CHRIST FOR OUR TIME John M. Buchanan

Reflections on the Sculpture and Broad Street Prespyterian Church
Paintings on the Theme of Christ Teaching, Columbus, Ohio

by Jack Greaves

Matthew 16:13~20

May 27, 1979

The Thirceenth century Philosopher and Saint of the Roman Church, Bonaventure,
once described painting as "open scripture for those who could not read", Some-
times, even literate people need help in expressing the most deeply felt emotions,
We know, I think, that words - written or spoken ~ are not always adequate, particu-
larly our words, We find that our inarticulate feelings are reflected, amplified
and expressed by people with a special gift of sensitivity: Shakespeare, Edna St,
Vineent Millay, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Frost, Who has not discovered
that music communicates feeling much more expressively than words? J,8,Bach's
Come Sweet Death is a powerful piece of music and moves people to tears quite apart
from its subject matter, Beethoven's Ode to Joy in the Ninth Symphony soars with
profound gladness, Even a sentimental love song manages to say more than most of us
ean put into our own words,

Likewise, visual art expresses what words cannot: for instance, the stained
glass windows, the table and cross, the shape of the building and, of course, "Christ
Teaching”, As the thirteenth century Saint observed, painting and sculpture can be
open scripture, God's living word can be appropriated through art; not instead of
the spoken and written Word, but in addition to speaking and writing simply because
in art the the Word can find fullness and richness and depth which words do not and
cannot convey.

My sermon this morning uses for a text a work of art: the sculpture and paintings,
“Christ Teaching", commissioned for Broad Street Presbyterian Church as a memorial
gift and dedicated two weeks ago, ‘There is a sense in which the sculpture, as well
as sermon, grows out of the scripture we heard this morning: the question Jesus posed
to His disciples, "Who do you say that I am?"

The commissioning of sculpture for a church was unusual, There are some, but
not many, objects of serious art in Protestant churches. Pieces of sculpture are
rare and sculpture depicting Jesus is almost non-existent - in the church, There are
several reasons, and I thought it might be interesting this morning to examine them,

Twentieth century Presbyterians have roots in four separate histerical sources:
Old Testament Judaism, the culture of the Greeks and Romans which was our first home,
the Protestant Reformation in Germany and Switzerland and British Protestantism,
particularly in its Puritan and Scottish Presbyterian form, Each, in a way, has had
an influence on the subject at hand,

Judaism was born out of idolatry. The earliest and, in many ways, most impor-
tant idea in Judaism is monotheism: "The Lord our God is one", The other nations of
the Mesopotamian Basin had many gods, symbolized by a bewildering array of idols,
Israel was convinced that God was one, Jahweh was His name, He was the God even of
the nations which did not recognize Him, God, in early Jewish theology, was majestic,
magnificent: He could not be contained in a biock of carved wood or stome. In fact,
to attempt so to contain Him was blasphemy, "You shall have no other gods before me"
is the first commandment, And the second spells it out in detail: "You shall not
make yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or
that is in the earth beneath,,,You shall not bow down to them and serve them," What's

a graven image? Does that mean that God doesn't want people to draw pictures or
wear jewelry fashioned to look like stars or apples or frogs? What it means is that
Israel cannot be Israel and practice the same kind of religion as all her neighbors,
God is one, He requires no idol, It is no coincidence that at the v.71 y moment Moses
was up on the mountain talking to God about the rules, the pedple were down in the
valley paying the Canaanite priests of Baal to build a golden calf so they could
worship it, They preferred that,you see, because Baal worship wasn't quite as
rigorous as Jahweh worship, Jews had to make sacrifices and behave themselves, In
the cult of Baal worship meant having a party and getting drunk,

From the beginning, idolatry has been the threat, Jewish scholar, Heinrich
Gratz observes that "paganism sees its god: Judaism hears him," (Journal of Current
Social Issues, Fail, 1978, Art_as Prayer, Joseph Gutmann, p.75ff), That's first?
the primal Hebrew abhorrence of idols,

