Easter Sunday - Whats Art got to do with it?

Karen Sloan 04/04/2021

Reading - Mark 16:1-8

I know it’s been a time when visiting anywhere is difficult.  Let alone going overseas.  Which is why, when I remember my trip to Istanbul a number of years ago I do very fondly.  Even though I was caught up in a protest about the government which went from involving families and children to a major protest camp and finally to tear gas and a water cannon to disperse the crowd.  I was attending a conference down the road, and every day I would pass the protestors, until one day I accidentily became one.  The people were so many and so packed together, hard to believe now, that I had to join in and travel with them as they moved down the streets, before I could make an exit to the conference centre.  It was amazing and at time exhilarating to see people speaking out against a government which was becoming increasingly deaf to the democratic rights of its people.  Unfortunately, it was costly, although not as costly as what is going on in Myanmar at the moment.

The reason I mention this is because Istanbul is the home of some incredible churches, mosques and art.

And art is where we are heading, particularly early Christen art.  How do we see a message of the resurrection for us today in the art of the 11th and 12th centuries?  Well, we know that art can speak to us in ways words can’t. As can sculptures, if you were at the Good Friday service.

Let me explain.

The bible has many stories about the resurrection, about what happened, yet maybe they are not meant to be taken quite so literally.

Today we heard from the gospel of Mark, where the account of the resurrection ends much more abruptly than the others, with no appearance stories to follow.  The gospels of Matthew and Luke are more embellished with earthquakes’ and physical appearances of Jesus and all of them date more than 40 years after his death.  The earliest account is actually from Paul’s writings.

Paul has pride of place in these Easter traditions because his writings are the earliest text, 20yrs after the crucifixion and after his conversion to Christianity. What he says actually points to something a bit different to the gospel accounts.  His resurrection account is less concerned with the empty tomb but rather sees Jesus as having become a life-giving spirit at his resurrection.  Not a physical body.  For Paul resurrection involved transformation not resuscitation and included all who identified with Jesus.

Clearly there are real differences in the accounts.  But between Paul and the Gospels, there was a great war, the Jewish Roman war of 66-73 CE.  Here Jerusalem and the temple were destroyed.  As Greg Jenks says, “both Jews and Christians alike found themselves picking up the pieces among the ruins of a world gone forever”.  The gospels come out of that experience and they reflect a new political and social situation long after the time of Jesus.  So, to say the stories are history is to miss the point.  The writers were defining not just history, but who they were as human beings and as a society and as a fledging church and this varied, as can be seen.   

So where does that leave us in the 21st century, you may ask.

Like the Native American storyteller quoted by Marcus Borg, we may find ourselves saying:

"Now I don't know if it happened this way or not,
but I know this story is true."

Or as Dominic Crossan would say, you can believe in a raised physical body or a spirit or an empty tomb, anything you like really, but what is the meaning of it all?

The meaning of it as a transforming moment in our lives and the lives of the world in which we live.

Back to the art.

Firstly I want to take you the 11th  century, where the Eastern and Western church split from one another. 

The East–West Schism, also known as the Great Schism, is the break between the Roman Catholic church and Eastern Orthodox churches that occurred in 1054. The schism was the culmination of theological and political differences which had developed during the preceding centuries between Easter and Western Christianity.  A succession of church differences and theological disputes between the Greek East and the Latin West preceded the formal split that occurred.

I don’t want to go through what the theological points were, but it is also interesting to note it was during this time that Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury in the west was also developing his ideas.  Ideas that brought us what is now known as the substutionary atonement theory where Jesus’s death is seen as a payment for sin, satisfying an angry God so that we can be forgiven. Jesus’s resurrection was a vindication of this reconciling work on earth, a vindication of his sacrifice to save us. He went to heaven after the payment was made, the transaction completed. So, the resurrection of Jesus in the west was becoming a more personal event. There was not much here about the non-violent revolutionary from our Good Friday service. Or the choice between God or Rome.

This differed from the Eastern tradition, which headed in a different direction.  In the East the Resurrection was linked to redemption, and the renewal and rebirth of the whole world was involved   Resurrection was seen as a universal event and stems from the Jewish tradition, and remember Jesus was a Jew, that they too were working for God’s justice.  What would happen to the martyrs and those seeking justice on behalf of a loving God who had died?  They  believed they would be raised with the greatest of martyrs Jesus, to proclaim that God is a God of justice, and compassion and love. And peace.

