We need not be surprised that Edvard Munch, whose most famous painting is The Scream, should be drawn to paint the image of torment and desolation that is the Passion of Christ. Indeed, many commentators believe that Munch has painted his own face on the crucified figure. Munch, like Alfonzo, identifies with the sufferings of Christ and sees in them his own isolations and afflictions. Even more than Alfonzo, Munch was a deeply melancholy figure who, at times, revelled in his own self-hatred. When a psychoanalyst offered to help him work through his torments, he declined, replying that “they belong to me and to my art… I want to keep my sufferings.”
It has to be said that some of Munch’s self-loathing seem to have stemmed from the austere Protestantism in which he was brought up. His parents instilled in him a strong sense of sin and punishment, while sitting rather light to the Gospel message of love and forgiveness. So, like many brought up in that way, Munch abandoned formal religion in his twenties as he came into contact with radical modernist circles, particularly the Bohemians of Kristiania where he lived.
But we should not read this self-portrait crucifixion, painted when Munch was 37, as an irreverent parody. Munch’s religious sense certainly did not go away. Later in life he wrote, “Through it all you might say I have been a doubter, but one who has never denied or mocked religion – my doubt was more an attack on the overpietism that dominated my upbringing.” And he never let go of some basic tenets of Christian faith. He declared, “I bow down before something which, if you want, one might call God. The teaching of Christ seems to me the finest there is, and Christ himself is very close to godlike.” So while not fully faithful to the teaching of the Church, Munch’s work is constantly concerned with existential mysteries at the deepest level even when they generate an angst against which he refuses to be numbed or anaesthetised.
What I find particularly interesting about this painting is how Munch does not depict Christ’s suffering with the same isolation as that of, for example, his figure in The Scream, or for that matter the same isolation that characterise most modern images of the Crucifixion, perhaps with just the few women mourners or the mocking soldiers. Here Munch places the crucified figure at the centre of a swirling mass of people, some mourning, some mocking, some animated and some impassive. Some of the faces in the foreground are perhaps depicting people known to him, members, most likely, of the Kristiania Bohemians.
But they are all people who appear to have been, in some sense, shaken – shaken by anger, by fear, by grief or by sorrow. They have all been shaken by this image of the crucified Christ. That’s why this image illustrates the sense in which religion remains for Munch something collective, not merely personal, and why this image actually gives us some kind of image for the Church.
I mentioned in my second talk the idea that the Cross is an image associated with the gathering of people. And quite often what gathers people in church is a kind of experience of shakenness. A lot of people come to Church when they are shaken by the trauma of bereavement. Perhaps we have been shaken by a frightening awakening to our own mortality through illness or an accident. Others start coming when they are shaken by the extraordinary experience of having children and wondering what kind of world they have been born into and what kind of values they might learn as they grow up. For others still it is a persistent shakenness at an existential level, a feeling that life is not simply material and functional, but that something within us draws us towards the origin of life and meaning.
But we needn’t think that the church is just a kind of therapy for trauma, or “a crutch for the weak” as it is sometimes caricatured. Because that experience of being shaken very much carries on when we join the church. We might say that we are held alongside others in our shaken state, and this shakenness may even take on new forms. Because the foundation of membership of the Christian community is to be collectively shaken in our experience of the world. We are shaken out of the complacency that makes so much of our world blind to the deeper meaning of life and the tragic fallenness of our world.
I have borrowed this image of shakenness from the priest theologian Andrew Shanks who describes the Church as “the universal solidarity of the shaken… An alliance, that is to say, embracing all comers. The solidarity of those shaken – out of complacency, out of inertia, out of numb despair – into a serious pursuit of true Honesty.” Whatever the apparent immediate cause, Shanks sees the origin of this shaking in God – not perhaps always an appealing idea! We want God to be the comforting Father, the good and gentle Shepherd to the flock. But as we stand together, not just in any ordinary human gathering, but as a community before God, how can we not be shaken? How can we not be unsettled from our places of comfort? And if we were not shaken by this, would anything very significant really happen in Church?
