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Dear Bellefield Family,
For the last four years or so, each Holy Week, I find myself thinking about the Isenheim Altarpiece.
I first became aware of the altarpiece in seminary, as we were discussing the gospel of Mark. What draws my mind back to the altarpiece each Holy Week is the depiction of Jesus on the cross in contrast to his resurrection and ascension. Matthias Grünewald, the altarpiece’s painter, was painting for a monastery that specialized in hospital work. Seeking to show Jesus’ identification with the sick and suffering, he depicts Jesus’ death on the cross as unusually grotesque: he is emaciated, his hands are splayed, his head bowed, mouth agape. Next to Jesus (anachronistically), John the Baptist points to him and says in Latin, “He must increase, I must decrease” (John 3:30).
It is an appropriately bizarre scene. Human wisdom has categories for understanding David-and-Goliath sort of underdog victories: pride goes before the fall, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, “my greatest weaknesses are my greatest strengths”, etc. However, there are limits to this. Brock Purdy’s rise from last pick in the NFL draft to the starting quarterback of a team in the Super Bowl is an incredible accomplishment, but he still lost the Super Bowl. Failure is still failure, and the idea that the crumpled, powerless man on the cross can in any way ‘increase’ is beyond the limits of our human imagination. It is just defeat.
Yet when the altarpiece is opened to reveal the resurrected Jesus, we see him rising as a sun, standing in victory over his vanquished enemies below him. His palms still show the nail holes, but his hands are raised in victory, not splayed in pain. His face is so radiant that it is difficult to make out. Death and (seeming) failure, in the strange and wonderful gospel of Jesus Christ, become the means of victory.
Why is Jesus' victory so counterintuitive? I think Grünewald gives us a hint with his placement of John at Jesus’ crucifixion. The strange (by human standards) method of salvation Jesus uses forces us to wrestle with a question: what if, when it comes to how humans relate to God, we haven’t just been sort of wrong, but dead wrong? What if the question of success and salvation isn’t one of gradual self-improvement through struggle, but radical self-abnegation: “he must increase, I must decrease?”
Then it would mean we wouldn’t be able to boast in anything but Jesus himself.
I’m praying for all of us, that we will see more fully the beauty and wonder of the death and resurrection of Jesus.
In Christ,
Greg Burdette
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