And the difference between East and West is seen in the art, although it took many centuries for people to even consider painting the resurrection at all. But by the 4or 5th century attempts were being made.  And it is in the art that we can see these striking differences displayed.

In the west, Jesus is always depicting rising alone, often as a hugely powerful figure.

But in the East, Jesus is never alone.

The best example of the Eastern style is found in the Church of Chora, in the out skirts of Istanbul which dates back to the 5th century.  I didn’t get there, because I wanted to see the Hag Sofia, and the Blue mosque, but if I could do some time travelling I would go there now. 

This is what the church looks like. And this is what the famous fresco of the resurrection looks like.

Because I haven’t been there, I am going to let the Rev Keith Rowe speak, someone who has, and let him tell you his experiences of walking the Chora Church Frescoes and particularly this one.

Rowe writes -

“the high point of my visit to Chora was a spacious side chapel where a fresco high up near the ceiling depicts or better interprets, the resurrection (in the Eastern tradition, the Anastasis), dated around 1300. It is magnificent and evocative of the form that resurrection hope would take in a wounded world.  But unlike any western depiction of the resurrection.  One recent writer describes it as the greatest ever depiction of the Anastasis.  But it’s not factual like a photo, more an imaginative and pictorial unfolding of the meaning of the resurrection understood as a parable.  Its theology in colour.  A pictorial response to a visitor to Chora like me, who having reflected for more than an hour on pictorial representations of Jesus the healer, the teacher and the bringer of God’s love for humanity asks, but what does it all add up to.  What does it all mean?  Christ is in the centre dressed in white and standing on the gates of hell with locks and bolts by which humanity has been enslaved scattered around his feet.  With one hand Christ draws Adam from his coffin and with the other similarly draws Eve out of the grave, from death to life, from slavery to freedom, from living hell to fulfilling paradise.  Adam and Eve the biblical parents represent all of humanity including us.  On the left John the Baptist and kings Solomon and David watch on. On the right biblical and historical figures similarly watch on as the living participants of humanity’s rising….”

A little different from this image from the West.

But what did it mean to those who painted these Eastern images and worshipped in these churches. And what do we do with all of this today.

Keith Rowe  goes on,

“In the Eastern tradition the resurrection of Jesus is more than an astonishing tale of the individual Jesus rising in splendid triumphant isolation or an empty tomb in 1st century Palestine.  Rather it’s an evocative dream and expectation of the rising of all of humanity.  The focus is on the universal rather than the individual resurrection.  It invites the church to ask where humanity is heading and invites us to be part of the healing, peacemaking, hospitable, forgiving paradise on earth pioneered by Jesus and continued in the life and work of faithful people across the centuries.  Were invited to live and pray within the Easter dream, to live it where we are and as we are able.” 

“The essence of the resurrection is encapsulated in the great prayer of the church, “your kingdom come, your will be done”.  The world seems to go on its merry way, with violence and greed its modus operandi.  But “Your kingdom come “prayer seeks the non-violent, generous way pioneered by Jesus”.

Maybe, then, on Easter day we are invited to a wider more inclusive story, bigger than ourselves, our city, our tribe or our nation.  As Keith Rowe says, “to live within the fragile Easter story” for the sake of the world. 

Maybe we are being invited to join in a path of peace, justice, forgiveness and love that has been trod for thousands of years by thousands of people.  A  path that leads to freedom and light, not just for some but for all.  Including ourselves.  On this path no action is wasted or is too small. 

Maybe we are being called to see a Universal rather than individual vision of the resurrection. A provocative and incredible vision.  As Keith Rowe suggests, a vision that contrasts crucifixion violence with resurrection hope.  A vision Jesus knew, lived, taught and ultimately died for.  In a different time and place it may have ended there, but it was a Kairos moment, a moment of transformation and change.  In the 21st century we  are called to share his vision of a different way of living and being human, with the spirit of God as our companion and Jesus as our guide.

Not a bad thought to take away on this Easter day. Which doesn’t require a debate about an empty tomb!

Amen