the natural world and
living among other human beings and with questions about what other world may
lie beyond this one.
Psychology, anthropology, sociology,
biology, even theology are all mind-centered and rational ways of doing the
same thing, but the arts are not just helpful, but even necessary for real
discussion and learning among people who are thinkers, but more than
thinkers. We respond to ideas and
thought, but we even talk about mathematical theories as “beautiful” or “elegant”,
and those things move us and speak to us on a deeper level than we often
express.
In practical terms, some people
learn through the sciences and some through the arts. Some people learn visually and some learn by
hearing; some learn by reading and some learn by moving.
There have been times when
Christianity has almost lost that awareness.
We grew out of Judaism, with its strong opposition to idolatry.
“You
shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in
heaven above or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the
earth. You shall not bow down to them or
worship them…” [Exodus 20:4-5a]
Familiar? I hope so.
At the same time, the tabernacle that Moses was commanded to construct
and the Temple that later took its place were decorated with carvings of
animals and embroidered hangings, so it isn’t all art that is banished. At the Transfiguration, when Moses and Elijah
appeared in conversation with Jesus, Peter’s impulse as a witness of that
moment of pure glory was to offer to build three dwellings or tents or
tabernacles (all possible translations of one word) to commemorate what had happened.
[Luke 9:33] Jesus turned it down, but
the impulse to build a monument, to create, in response to this indescribable
sight, was Peter’s very human thought.
We face the need to see art for what
it is, not worshiping it or making it an idol, but as a tool for communicating
the awareness of a creative and redemptive God who does not disdain nor
undervalue the material world or the people who live in it.
Yet, humans being humans, we do tend
to worship our own creations. At one
point in Church history, there were a group of people who looked at the way
images of Jesus and of God’s holy people were being treated and said, “Wait a
minute. This is going too far.” A lot of people who had formerly been pagan
still had superstitious ideas about statues and pictures and didn’t always distinguish
clearly between the person pictured and the picture itself. In Constantinople, there riots between “iconoclasts”,
who favored banning images and sometimes took matters into their own hands, and
“iconodules”, who insisted that they venerated images without worshiping
them. The battles went back and forth for
over a century from 726-842. Eventually,
they settled on a compromise that you can still see in Orthodox icons, where
they agreed not to produce three-dimensional statues, to avoid strictly
realistic portrayals in favor of stylized figures, and to put them on gold backgrounds
to symbolize that these icons are glimpses into heaven, not objects of power
here on earth divorced from God’s Holy Spirit.
The Italians perched across the
water from Greece looked at this stuff and said, “Wait a minute.” They didn’t have the same lofty, philosophical
approach to art. For them, as for much
of Western Europe then and for the next few centuries, it was a way of teaching
people who could not read and letting them get at least a small hint about the
contents of the Bible. They didn’t sign
onto the program that Eastern Christianity adopted at that point.
Now,
that isn’t to say that Western Christianity hasn’t had its own excesses of
devotion to statues from time to time, and its own arguments about what to do
when images threaten to become idols. On
the whole, though, the tradition established by Italian painters of the Middle
Ages and those who followed them over the centuries kept the visual arts alive
as a means of teaching people about Jesus in a way that says he’s not just as a
face staring down from above, but he is the living embodiment of God in human
form.
People like Giotto and Filippo Lippi
and Cimabue (don’t worry – there won’t be a test) began to experiment with
drawing and painting scenes from the life of Christ in realistic ways, setting
them in Italian towns and with people wearing the clothing of their own
day. By painting Bible scenes that way,
they were saying, “Don’t try to box Jesus in.” They set an example of how to use artwork and
everything else, for that matter, to set the gospel free in the world. They pointed to the Transfiguration of Jesus,
when the glory of God that lived within him burst out in a miraculous way
because it is so wonderful that it just cannot be contained.
“And
while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes
became dazzling white.”
[Luke 9:2]
Jesus,
for them, and for us, cannot be just an image even though we have an image of
him in our minds sometimes or a set idea about him, when instead we are faced
with a living Savior and the voice of God himself saying,
“This
is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” [Luke 9:35]
Listen
to him, because he has good news. The
kingdom of God is at hand, and he brings it to all of us, here and now.
“And
the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory
as of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth.”
[John 1:14]
