Threading the Needle
“Hate evil, and love good, and establish justice in the gate: it may be that the Lord, the God of hosts, will yet be gracious to the remnant of Joseph.”
Russian-born artist Vladimir Kush applies the rich symbolical imagination he has cultivated and described as “metaphorical realism” to Jesus’s famous saying in this week’s Gospel lesson, that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.” Formally speaking, Kush is a surrealist, but his surrealism is deployed with a restorative, rather than a distortive aim: rather than trying to make manifest the horror and wrongness that pervade orderly conceits, he operates with the conviction that a positively deployed imagination can bring healing, and open vistas for new, positive possibilities.
As Kush notes in his own explanation of the painting, his depiction presumes that “the Eye of the Needle” references a particular narrow gate in the city of Jerusalem around the time of Jesus. This is not the best reading of the Biblical text: the conversation surrounding the saying emphasizes the impossibility — not the difficulty — of the described action.
But Kush brings the paradoxical dimensions of Jesus’s saying back in through the metaphorical depths of his art. The needle stretches off into infinity, becoming both a pointer towards and passage into the unknown. The sun takes on an aspect of a glowing ball of yarn, and the train of camels, a thread proceeding from it. Life itself is the richness that is being pulled through the needle’s eye, as Kush quietly testifies: his visual puzzle invites satisfaction within quiet contemplation.
We are God’s household! — If indeed we hold fast our confidence and our boasting in our hope.
— A Theologian of the Early Church (Hebrews 3:6)
Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost
Texts for This Week
Prayer
O God, our refuge and strength, true source of all godliness: Graciously hear the devout prayers of your Church, and grant that those things which we ask faithfully, we may obtain effectually; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
I Surrender All
I’m a bit puzzled as to how and why there is a world-famous Gospel Choir in Oslo, Norway, but here they are, with a fine rendition of the old and well-beloved hymn, I Surrender All; perhaps the most famous spiritual song to emerge from the American Dutch Reformed tradition. The lyrics to the hymn were published in 1896 by Judson W. Van de Venter of Dundee, Michigan. The tune is called ‘Surrender’ and was composed at the same time by W.S. Weeden, a friend of Van de Venter.
If Oslo’s interpretation is too mainstream, here’s John Rashin Singh covering the melody on a bansuri, a bamboo flute that features in music from the subcontinent.
