I want to reflect in this talk on seeing the divine – where we see God in our lives and how the image of the Cross shapes that way of seeing.
The way in which Christians have understood the presence and activity of God in the world is by talking about sacraments. So if, as Christians, we understand the Cross as the decisive action of God in the world, it is important for us to think about it in sacramental terms. And that’s got a lot to do with the Cross as an image. The Book of Common Prayer takes up St Augustine’s definition of a sacrament as “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace”. So sacraments are visible signs, things in our lives where we can see the work of the Creator. There is, in fact, a strong emphasis on seeing in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The psalmist’s faith is expressed in the sentiment, “I am sure I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living” (Psalm 27:13).
In the New Testament this is taken to a whole new level of sacramental seeing, precisely because it is written by people who believe they have seen God. These are people who have seen the man Jesus who was, for them, in an unparalleled way, a sign of the presence and activity of God. As the author of the letter to the Colossians describes it, Jesus Christ is the “image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15). Or as St John expresses it in his famous prologue, “No one has seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known” (John 1:18). For Christians, Jesus Christ is the supreme sacrament of God. Jesus is how we see God.
That has allowed Christians to put a special emphasis on seeing God in images and understanding the ways of God in the signs around us. But there have, of course, been times when that idea has been called into question. At the Reformation, for example, the alarm was raised that images might cut God off rather than open windows onto God. Paintings, sculpture, colour and ritual might in fact be idols rather than icons. And so the Reformers urged us to place our trust in language, the spoken and written word. The goodness of the Lord was not, as the Psalmist thought, to be seen but rather heard. And, of course, that was primarily to be found in Scripture which needed only to be expounded in long sermons.
What I hope we are coming to realise today is a kind of third way – that words and images can’t be quite so easily separated. Language itself makes sense because it conjures up for us all kinds of vivid images and pictures. Jesus’ words in the gospels, for example, are endlessly encouraging us to call images to mind: “The Kingdom of God is like…”, he says, and then he paints a picture with words.
But we’re learning too that images need words as well. Images become meaningful when we can talk about them. That’s how images become symbols – they become objects of our common language. We may agree with St Bonaventure when he wrote “our emotion is aroused more by what is seen than by what is heard.” But depth of experience and knowledge of the divine occurs when emotions connect with the mind. To give an example many of us might relate to, we can have a crush on a beautiful person who we haven’t spoken to. But we’re really in love with them when we have got to know them and love them with our mind as well as our eyes. That is a fundamental connection between images and words.
So this is where we see God – in images that have meaning, images that we can talk about with words. These are images that we can journey into, signs which draw us in and speak of something beyond themselves. Their meaningfulness makes them – turns them into – icons of God. It makes them sacramental – signs of the presence and activity of God in the world.
All this may sound quite technical, relevant, you may think, to people who study theology of art and iconography but not my everyday experience. But I’m not just talking about paintings and icons. I want to suggest that we experience the world in a very visually way and if we are Christians we must and do see God in the images we see every day. That might operate on two levels. First there are the primary religious images which shape our lives: the image of a church building, the image of a priest elevating the host, the image of a baby being baptised, the image of the Madonna and child, and the image, on which we reflect today, of a man hanging on a cross. On the second level are the more mundane images we see in our lives each day. And part of being a Christian is allowing the primary Christian images to permeate this level so that we see the world through the eyes of faith: seeing the delight of God in creation in the smile on a child’s face; seeing the holiness of Mary in the young mother nursing her child on the bus; and seeing the face of Christ in all people and particularly those who suffer his isolation and exclusion – the beggar on the street, the scared asylum seeker, the frail and lonely old woman close to death. In these images we see God around us. We see God in our lives. We see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. For Christians, images are meaningful.
But what happens when images become unmeaningful? What happens when images that used to communicate a meaning beyond themselves suddenly become flat and empty? And how does this effect the question of where I see God in my life? This was the question that preoccupied Andy Warhol. He believed that the consumer society that the Western world has become is one in which images have become trivialised and debased.
Warhol was a strange kind of artist, if indeed (many would argue) an artist at all. He made his name with parodied repetitions of brand images such as Campbell’s soup or Brillo or Marilyn Monroe. The pop art he invented was less art as people had understood it so much as one big ironic critique both of the superficiality of the images he depicted and the impact that the branding culture was having on the whole concept of art. In an age when mass produced images are everywhere, what meaning does any image have over another? Does the face of a film star signify anything different to the label on a tin of soup?
Warhol’s art points to the notion that our culture of mass-produced images has somehow distorted the meaning of images. And this isn’t just true of art, it’s taking place everywhere. One art critic has pointed out how this is happening in political life and suggests that Andy Warhol, painting in American in the 1980s, captured the spirit of President Reagan’s administration in recognising the power of celebrity, of branding and, fundamentally, of television. And if that brings to mind something of our own political “spin-culture”, then we are reminded that the distortion of the meaning images have in a society saturated with images, is going on in British society today too. John Berger is a British painter who has written about art and contemporary culture. He writes:
Today images abound everywhere. Never has so much been depicted and watched. We have glimpses at any moment of what things look like on the other side of the planet, or the other side of the moon… Yet with this, something has innocently changed… It turns appearances into refractions, like mirages: refractions not of light but of appetite, in fact a single appetite, the appetite for more.
So what we have here is a kind of image that is very different to the sacramental image, or the icon. Sacramental images reveal to us God and so overwhelm us as observers of the image with the sentiments that are of God: love, compassion, joy and hope. But these “refractions of appetite” that Berger is talking about are essentially about identifying within us a lack. Berger has written particularly about how the images of advertising stimulate within us feelings of envy and inadequacy, suggesting that if we buy what is on offer, life will become better.