Our second, historical source is the environment for the birth and growth of the
Christian Church - the culture of Greece and Rome, As you know, it was a sophisti-
cated culture artistically, And so visual art was part of the Christian experience
from the outset, Sculpture and painting were done for the church and by the church,
During the Dark Ages the monasteries kept the old culture alive until, in the Rennais-
sance, it was reborn in the greatest explosion of art in the history of the world,
Much of it was commissioned by, paid for and installed in the church,

The trouble is that sometimes people forgot that art points elsewhere, Some-
times, in the minds of the people the work of art became the thing it represented, so
that a sculpture of St, Jude actually became St, Jude; and prayers to the Virgin Mary, |
said in front of an icon the purpose of which was to help the believer understand the
Virgin Mary, actually were said to the piece of sculpture. The trouble is that art
is very powerful and when people forget that art is art and God is God, idolatry be«
comes an immediate possibility, That's what it Looked like, frankly, to the Reformers,

To make matters worse, the visual arts were allied with the pomp and power which
contrasted so vividly with the simplicity of the Word of God they had rediscovered,

A Lutheran Reformer, Karlstadt, pulled down all the images in the former Roman
now Lutheran Church of which he was pastor, Across Germany zealous Reformers followed
suit: the intricably carved wood and stone rood screens were smashed, icons, relics,
paintings and tapestries burned, and sculptures dragged into the streets, In Zurich,
Huldrich Zwingli personally supervised the removal of all art objects from the cathe-
dral and the white washing of the walls,

The Word of God, God's self-revelation, in the Reformation, became exclusively
the written words of the Bible and the spoken words of the Reformers, As you Can
understand it was one of the most important developments that ever occurred in
Western civilization, It is related to universal education and literacy and the
particular incredible intellectual development of the West. But, at the same time
it robbed Western Christianity of an entire mode of expressing itself, The redis~
covery of the Word of God in the written and spoken words of men is both the genius
and poverty of Protestantism,

There is a fourth source for our traditions: British Puritanism, John Dillen-
berger, President of the Hartford Seminary Foundation, who lectured at the Columbus
Gallery last spring observes wryly that Catholic and Protestant history differs
geographically as well as theologically: and that Meditarranean ease with the body,
nurtured by climate and natural exposure contrasts with the clothed and cold north,

~3-

"As one moves from south to north, the senses narrow and inescapably internalized,"
(Current Social Issues, Fall, 1968, Faith and Sensitivity, p,62).

Henry VILE ripped the art out of the monasteries to demonstrate who was King,
Cromvell did it for theological reasons, That, plus the climate, say the scholars,
is the reason the British have majored in furniture, china, jewelry, and gardens,
and minored in sculpture and painting, Their greatest genius has been the word,
Dillenberger notes that "Just as England had no counterpart to Michelangelo, Raphael
and Rembrandt, the continent had no counterpart to Shakespeare, Donne and Milton.”
(Op,cit., p.64),

English Puritans were afraid that anything which could powerfully affect the
human emotions, could interfere with a person's obedience to the will of God, Any-
thing a person loved too much; music, art, poetry, drama, games ~ had to be curtailed
for the health of the soul,

Those are out roots: they contain many of the reasons why it is unusual and
important for serious art, a piece of sculpture, to appear in the sanctuary of a
Protestant Church. Professor Joseph Gutman of Wayne State summarizes: "In the absence
of a truly religious art, both the synagogue and the church have had to be content
with art styles emerging from the secular sphere, Often the result is that sacchar~
ine melodramatic Madonnas are endorsed by the church, just as bearded, sentimental-~
ized, pietistic Rabbis,,,are accepted..,This art is vacuous, lacking any enduring
power to move or challenge. It cannot be expected to arouse sentiments which demand
a genuinely deep emotional involvement," (Ibid, p.77).

