This is the Way
“I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
Contemporary artist Bruce Herman not only produces interesting and compelling images, he reflects beautifully and with theological depth and richness upon his inspirations and his creative process. This is his 1997 painting, “By His Stripes,” painted shortly after he suffered the devastating loss of a house fire that not only upended his life, but destroyed the better portion of his artistic output. Christ’s wounds here echo the artist’s grief: they are black, twisted and charred. And yet, the Body stands, substantial and resolute, even as it is marked by its endurance of the most terrible horror.
Here is a portion of his own reflection on his artistic journey:
As an artist I am drawn to the paradox of “power made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). The imagery that came to me initially in the early 1990’s (in my series Golgotha) was directly based upon the accounts of Good Friday in the Bible. Later, after our house and studio burned… I began to seek a more allusive approach to imagery of God’s paradoxical broken beauty…Somehow the reality of our ruined home and studio was stitched together with my earlier artistic imagery, and I saw in the smoldering heap of our house a brightening hope for the future.
When we confess Christ as “The Way,” it is easy for that to become an abstract and distant reality; a standard that is outside of us and imposed on us and that we never really quite live up to. Yet the way in which Christ is the Way is more subtle than that. HE enters into OUR experience — our pain, our anger, our tragedy, our suffering, our darkness our death — and leads us from within this terror … not by telling us what to do or where to go, but by enduring it with us and for us, taking it fully into himself, and then transfiguring it, in the light of his resurrection to a new life built, not upon bootstrapping grit, or rigorous discipline, moral effort, and self-denial, or wishful thinking, but upon the defeat of death by death.
Then, by the power of the Holy Spirit, at work continually applying the mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection to us, our stories and our experiences are continually reimagined and reintegrated with a view to this truer and more beautiful frame that embraces the limits of our brokenness, mortality, and death, rather than trying to avoid it.
This is the Way.
These who have turned the world upside down have come here also.
— Paul’s Opponents in Thessolonica (Acts 17:6)
Fifth Sunday of Easter
Texts for Today
Prayer
Almighty God, whom truly to know is everlasting life: Grant us so perfectly to know your Son Jesus Christ to be the way, the truth, and the life, that we may steadfastly follow his steps in the way that leads to eternal glory; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini
Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff here gives us something of an auditory parallel to what Jesus accomplishes in his teaching. He begins with a work masterful in its own right — the 24th Caprice for Solo Violin of Nicholas Paganini — and expands and opens it — exploring latent and implicit possibilities within the rich melodic frame to create a new, richer, and even more forceful masterpiece. Likewise, Jesus’s rhapsody on the Law and the Prophets reconfigures their basic melody into a new, richer, more satisfying harmony: a mystery now written on our hearts, and not imposed upon us from the outside, by an external code.
We see a second dimension here implicit in the performance of the Ukranian concert pianist, Anna Borysivna Fedorovai. The Master does not merely reintegrate the tradition of his ancestors and lay down a fresh way of understanding it that is now held to be the law: but evokes the Performer to give it a fresh embodiment fueled by delight in the music itself, expressed in that sweet combination of faithfulness and improvisation that characterizes the virtuosic performance.
