The Octave Day of Easter (Easter 1)

“For whatever is born of God conquers the world.”

If you travel to Basel, Switzerland, and pay a visit to the Kunstmuseum  - the museum of fine art – you’ll find there an enormous and probably unsettling painting.

The painting, painted by the Renaissance artist Hans Holbein the Younger in the middle of the 16th century, is about seven feet long but only a foot high and depicts Christ, but not as we’re used to.

The painting itself is deeply grotesque and pulls no punches in its depiction of Jesus in the tomb following his death, but not immediately following his death. His body is pale and lithe, skin practically stretched over bones; his eyes half open but dead, rolled back and unfocused, staring upward, his mouth hangs open, lifeless. His feet, his hands, and the wound in his side all bear the signs of putrefaction – his right hand, closest to the viewer of the painting, is turning gray or black and his fingers are locked in a kind of rigor mortis.

This is to say: it’s not the kind of print you’ll soon be hanging in the living room.

The depiction of Christ is so grotesque, so real, and so…unlike anything we typically imagine, that it has completely captured the imaginations and fascinations of writers, artists, and critics, most notably the Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky who has it feature prominently in one of his novels. His wife, recalling later in life the grip that the painting had on him after viewing it only once, recounted that she could not spend more than a few moments in the same room as it, as she found it so disturbing.

In the novel in which the painting features – The Idiot – one of the characters encounters a print of the image hanging in another’s home and it becomes the inspiration of vigorous thought and discussion between the characters, and indeed for the reader. One of the characters, Ippolit Terentyev, is a young man in the final stages of consumption (tuberculosis), and near to death. Ippolit is young and idealistic, a committed atheist, and though he deeply craves love and recognition from others, others find his ego and his obsession with himself troubling, and it leads Ippolit deeper into cynicism and loneliness.

The main character of the novel is young Prince Myshkin, who is naïve and lacking in social experience so much that people often mistake him for being an idiot (hence the book title), but Myshkin is in fact intelligent, aware, intuitive, and has spent far more time than the others, those who would call him an idiot, thinking deeply about faith, morality, and human nature. At one point in the book, he asserts that, “Beauty will save the world,” a sentiment that the cynical Ippolit chastises, “What kind of beauty will save the world, Prince?”

For Myshkin, the beauty that will save the world is the beauty and perfection of Christ and Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, reminiscent of our Epistle today from St. John who says that “this is the victory that conquers the world, our faith.”

When Myshkin thinks about or looks at Holbein’s grim painting of the dead Jesus in the tomb all he can see is the beauty of the one whose body was broken for us; it’s as if he looks at the dark decaying wounds on Christ’s hands and sees the glory and light of God, and of the resurrection, shining through them.

Ippolit, on the other hand, looks at the image of the dead Christ and sees nothing but a grotesque image of death and decay; he sees something in it that he doesn’t want to face – that soon, he will be as Christ in the picture, dead and decaying. He can only see the darkness of the inside of the tomb, and not the light of the resurrection that comes after. He looks at Christ in the image and sees only something lost, perhaps looking inwardly at himself.

Ippolit simply cannot understand how Myshkin can see anything good or redemptive in Holbein’s dark painting so he later asks a philosophical question related to the painting when he asks (paraphrased slightly), “Can someone perceive in an image that which does not have an image?” Ippolit is asking whether we can see in one thing something that may not be there, or may be there invisibly? Put another way, thanks to a commentator, the question might be phrased thus, “Can we see beauty or perfection in something that is ugly/monstrous/disfigured?”  

This question really draws us back to that line from St. Paul to the Corinthians that the cross seems like foolishness to those who are perishing, but to those who are being saved – those who know God and what God is doing in their life - the cross is the power of God.

When Ippolit looks at the dead Christ he sees something foolish, sad, and frightening because Ippolit is perishing. When Myshkin looks at the horrifying image of Christ’s lifeless body, through the eyes that his faith gives him, all he sees is the beauty of Jesus’ love; the love that would endure that for him; that would endure it even for poor Ippolit.

For Myshkin, the world is overcome by faith; death is overcome by faith; the ugliness of Christ’s crucifixion, and the darkness of this world is overcome by faith in the beauty of his resurrection.

We will still very much be in the glow of last week for quite some time, and what happened in the tomb during those three days 2000 years ago is a mystery to us; the resurrection happened behind closed doors, all we know is that at a certain point those doors were found open, and the tomb found empty.

Today, we hear, the Disciples are gathered inside at the end of the day of resurrection with the door locked out of fear. These closed doors, of course, are not just physical but also spiritual doors, and we have such doors that we often lock and hide behind inside of ourselves, in our hearts and our minds that are often shut to the beauty of Christ’s resurrection, to His love and to His forgiveness.

We shut them for the same reasons as Ippolit: because of horrible things in our lives, the hard-to-face, hard-to-swallow realities like dying of some awful sickness as he was – and who can blame us? Such things are terrifying. But when we shut the doors of our hearts in those times, we can also shut them to the ways that even those dark things – as Myshkin saw – can proclaim the presence, glory, and love of God.

And so to answer Ippolit’s question: yes – we can see in something monstrous and hideous something good and beautiful; we can find the paradise in the midst of the wilderness.

But often we’re like Ippolit in the novel, or the disciples in the Gospel: our trauma and our suffering has made us hard and cynical, we read about the resurrection and think “Yeah great, but what does it do for me?” What overcomes the world, says the Epistle - everything that stands between us and God and God’s resurrection in us - is faith. Trust in things we cannot see fully, trust in the truth, and beauty, and goodness of what Christ won for us on the cross.

The door to that room was not kicked in from outside, no force or coercion was used, Christ simply appeared in the midst of the disciples’ confusion and fear to bring peace and forgiveness. And in the midst of our confusions and our pain, Christ appears in the same way wanting to offer us resurrection of mind, and heart, and body.

“God gave us eternal life,” says St. John in his Epistle, “and this life is in his Son. Whoever has the Son has life…” That life that John talks about is the resurrected life that Jesus rose to give us; a life that renews our minds, our hearts, our desires, our relationships, our love – every aspect of our being; a life that offers us not satisfaction in the things of the world or of our lives as they are, but true joy  in God’s transformative love in us and for us. 

This life, which we receive by faith, is the beauty – as Myshkin said – that will save the world, that will save us. So we pray today and this Easter season that his resurrection will be made manifest in us, and that whatever stone blocks the doors of our hearts will likewise be rolled away.