This is perhaps where we start to understand the positive sense of living in the “fear of God” that is spoken about in the Bible. It’s certainly not fear in the sense of being scared. “Do not be afraid” is the command that Jesus gives more than any other in the gospels. No, this sort of fear is more like a sense of awe, a sense of being overwhelmed by what is beyond us, a sense (in short) of humility. This is a sense of being shaken by God as the awakening of our faith and our discipleship, meaning that being shaken by God takes us on a long journey. As Psalm 111 concludes, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”. And as the same Psalm states at its opening, this is a fear that is experienced “in the company of the faithful and in the congregation” It is collectively in our worshipping life together that we are shaken by the fear of the Lord. From this (and here is an important point!) we are drawn by God out of our shakenness through redemption into grace and hope.
So many problems arise when this “fear” becomes something more isolated and anxious. That was the kind of faith in which Edvard Munch was brought up and it seems to me to be rooted in a particularly unhelpful strand of post-Reformation theology which has little to say of the solidarity of which Shanks writes and is more concerned with a kind of shakenness that is simply the individual’s consciousness of corruption and separation from God. That still colours a great number of people’s view of what Christianity is really about and quite often their reactions against it are no less individualistic. In Munch’s case we discover that he was drawn to the Spiritualism that was so popular in the Europe of his time. But while this may have seemed to him less harsh and judgemental, it still meets only the needs of the individual – the individual’s shakenness by death and the death of one’s loved ones – and a certain kind of isolation in life remains and only a thin hope is offered.
Much of what passes today as “spirituality” responds to various low levels of shakenness, a dissatisfaction perhaps with materialism and consumerism. But the irony is how consumerist it remains in meeting my spiritual needs in the way that I want and connecting the with other people only in so far as I choose. And we find that within Christianity too with people thinking they can cherry pick from the Church the commodities they want: values for my children, my personal spiritual communion with no ethical commitment to others, or just an aesthetic experience I find edifying. But those people are missing out. They really are missing out. Because the church is the journey of the people of God, together, out of shakenness through redemption to hope.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was a Lutheran Pastor killed by the Nazis in 1944, was someone who really sought to reform the kind of individualistic European Protestantism that the likes of Edvard Munch were finding unsatisfactory. In fact, he had a vision for the church which we are still very far from realising and from which we can still learn a great deal. He had this to say of Christianity that is only concerned with individual redemption:
Aren’t we really under the impression that there are more important things than that question [of personal salvation]… Aren’t righteousness and the Kingdom of God on earth the focus of everything… It is not with the beyond that we are concerned, but with this world as created and preserved, subjected to laws, reconciled, and restored.
So for Bonhoeffer, God’s purposes for the world are not being worked out in God’s tinkering with isolated human souls, with spiritual fixes and ethereal mysteries. God is gathering a redeemed community, a solidarity of the shaken, and they are gathering first and foremost around the cross of the one who was lifted up from the earth that he might gather all the world to himself.
This view shifts the purpose and the preoccupations of the church from those that are usually thought to be appropriate. It means that the church’s concerns are far less “spiritual”, in the sense of being uninterested in material things, than we might think. We can see that in two ways:
Firstly, it means that our physical presence to one another in the church is immensely important. Again, Bonhoeffer writes:
A human being is created as a body; the Son of God appeared on earth in the body for our sake and was raised in the body. In the sacrament of the believer receives the Lord Christ in the body, and the resurrection of the dead will bring about the perfected community of God’s spiritual-physical creatures. Therefore, the believer praises the Creator, the Reconciler and the Redeemer, God for Father, Son and Holy Spirit, for the bodily presence of the other Christian. The prisoner, the sick person, the Christian living in the diaspora recognises in the nearness of a fellow Christian a physical sign of the gracious presence of the triune God.
People often say that they don’t need to go to church to be a Christian. But if the Spirit of God is really active in the world through the interactions of a bodily community, shaken and redeemed together, then they really are missing out on the full manifestations of grace.
