Easter 2020: fear and hope in a landscape of death

Public was death, but Power, Might
But Life again, but Victory
Were hushed within the dead of night
The shuttered dark, the secrecy.
And all alone, alone, alone,
He rose again behind the stone

Alice Meynell’s poem is haunting me this Easter. ‘All alone, alone, alone’ is precisely how much of the human race finds itself during these weeks of Coronavirus lockdown. Despite all the ways in which we are digitally connected to one another as never before, this enforced isolation from physical human contact is still hard for many and for some, almost impossible to bear. We feel especially for those cut off in even more extreme ways because they are seriously ill, unconscious or facing death, and for those who love them. These are terrible times.

The poem underlines what’s said in all the Easter stories in the gospels, that no-one was there to witness Jesus being raised from the dead. All there was to show for it was an empty tomb from which the beloved body had gone. The resurrection narratives all begin there, not with joyful meetings with the risen Lord but with emptiness, bafflement and fear. They begin at the threshold of profound mystery, in a strange and disturbing place where nothing is quite as it seems.

The painting captures the paradox of Easter. It’s an extraordinary work of art from the same altarpiece I wrote about in Passiontide by Matthias Grünewald, the early sixteenth century German painter whose masterpiece this is. This resurrection panel is not as famous as the crucifixion but I find it just as remarkable. The colours for a start - this could have been painted by William Blake three centuries later. The way Jesus’ head seems to dissolve into the aureole of light surrounding it - that could be Turner. The beautiful curve of his diaphanous robes traced out by his rising up into the sky; the vibrancy of the risen Lord presiding majestically over a landscape of death with the wreckage of the rent tomb centre-stage: it all makes for a painting that’s as dramatic and compelling as anything in religious art. As an imaginative journey it takes us where no theologian would dare to tread.

I keep coming back to the aloneness of this risen Christ. Perhaps I wouldn’t have been tuned into it before we went into self-isolation. But I’m struck by how the painter pointedly does not include a heavenly panoply, a host of angels to celebrate the resurrection. Nor have the women yet arrived at the tomb. True, there are human figures in the painting, but the guards could not be more lifeless, strewn like broken toys across the foreground, When Lazarus stepped out of his tomb, his sisters and Jesus his friend were waiting to greet him. When it’s Jesus’ turn, there’s no-one. He is ‘alone, alone, alone’. Whatever has taken place on Easter night has happened out of sight, hidden from all human gaze.

The theological point is that the event of resurrection is unknowable. It can’t be witnessed or conceived, or even spoken about. It is a mystery, a work only God can do. ‘I trod the wine press alone’ says Isaiah, imagining a warrior returning after a great victory (Isaiah 63). He is bloodied but unbowed, triumphant, ‘announcing vindication, mighty to save’. Did Grünewald have this passage in mind when he tried to capture in paint the rending of the tomb and Christ the victor ascending in his gorgeous red robe, and his battle-scars, the marks of the nails, for ever branded on his hands and feet? ‘I looked, but there was no helper, so my own arm brought me victory.’

We’re struck by the purity of the risen Christ’s skin. In the crucifixion panel, Jesus’ body was terribly defaced by scars, boils and pustules; as I pointed out in the blog, this painting was commissioned for a convent whose vocation was to care for people with skin diseases. It was to reassure the sick that Jesus had suffered as they were suffering, identifying with them in their pain. But now, all this has been healed. Resurrection brings healing, transfiguration and beauty to our disfigured humanity. The sky may still be black and the landscape sombre, but the rainbow colours of Christ rising from death point to a transformation that is coming upon the world. Easter changes everything.

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I think this painting encapsulates where we find ourselves just now if we are Christians. Faith affirms that God raised Jesus from the dead. We profess it in the creeds and try to live by its promise. But like the altarpiece, our lived experience may take us into very bleak landscapes. The sterile ground may show no green shoots of spring, the dark vault of heaven may hold no hint of dawn. Our worlds may be strewn with wreckage and destruction. This radiant resurrected Christ gazes straight at us as if to say, hope against hope. A better future is promised. And we want to hope, desperately. We want to defy the despair we’re tempted to fall into. Even at the grave we want to sing ‘alleluia’. But the barren earth beneath us and the inky sky above seem to say: whatever this promise means, it is not for now. It is not yet.

