Facing the Agony of Christ
To contemplate the suffering of our Lord is to look deeply into the face of love.
A week or two ago, one of the pseudonymous priests of Twitter requested two gifts for his birthday: (1) Prayers and (2) Please post an image of your favorite work of religious art. Quite a few in my top-twenty were already up, and (unexpectedly, for I’m a fangirl) Caravaggio had nothing on offer that I could honestly say was my favorite. Then I remembered which one painting truly is my favorite work of religious art, and the story of why is worth sharing on Good Friday.
This is the Issenheim Altarpiece, on display at the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar, France. It’s a long story about how my teenage-self wound up face to face with this massive work of art, but I did.
For scale, here’s a snapshot of the Crucifixion side of the painting, from when I took my kids to see it in July 2017:
Of everything there is to visit on a once-in-a-lifetime epic vacation in France, this was one of the very first things I took the kids to see. In fairness, they like art. But this art was something I wanted to share with them in particular.
I wanted to show them this because my sixteen-year-old self had been blown away by my first encounter with an image of the crucifixion that truly captured the agony of Christ being tortured to death.
You can click through here to see a detail of the painting and understand what I mean.
I didn’t have a massive conversion that day back in the late ‘80’s, but it did stick with me. A love of Lent would characterize my faith, even in the years when I’d left the faith, from that point forward.
And honestly, that’s about it for the story. In the early 1500’s a guy painted a particularly vivid portrait of Christ’s suffering on the cross, and in the late 1900’s a teenager saw it and felt a sense of victory, like justice had been done. I contemplated it for a long time back then, and thirty years later I did so again.
Sign of a Catholic upbringing, on one of the kids’ cameras are selfies taken in front of the Issenheim Altarpiece. This was not a lack of reverence. It was a sense of the momentous: I was somewhere important, see me here at the encounter of something much greater than myself.
I think that selfie-instinct was also indicative of a sense of comfort, a sense of being at home with sacred things, a sense that the moment when Jesus died on the cross belongs to us. We’re part of it.
And we are. Jesus died for us. For you and me. He loves you enough that if you alone were the one person who could be saved by his suffering, he’d suffer everything you see in the painting, and on top of that he’d suffer yet more that can’t even be captured no matter how dedicated the artist.
He loves you so much.
So that history depicted in the altarpiece is in fact our history. Fridays are for the salvation of the world, eh?