Bearing our Sickness: the Passion in 2020

This painting means a great deal to me. It lives in a marvellous museum in Colmar in the Alsace region of France. I first saw it there when I was a teenager, working on a farm near Strasbourg during what we would now call my gap year. I was grasped by this extraordinary and powerful work. Like Bach's St John Passion, it's been central to the way I've tried to understand and respond to the crucifixion throughout my adult life.

Let me first describe the painting. It belongs to a complex threefold altarpiece whose constituent parts were displayed to reflect the changing seasons of the liturgical year. It was created for an Antonine convent at Isenheim not far from Colmar (hence its name, the Isenheim Altarpiece). The 'Hospital Brothers of St Antony' lived under the Rule of St Augustine. Their particular vocation was to care for the sick. The altarpiece was commissioned in the early sixteenth century and was complete by 1516. This was on the eve of the German Reformation, so it belongs to the very last phase of medieval religious art with its distinctive spirituality focused on the passion and death of Christ. It is the masterpiece of German painter Matthias Grünewald (c1470-1528) of whom we know little, and of whose output only a handful of works survive.

The crucified Jesus dominates the painting, not only because he is placed at the centre but owing to his immense size - compare the figures on either side. He is not the martyr serenely offering up his life to his Father, but the agonised victim wracked with pain and suffering spiritual torment in a terrible darkness. There is no beauty or dignity to admire in this figure: this could be any common criminal, vagabond or slave. His skin is pitted with scars; we can read every muscle and sinew as the tension in his body drags down the ends of the cross-piece of this engine of death. It's as if God has entirely abandoned him at Golgotha. This is the passion according to Matthew or Mark: 'my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?'

And this seems to be the experience of the two women to his right. His mother Mary is attired in a grave-cloth white (where else is she depicted quite like this?), swooning at this appalling sight of her Son's death. At her feet Mary Magdalen kneels distraught at the foot of the cross, wringing her hands in a gesture that's as pitiful as anything in art. St John leans in to Mary, his hand pressing her towards him in a vain attempt to protect and comfort her. Opposite, John the Baptist stands apart, the interpreter out of time, pointing to the cross as an event foretold in the scriptures. The text reminds us of his words about Jesus, that 'he must increase while I must decrease', and of how he had spoken of him as 'the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world', shown in the painting as emptying his blood into a chalice that will, paradoxically, bring life to the world.

The Marys and the Beloved Disciple are shown again in the entombment below the crucifixion, where the agonies above finally reach some kind of resolution - it would be too much to call it rest. And on each side stand figures of saints: Sebastian, pierced by arrows, and Antony, the patron of the order that commissioned the painting. Both were appealed to in defence against sickness, not least the plague that was endemic across Europe during much of the middle ages. But there's a more specific reference in the image of Antony. The Antonines had been founded in 1093 by a man whose son had been cured through Antony's intercession of what was known as the 'burning sickness' or 'St Antony's fire'. Outbreaks of ergotism, a fungal poisoning caused by alkaloids in infected grains, regularly afflicted pre-modern societies. Its distinctive symptoms were severe and painful seizures and spasms, and a gangrenous rot that spread across the entire body. The suffering was excruciating, and usually fatal. It was to the care of its victims that the Isenheim convent was devoted. 

Experts who have studied the altarpiece have suggested that the artists consciously chose to depict the crucified Jesus as a victim of this terrible disease. His scarred, defaced skin not only bears the marks of persecution and human cruelty. It shows him covered with tumours and lesions from head to toe. No doubt Grünewald had seen for himself the effects of ergotism on its victims, perhaps in the convent morgue. This physical disfigurement of Christ adds to the profoundly disturbing effect the painting would have had - and was meant to have - on those who viewed it. It was a memento mori, a reminder of mortality. The message was: anyone could catch the disease and die from it. And even if they didn't, they would die of something. Even the Son of Man was not immune, for he was mortal, like us. 

Which of course is the whole point. In that bleak warning about mortality is embedded the possibility of a transforming vision. The startling insight that Jesus shares our humanity to the point of embracing our sickness is how the painter wants suffering victims to begin to find solace and hope. For he is Immanuel, God-with-us! This crucified Lord, says the painting, does not stand above suffering and pain in self-isolation from all that afflicts human beings. On the contrary. He makes our pain his own, immerses himself in our suffering, empties himself of his life because of it, demonstrates the depth of his love through his solidarity with the human race. 

How could Grünewald not have had in his mind the image of the suffering servant of the Lord in Isaiah 53? St Matthew quotes this famous passage (though not in the form we know it best from Handel's Messiah). 'He took our infirmities and bore our diseases' (Matthew 8.1). This turns out to be the likely meaning of the Hebrew. The Jewish scholar Robert Alter translates the passage as follows. 'Despised and shunned by people, a man of sorrows and visited by illness. And like one from whom the gaze is averted, despised, and we reckoned him naught. Indeed, he has borne our illness, and our sorrows he has carried. But we had reckoned him plagued, God-stricken and tormented' (Isaiah 53.3-4). 

You'll see why this painting has come alive for me in a new way since the Coronavirus pandemic began. I can't give you a precise explanation of what it means to say that the suffering servant 'bears our sickness'. But the key to it for me is the idea of solidarity. I think that during these past weeks we've all discovered how important solidarity is, and how heartening. Our feeling for those who have the virus severely, for those who have died of it or lost those they love have resulted in a profound sense of holding them together in our hearts and in whatever way we find ourselves praying.

I'm also thinking of our admiration of and respect for the courage and heroic commitment of those involved in health care and the emergency services. And of so many others who also face risks in front-line services that support us, from supermarkets to corner shops, in food supply chains, social services, education, public transport, refuse collection not to mention the three quarters of a million people who have enlisted as volunteers.... the list is endless. We are more aware of how interdependent we are in our common life and that can only be good. Lighting candles in our windows, coming out on the streets to applaud the NHS, a million little acts of care and kindness are examples of this. It's truly inspiring. 

And solidarity is what I experience by being drawn into the painting: my solidarity with all who suffer, theirs with me, and God's solidarity with all the human race. My response to the altarpiece is complicated, but it goes something like this. 'Behold the Lamb of God' it seems to say through John the Baptist as he points to the Christ on the cross. 'Look on this victim, this innocent sufferer who is undergoing what is afflicting so many people and threatens to overwhelm you, who was as lonely and desperate and afraid as you are. He drinks the cup of suffering to its dregs, embraces our sickness and our sorrow in solidarity with us, lightens burdens that are so huge, so dreadful that they would crush us completely if we had to bear them on our own. Look on him, and find strength. Cast your care upon him, for he cares for you. Find comfort, learn trust, have hope.' Perhaps this is all I need just now.

Today, Passiontide begins and our thoughts turn to the cross and all that it means. The gospel reading on this Sunday is the raising of Lazarus in John 11. Twice comes the pitiful lament from the dead man's sisters, 'Lord, if you had been here he would not have died!' On another panel of the altarpiece St Antony is shown again, this time with an agonised question, 'Where were you, good Jesus, why were you not there to heal my wounds?' The painting, and the passion narrative, answer that question. He was there. He is there. He will always be there with us and for us, this crucified God who bears the pain of the world on his heart. He is the Christ of Coronavirus. It's what incarnation means. This is the glory of the cross, full of grace and truth.