Easter in lockdown may feel a bit like that. What hope does it bring to people who are lonely, frightened or very sick, or who have lost people they love? Or who are overwhelmed by worries about what the virus may mean for their homes, jobs and finances? Or who are burned out with the tasks of caring for others? Bring it close to home. Any of us could die in the next few weeks. Easter won’t make any difference in this strange and terrible year. Will it?

It would be easy for us to see Easter as the happy issue out of all our  afflictions, to allude to a prayer for the sick in the Book of Common Prayer. We want our tragedies to end in triumph, our tangled chaotic experiences to achieve resolution and come to rest. We wouldn’t be human if we didn’t crave a good ending to all this misery. Or at least, could glimpse some light at the end of this long dark tunnel. ‘Easter brings us hope’ will be the message of every online sermon preached today. But what does it mean? What difference does it make?

Let me say what I think it doesn’t mean. Easter makes no promise that things will get better, or that we’ll pull through this crisis because we’re resilient. It really doesn’t. You don’t tell someone who’s been terribly injured or is terminally ill or about to lose someone they love that ‘everything will be all right’. We don’t know if it will. It may not be. Worst fears may be realised. It’s a pastoral mistake in my view prematurely to quote Mother Julian’s ‘all shall be well’ as if it neutralised suffering here and now. Indeed, she wrote: ‘He said not, “Thou shalt not be tempested, thou shalt not be travailed, thou shalt not be dis-eased” but he said, “Thou shalt not be overcome”’.

When the desperately sick patients in the convent looked at Grünewald’s resurrection, I don’t think they necessarily believed that the risen Christ would cure their diseases and put everything right again.What did they look for then?

I think they found strength. That is to say, they were comforted by this luminous painting, given a strength that was not their own, resources with which to face suffering and death. Comfort isn’t a soft palliative word. It comes from confortare, to make strong, invigorate, en-courage. It’s about fortitude. Perhaps they recalled St Paul’s words about not being overwhelmed by trials beyond our capacity to endure, how God’s strength is revealed in human weakness. And surely they thought back to the words spoken by the empty tomb when the women were terrified, ‘do not be afraid’ (Matthew 28.5). And his final words in that Gospel, ‘I am with you to the end of the age’. The world’s age, yes, but my own too, whenever and however my life comes to its close.

I don’t underestimate the hope the painting’s message would have brought to the dying. The vision of God is at the heart of Christian faith and the resurrection opens a door on to our communion with ‘the love that moves the sun and the other stars’, to quote the marvellous last line of Dante’s Paradiso. The dying can feel very alone, especially when death comes because of this virus. As Jesus rises alone, up above the desolate landscape of death, his risen aloneness touches and transforms our loneliness. The rainbow colours of glory and the garland of stars promise that while there are tears in things, they do not have the final word.

That conviction could not be more comforting, more empowering. It imparts confidence, reassures me that my faith, fragile and faltering though it is, beset by ‘fightings and fears, within, without’, will hold whatever may come. Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was executed by the Nazis 75 years ago this month, said: ‘only the suffering God can help’.  When we read the resurrection painting in the light of the crucifixion, when we understand Easter in the light of Good Friday, we glimpse how suffering love is also the love that ultimately triumphs. We can be comforted, strengthened, by the truth that lies at the heart of all of life, amor vincit omnia, love overcomes all things. It feeds the hope that dares to imagine how things could be different for our world and for us all.

So my Easter prayer is that God may look with mercy on his suffering world and be close to every human child. That God will give us strength to persevere through this crisis, endure suffering, care well for one another. And that we hold on to our hope for the time we long for when ‘all shall be well, and shall be well, and manner of thing shall be well.’ And that the risen One who rose ‘alone, alone, alone’ will bring comfort to us all by reassuring us that because of Easter we are never alone.

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.