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Holy
Week, “in the old days,” meant that the crucifix and the
images of the saints in our churches were all shrouded
with violet-colored covers. That ancient custom is no
longer generally followed, though the liturgical ordo
tells us it may still be observed. In Holy Week the
Stations of the Cross come alive in our parish churches.
On Good Friday, especially, families “make the stations”
together, and in Rome one of the high points of the
annual observance of the sacred three days (the triduum)
is “praying the Stations” in the evening at the historic
Coliseum. On Good Friday the sacred rites focus on the
cross and the crucifix, and in our churches all over the
country there are moving representations of Jesus on the
cross of His suffering and death. Some of them are
rather traditional or stereotyped, but many
—surprisingly many—are superbly crafted, even genuine,
moving works of art carved with devotion, even with
passionate artistry, by (mostly) unknown local artists.
Then, too, there are the images of the dead Jesus, the
“santo entierro,” which are displayed and carried in
processions on Good Friday also—some of them, again,
authentic works of art.
JESUS
Meets Mary on the Way to the Cross, by Jesuit Fratel
Venzo, SJ, 20th century
A
European priest who had studied religious art all his
life long, after visits to our churches in many of our
cities and towns, and after witnessing some of our Good
Friday processions, expressed regret that not much
serious study, research, documentation and reflection
had been dedicated to Filipino church art across the
centuries.
In the
recent years, parishes building their churches, and
priests assigned to plan and organize their
construction, have occasionally asked me about “the kind
of crucifix” they should commission.
The
crucifix at the main altar is important for both the
official liturgy and for people’s more personal
devotion, especially here in the Philippines. It is
important for its theological signification, above all
in the Good Friday liturgy, which reaches a climax point
in the veneration of the Cross. This veneration
dramatically underlines Saint Paul’s understanding of
our salvation, of the will of God regarding our
salvation. The well-known Dominican scripture scholar
Jerome Murphy O’Connor, an expert on Pauline thought,
writes on this theme:
For
Paul, the will of God is very simple, and this lack of
ambiguity terrifies us. It mandates the following of
Christ who is defined by the cross. This is the revealed
will of God. We must exhibit the self-sacrificing,
empowering love that Christ showed in his crucifixion.
We must bear in our bodies the dying of Jesus in order
that the life of Jesus may be manifested to the world.
Crucifixion is what makes us a Christian.
There is
a text from Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict
XVI, which I give to those who ask me about the crucifix
they would want to create and collocate at their main
altar. It is from his Spirit of the Liturgy, and I would
like to cite him at some length.
“… the
icon of Christ is the center of sacred iconography. The
center of the icon of Christ is the Paschal Mystery:
Christ is presented as the Crucified, the risen Lord,
the One who will come again and who here and now
hiddenly reigns over all. Every image of Christ must
contain these three essential aspects of the mystery of
Christ and, in this sense, must be an image of Easter.
At the same time, it goes without saying that different
emphases are possible. The image may give more
prominence to the Cross, the Passion, and in the Passion
to the anguish of our own life today, or again it may
bring the Resurrection or the Second Coming to the fore.
But whatever happens, one aspect can never be completely
isolated from another, and in the different emphases the
Paschal Mystery as a whole must be plainly evident. An
image of the Crucifixion no longer transparent to Easter
would be just as deficient as an Easter image forgetful
of the wounds and the suffering of the present moment.
And, centered as it is on the Paschal Mystery, the image
of Christ is always an icon of the Eucharist, that is,
it points to the sacramental presence of the Easter
mystery.”
Pope
Benedict tells us that the crucifix should, in some true
way, repeat for us the proclamation of “the mystery of
faith” which we make after the words of consecration at
the Mass: “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will
come again.” The altar crucifix described by Pope
Benedict will challenge the artist who designs it.