Secondly, if God’s ways with the world are through the journey of a community of believers, physically present to one another, then perhaps the church has for too long been rather tentative and modest about its place in the world. This is obviously a very current and contentious question about the role of faith in society. We Anglicans may read our traditional role as one of providing a spiritual (understood as immaterial) dimension to the life of a society that essentially runs itself according to secular logic. That is exacerbated in our age when the pluralist settlement has pushed religion even further into the private sphere with little to contribute to the general running of things.
But in our era, perhaps more than ever, we are coming to see that things are not going well in our world. The materialist system of exchange for the dogged pursuit of profit that has spread to every corner of our globe is being shown to be dysfunctional. It widens the gap between rich and poor and, more than that, the logic of growth on which it is founded is now being exposed as the origin of a global environmental catastrophe. Nobody has the mandate or the imagination to do anything about this and we are now warned that it may provoke a new wave of warfare for resources. These are the issues by which today’s church must be shaken. Indeed the alliance of Christian people to campaign for the alleviation of debt and for fairer trade laws is perhaps the best example in recent years of the solidarity of the shaken pursuing honesty and justice in God’s name.
And if we are to be God’s agents for redemption and hope in this generation and for our children we must look to the gospel and into what the Spirit is saying at the heart of our worshipping life to see how we can model a more sustainable way of living on this planet. I have no quick answers in this area, but I know it is the road which the church’s journey must take. Perhaps like me you were moved by the interview in last week’s Ham & High with the activist parish administrator from our neighbouring church St Mary’s Primrose Hill where she said:
Unless you are ignorant of the problem of climate change (and denial is not the same as ignorance), unless your head is so deeply buried in the sand that the news of icebergs melting and rainforests burning does not seem like an urgent call for action, then I believe we must all get involved.
The material world is the concern of the Church because the Church is a material community. And as we look at our material world today there is much cause to be shaken like the figures in Munch’s Golgotha. But Golgotha is not the end of the story. Because it is in our standing together in the fear of the Lord that we are transformed as a community, that we are redeemed. That kind of solidarity is rarely seen anywhere outside of the church in these days of fragmented community. And that is why, before anything else, the Church must be an embodiment of hope for the world.
It often doesn’t feel like that, partly because we can easily become desensitised to what the Church really is, to encountering the grace of God in our sisters and brothers in the church. Or as Bonhoeffer put it, seeing a fellow Christian as “a physical sign of the gracious presence of the triune God”. And we are constantly tempted to see the church in terms other from those which I’ve set out of the solidarity of the shaken being drawn through redemption into hope.
Perhaps we see the church purely as an interest group which can only be measured in terms of numbers. Or perhaps in our fast-changing world we see the church as a bastion of heritage and the preservation of history.
Archbishop Oscar Romero warned against the dangers of both these views of the Church in his situation of El Salvador in the 1970s. In the twentieth century there can be few better examples than him and Bonhoeffer of Church leaders who understand what it means for the Church to be the solidarity of the shaken, and through the practice of the faith to journey through redemption to hope. Romero wrote:
Let us not measure the church by the number of its members or by its material buildings.
The church has built many houses of worship, many seminaries, many buildings that have then been taken from her…
None of that matters.
The material walls here will be left behind in history.
What matters is you, the people, your hearts, God’s grace giving you God’s truth and life.
Don’t measure yourself by numbers.
Measure yourselves by the sincerity of heart with which you follow the truth and light of our divine Redeemer.
What is the Church? It is the community of people, shaken by God, and shaken by the most profound questions of living, a community that is gathered together by Christ in the process of its redemption, and from here, through the grace of the Spirit, it embodies hope for the world.
As we gather before the Cross again this Good Friday, let us recommit ourselves to that collective journey of faith with our sisters and brothers in Christ.
Cited in Alf Boe, Edvard Munch, New York: Rizzoli, 1989, pp.28-30
Andrew Shanks, The Other Calling: Theology, Intellectual Vocation and Truth, Oxford: Blackwells, 2007, p.18
Psalm 111.10
Psalm 111.1
Dietrich Bonhoeffer Letters and Papers from Prison: The Enlarged Edition, London: SCM, 1971, p.286
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996, p.29, my italics
Tasmin Omond in Ham & High, March 13 2008, p.18
Oscar Romero, December 19, 1977