That, happily, is not the situation at Broad Street Presbyterian Church, What
we have is serious art, Laying history aside I should like now to reflect on the
sculpture and Paintings,

The imagination of the artist, Jack Greaves, stimulated it, it was his idea to
do a Christ figure, I confess that I resisted it emotionally and intellectually at
first; there was no precedent for it in my own experience, I could not remember
ever seeing a sculpture of Jesus in a Protestant Church, (i have since discovered a
triumphant and heroic seulpture of the risen Christ in the back of Riverside Church,
New York City, hich above the balcony.) But the more I thought it through the more
I concluded that my hesitation was not terribly rational; that no Presbyterian
Christian was going to confuse this work of art with the person of Jesus Christ:
that no one was poing to worship it - and that to the ultimate question, "Why not?"
there were no levitimate answers, It was a happy decision, even if by default,

Once the decision to proceed was reached by the artist and donors the Session
of this Church exercised real courage and intelligent leadership by approving
unanimously, The artist and I began a kind of unscheduled and unstructured dia-
logue, We talked about churches and Christianity and Jesus and the role of the church
and the different ways people perceive and hear and see the same things,

L thought you might be interested in some uf the things he wrote to me from
England while working on this project, On December 4, 1978 Mr, Greaves wrote: "The
initial concept which was slightly Byzantine in style with the ornamental halo has
been systematically abandoned and I really think, because I am a product of a more
humanistic age I have sculptured a Christ - the Man ~ the Teacher, And yet not just
aman, I read that when Donatello as a young sculptor had carved a crucifix he asked

~&-

his friend Filippo Brunellesci to see the work, When he saw it he is reported to
have said,'It is not Christ but a peasant which thou has crucified'," Mr, Greaves,
who claims not to be a theologian, here was dealing with the central affirmation ~
and the abiding mystery of the Christian faith; the Incarnation, the Word made
flesh, God amonz us in the life of a man, a peasant, Mr, Greaves deseribed Him: "A
man who has spent time alone in the wilderness, who has walked and traveled hard in
a very hard Land,"

The title of this sermon came from that same letter in which he wrote, "One of
my artist friends said, after seeing the sculpture, ‘It is a Christ for our time’,"

The work invites you to respond, to see and interpret what you see on the basis
of your own sensitivities, What I can do, will now do, in conclusion, is to tell you
what I see and what it stimulates in me,

I see, first, the man Jesus, From the earliest days of our history, we Christians |
have been strugcling with His humanity, Our faith is that God dwelt in Him: that He
was and is the divine Son of God, Gur faith is that He was also totally a man, In
reality, we have often placed Him somewhere between deity and humanity. About one
hundred years after His Life the early Christians started to hedge on that issue, He
only seemed to be human, they said, He didn’t really hurt and get tired and angry
and hungry. He didn't really die, It has been one of the more enduring heresies. A
heavenly Christ is simply not very real. An ethereal teacher, gentle, meek and mild
makes our faith "other worldly" and irrelevant. Swinburne, with great sarcasm, called
Him the “Pale Galilean": and thac is what He becomes, not human, not real, not impor~
tant, I see a reminder in this art that the Lord of the Church, my Lord, was a man:
that He lived the same Life I am living and felt the same things I have felt: that in
Him God has experienced my anxieties and worries and noble dreams: that in this life
God has taken on himself my own fear of death ~ my dying, All of that depends on a
Lord who was human,

I am reminded in the most literal sense, of what He taught: that out of His own
rich Judaic faith something new emerged: the imperative to love, More subtly T am
reminded that there are two major thrusts to His teaching: two sides, therefore, to
the Christian faith: two assignments for the church which bears His name,

The raised right hand, traditional posture of teaching, reminds me that we be-
Lieve He embodies truth, What is true about God and humanity and life and the future,
we believe, may be seen in the Life of this man, I am reminded that if was He who
said that the truth will make us free, Beside that right hand of truth is the proto~
type teaching parable: a Roundel depicting the Parable of the Sower and the Seaed,.,
He's carefree, there is a certain confident abandon in the way he does his job, He
knows that God vill provide growth if he is a faithful sower, That, for me, is one
half of our purpose: not to save souls, God will take care of that, But to tell the
truth: to witmess to the truth as ve perceive it,