We are
told that the so-called miraculous crucifix in the
Franciscan church of San Damiano (?) has a face of
Christ which, looked at from the front, shows him serene
in death, but looked at from one side shows him still in
the agony of suffering, and from the other side, already
in the peace and joy of his risen life. I have never
seen that cross, although I’ve heard the legend that an
angel carved the miraculous face which the human artist
could not complete.
In Metro
Manila, we, of course, have the two striking crucifixes
made by the National Artist Napoleon Abueva. The first,
sculpted under the direction of Fr. John P. Delaney for
the Church of the Holy Sacrifice at the University of
the Philippines in 1955, has the dead Christ on one face
of the cross, and the risen Christ on the other side. It
is suspended from the ceiling, above the altar table.
The second crucifix, created by Abueva just three years
ago for the Church of Our Lady of Pentecost parish at
Loyola Heights, is fixed on the back wall. It tries to
suggest both Jesus’ death (he is still nailed to the
cross) and his resurrection (he looks upward, and his
nailed hands and feet are pulling away from the cross,
and the bands around his body are falling away). Quite a
number of crucifixes recently carved have tried to meet
the difficult demands made by the text of Cardinal
Ratzinger just cited; the one at the chapel of the First
Asia Institute of Technology and Humanities at Tanauan,
Batangas, being one of the latest. It was made by the
young sculptor Vox Angel Bustinera, who has already done
much excellent religious art, e.g., in the Ateneo
University’s Church of the Gesù.
The
well-known art critic Sister Wendy Beckett has written a
small book, Joy Lasts, on the Spiritual in Art, which
centers on the El Greco painting of Jesus on the Cross,
now to be found in the prestigious collection of the
Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The El Greco crucifixion
scene, she says, “seems to me…a miracle of grace.”
“Here is
a crucifixion,” she writes, “that I can look at and
enter into…because here—and this, for me, is unique—I
find the Passion understood rather than shown. El Greco
was no mystic…yet when he painted he moved effortlessly
into a world akin to that of his contemporary
Saint John
of the Cross, mystical poet.”
In his
art, if not in his life, El Greco understood what Jesus
meant when he uttered that final cry, Consummatum est:
it is done, it is accomplished. It was a transforming
moment in my life when I, who had always found Holy Week
and Good Friday almost unendurable, suddenly saw that,
in fact, Jesus died in an ecstasy of joy. He had been
sent by the Father to bring life into the world. He had
done it, achieved what the Father intended. His agony,
physically and emotionally, may not have been any the
less, but in his will Jesus knew the great liberation of
having reached an almost impossible goal. All this I
see, mystically, in El Greco. The intensity of the
surrounding, enveloping darkness…is just beginning to be
pierced by the radiance that Jesus has brought us.…
Jesus
dies, as we all die, alone with his God. He dies as we
hope to die, looking upward, his determination set upon
his father’s will and its consummation. But the most
marvelous touch, to me, is the depiction of the dying
Jesus as already triumphant over death: he does not
escape death; he passes through it and out of it. His
body spirals upward like a white flame, radiating out as
he spreads his arms to share the light with the defeated
shadows.
Jesus
brings before us the uselessness of defense, the joy of
abandonment to a divine purpose.
Saint Paul once wrote that when we are weak, we are strong, a mystical
paradox that this painting makes visual. It is Jesus in
death and in resurrection, dying in pain and rising in
glory, utterly true to the dual dimensions that make him
the spiritual center of so many lives. Joy lasts and
grief passes: that is what I see in El Greco’s Christ on
the Cross.
So much
for a masterpiece of an earlier age, an age of greater
faith than ours. But what of our time? “Each age seeks
imagery, however inadequate, to suggest the meaning of
the death of the crucified Christ, to reveal even a
little of the paschal mystery,” a recent Lenten article
says. “No one style is enough. No one Gospel is enough.