These are the kinds of images that dominate the world of consumer capitalism – images that make us feel inadequate and offer to us a quick fix solution. And these images of envy aren’t just confined to advertisements in magazines or billboards. They are all around us. It seems as if every programme on television, for example, – the house-makeover, the body makeover, the holiday home in the sun, the celebrity lifestyle programmes – are all opening up within us dark spaces of appetite and inadequacy. You will be happier if you look like this… You will be happier if you live here… You will be happier if you have this kind of lifestyle… You will be happier if you buy this… Or increasingly, in addition, we are confronted with the more exploitative images, images of people we don’t want to be like, images of people we can ridicule and perhaps even, by phone-in vote, punish with ejection if we’ve grown tired of looking at them with derision and internalised fear that others may look at us in the same way. None of the images we’re confronted with in our culture say to us “YOU ARE OKAY”, “You don’t need anything else to be a person who is loved by God”, “You don’t need a makeover that’s going to take 10 years off you; what you need is to experience the fullness of life that God gives as a gift to those who freely love him.”
What happens to religious images in this kind of visual culture? What indeed happens to the central image of our faith, the Cross of Christ? As you may know, Warhol lived a complicated life, but his Catholic faith appears to have remained with him in some form throughout those confusions. So this question is his concern and he was troubled by it because he can only conclude that the sign of the Cross goes the way of Campbell’s soup and Marilyn Monroe – the more it is mass-produced, the more it becomes yet one more image in a world exhausted by images, the less it means to people. In this painting he has reproduced a Polaroid image of a cheaply produced devotional cross. In some of the prints, the image has become faded. The cross has become just another empty sign in a world of superficial meanings. And don’t we know that to be true? How many people walk down Hampstead High Street wearing a cross around their neck with no appreciation of its significance? Perhaps its subtle distinctions in design will indicate that it is from Tiffany or Versace. But does it speak to them about redemption and judgment and sacrifice? Is it a sign of the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living? Probably not.
So an important part of our growing in Christ will have to involve the recovery of a certain way of seeing – a way of seeing Christian symbols that enables us to read the whole world through the eyes of faith. And lets begin here on this Good Friday with that central image of our faith: the man broken and dying on a wooden cross. And lets think about what that image tells us about God, about our lives, about what really matters in the world, and about how we are called to live. Let’s re-receive the meaning of this image.
Firstly, the author of the Letter to the Hebrews describes the Cross as an image of shame, a shame that Jesus, for the sake of a greater joy, disregarded (12:2). It is, in the world’s eyes, a sign of failure, even a pathetic failure. As Paul puts it, it is “foolishness” (1 Cor. 1:23). What kind of messiah is this that he ends up with this fate? No wonder our culture has turned it into a different kind of image, because the kind of image it is makes no sense to us at all. It is the opposite of all we strive for. So as we meditate on the shame of this image, let us repent of the times we sneer at what we regard as the foolishness of others, those whose lives we regard as shameful because of their failure in worldly terms: the homeless, the unemployed, the seemingly incompetent and uneducated, those who, for whatever reason, live on welfare provided by the state. And let’s consider too the ways in which God calls all of us as followers of Christ to disregard shame for the sake of a greater joy. Perhaps the shame of being seen to associate with those our friends disapprove of. Perhaps the shame of making material sacrifices, of giving more of our money away, or perhaps even the shame of having people know that we have been baptised and go to church. Let’s allow this image to mean for us the need to embrace shame.
Secondly, the cross is an image of forgiveness. From the Cross, Christ himself prays “Father forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing”. The Cross makes forgiveness possible. It is the image of God’s forgiveness of us. In this image God forgives humanity for the worst things we could possibly inflict on God. Let us be challenged by this image to be people of forgiveness, to seek out the feelings of resentment and judgment within us and allow them to be transformed. Let’s allow this image of forgiveness to make us resistant to the constant ways in which we are being encouraged to judge and condemn, particularly in the media circus where people are demonised and discredited for our entertainment. Let’s allow this image to mean for us the abundant forgiveness of God and our need to participate in that by being forgiving towards others.
Thirdly, in John’s Gospel, Jesus says, “When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself” (12:32). So this is an image of gathering. Even as he dies on the cross, Jesus forges new relationships, saying to his mother, “Woman, here is your son” and to the disciple whom he loved, “Here is your mother.” We never look in isolation at the Cross, we always gaze up at our saviour alongside our brothers and sisters in the church. That is why the Eucharist is not just about the Lord’s Supper, its about the crucifixion. The Eucharist is the place of crucifixion to which Jesus has gathered us. And given that Warhol’s consumer society is one of rampant individualism, I want to suggest that the Eucharist is really the primary place where we re-learn this way of seeing. Around the altar of the Lord we see people from all walks of life, all ages, all races, all nationalities, all classes, different worldviews, political allegiances and taste. For that reason, this is where we see a foretaste of the banquet that God is planning for all his loved ones in his Kingdom. As an image of the Kingdom it is incomplete, it is imperfect – church can be boring, frustrating, disappointing. But it is still the place where we see the coming together of the Body of Christ to receive that body from Christ himself. Church is a wonderful image. Church is where we re-learn how to see the whole of our lives and the whole of our world through the eyes of faith, even through the eyes of God. Around the altar, week by week – this is where we see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. And from here we go out to see the goodness of Lord in the signs of the world around us.
Bonaventure, The Soul’s Journey into God, New York, 1978, pp.72-3
John Berger, The Shape of a Pocket, London: Bloomsbury, 2001, pp.11-12