The left hand, stretched out compellingly, powerfully, is love in action, It is
the hand of healing, and feeding and friendship welcoming. Over it is a remarkable
painting of love’s imperative: the road to Jericho through the eyes of a man from
Samaria who, in stopping to help a wounded traveler, illustrated the new morality of
Jesus, ‘The picture draws me in, It invites an ethical decision: will you stop and
heip, or pass by on the other side?

-~ 5 -

The two great ideas of Christian faith: the word of truth and the act of love,
have often been wrenched apart. One has been emphasized over the other and the
dichotomy has caused dissidence and conflict throughout the whole Christian Church,

On the right, the evangelicals want to tell the story of Jesus, On the left, the
social activists want to liberate the oppressed, The right wants to save souls, the
left wants to change society, The richt wants to study the Bible, the left wants
National Health Care, The right wants peace of mind: the left wants peace between
nations, One of the tragedies of our time is that the church has so frequently

yielded to the temptation to go in one direction or the other, Leslie Newbigin, British
theologian, writes about what results when Christian people allow that to happen: "pro-
grams for justice, severed from the liturgical life of the congregation, lose their
character as signs of the presence of Christ and become crusades fueled by self-
righteous moralism, And the life of a worshipping congregation, apart from compagsion-
ate service to the secular community cisks becoming self-centered, serving only the
needs and desires of its members." (The Open Secret, p.11). Jesus said both, Jesus
held them both together in His teaching and in His Life,

I believe Presbyterianism has that to offer the whole,diverse institutional
church, We are not the largest church, by far. But we keep struggling to hold to-
gether the two sides, the two poles on the spectrum and thus the wholeness of the
Gospel, That is also, the uniqueness and greatness of this particular church, We are
here for a purpose, God has given us a job to do, He wants us to keep telling the
story as our predecessors did before us, But He has given us a new assignment, Part
of it, I believe, is to express, here, the wholeness of the Gospel: to Love one another;
to teach the truth; and to do the truth in acts of reconciling justice and love,

Mrs, Huntinzton, Mrs, Pace and Mr, Greaves have given us something to think about
for a long, long time to come, In fact, I'm inclined to believe that they haven't
been in this thine alone: that someone else has been pushing and prodding and inspir- —
ing: that God has had a hand in it all along. That is a very old idea, It comes
from a marvelous story I discovered tic week from the Midrash,the collection of carly
Rabbinic literature, "Twice Moses ascended to Mt, Sinai to receive instruction about
the Menorah, and twice he forgot the instructions on his descent, The third time,God
took a Menorah of fire and showed him every detail of it, And yet Moses found it hard
to form a clear conception of the Menorah, Finally God told him, 'Go to Bezelel, the
artist in the desert, He will make it,’ Moses did as instructed, The artist made a
beautiful Menorah with ease, Moses cried in amazement, 'To me it was shown many times
by the Holy One, blessed by He, yet I found it hard to grasp; but you, without see~
ing it, could fashion it with your intelligence, Surely you must have been standing
in the shadow of God, while the Hely One was showing me its construction',"” (Op, cite
Journal of Social Issues),

That, it seems to me, is the open-ended conclusion suggested by our tradition,
faith and experience, God's word is spoken in many different ways, We are exper-
iencing a new one: we are standing in a new shadow,

Amen,

God of mystery and majesty, we give thanks for the clear perceptions of
artists, Help us to see what they see. God of love, thank you for Jesus, Your
Son, out Lord for His words of truth; for His gracious and compassionate Life,
0 God, Bless us, as we follow Him; give us strength to love one another and to
serve as our neishbors; through Jesus Christ our Lord,

Amen,