Each time has means, moods, needs of its own. We must
support each other in responding as authentically as we
can to the celebration of the glory of the mysterium
fidei, the mystery of faith.… And in each age we must
hope for the artists who will help us to respond.” (Leo
O’Donovan)
For some
50 years now, one artist has accompanied very much of
the reflection and prayer I have been able to enter into
in the Lenten season. A remarkable French artist of the
20th century, Georges Rouault, created prints on the
passion, death and resurrection of Jesus, but joined to
his images of the Christ images of men and women of our
time undergoing their own “passion” also. The 58 prints
were gathered in a memorable book named Miserere. Side
by side with scenes from the Gospels, done in the same
emotion—charged but rugged expressionist style—are
sketches of contemporary men and women, the poor and the
broken, prostitutes and clowns, victims of our times and
our societies, which make present Jesus’ passion and
dying in our own history.
Rouault,
who was born and grew up in a working-class sector of
Paris in the last decades of the 19th century, “brooded
throughout his life over the plight of the poor, the
indifference of the powerful,” and the injustice we all
have seen and known. And he asked himself what the
presence and message of Christ meant for all this in our
time. He was always close to the hardship and even the
despair of the poor. As a deep and devout Catholic
Christian, his soul resonated with the great suffering
he knew was everywhere present among us.
In his
Miserere prints Christ is seen on the cross often enough
alone, but sometimes with his mother, one of his
disciples and other figures standing or kneeling near
him. In many frames, Jesus has his eyes closed, his head
bent, his arms outstretched, his body strong and stark,
wearing only a strip of loincloth. Obviously caught up
in much suffering, but without blood or stripes
depicted, “his wounds scarcely visible.”
O’
Donovan writes:
“This is
the cross of primal fact, unadorned, its emotional
appeal centered on the death for others of this Man for
Others, before whom only the most profound humility,
without any hysteria, is in order.”
Some
images are almost twin sketches: Jesus appears in a
moment of his passion, and in a print which follows, in
an all but identical pose, an ordinary man is seen. A
line—often from the Scriptures—is cited under each
sketch. For instance, Pascal’s “Jesus will be in agony,
until the end of the world.” Or, “Out of the depths.…”
The message is obvious: this contemporary person’s
suffering is the suffering of the Lord made visible now
to our eyes.
But as
with the passion and dying, so with the Resurrection. A
particularly moving sketch shows us two men standing in
front of each other and reaching out to each other. One
is clad only in loincloth; he has dark hair and beard. A
faint halo surrounds his head. The other man has a very
simple head covering, and is obviously a “common man.”
He wears a thin jersey and what looks like simple
briefs. Both men are looking downwards, as if in an
attitude of mutual reverence. The print bears the title:
“Lord, it is you. I know you.”
It may
be the encounter of Jesus and the disciple Thomas (John
20); or it may be the disciple whom Jesus loved, meeting
him that morning at the seashore (John 21). But surely,
it speaks to us of our own search for Jesus, and our
finding of him by the roadside of our lives. He is the
risen Jesus in the midst of our everyday life. We meet
him among our brothers and sisters. We reach out to them
and we touch Jesus crucified and risen in
them—especially when we reach out to the poor and
powerless, the “little ones” with whom Christ has
identified himself.
Rouault
died in 1959, tormented to the end of his life by the
growing measure of suffering and pain he saw around him,
but alive also to the beauty and hope somehow already
present within that suffering, because of the paschal
mystery—the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus,
God become man for our sakes.
The last
plate of the book Miserere is a powerful, even masterly
portrayal of the head of Jesus wearing the crown of
thorns. Rouault gave it the caption, “By his wounds we
are healed.” Jesus is obviously in the midst of his
passion, in the very center of his suffering. But even
as in the Fourth Gospel, there is a stillness and peace,
an incredible serenity present in his face: a calm of
victory, a presence of glory, of eternity even in the
crucible of pain.
Jesus,
by your death and resurrection you have set us free.
You are
the savior of the world. |
