Reflections on the Passion of Jesus
Passion Sunday/Lent 5, 1st April, 2001
The Rev'd Dr Colin Holden
Assistant Priest and Archivist, St Peter's Eastern Hill
Recently, when I visited Brisbane, I went to look in well known church for
an Arthur Boyd ceramic tile of the Crucifixion. I had seen a photograph of it
in a journal from 1954, the year it was installed. It showed not a traditional
crucifixion, but a distorted, even bloated, ugly figure. It looked quite
challenging. How daring, I thought, for someone to have put it in not long
after World War II. But I couldn't find it. When I finally asked about it, I
was told that it had been removed some time ago; it was in a bank vault. Was
this, I wondered, because people became aware of the tile as a work of Arthur
Boyd? I eventually contacted the priest who had been incumbent at the time of
its installation. The innovator was Father Peter Bennie, formerly a regular
worshipper at St Peter's, and a regular correspondent of Father Maynard's. He
told me that it had originally been placed at eyelevel near the altar rail; but
people found this rather realistic and distressing image of the crucifixion too
confronting as they came to receive their communion. There seemed to have been
some attempt at an alternative position, but for some that was still not enough.
A little later, I was in Newcastle cathedral, where a remarkable pulpit
crucifix of terracotta shows Jesus not with a facial expression suggesting
acceptance or repose, but a defiant, tortured face. This too had been a representation that attracted considerable criticism and resistance on its
installation in the 1970s when Robert Beale was dean of Newcastle. It had
also originally been a naked figure - thus historically accurate. Because
the figure was in terracotta, it was possible to make a loincloth without
making a whole new mould from which to cast the whole figure, as would have
been the case had it been a work in bronze. When it reappeared in modified
form, the former dean recalled only two objections. The original model for
this work in completely unmodified form remains in a Brisbane church
building - but it is not a parish church.
These incidents seem to involve some worshippers who did not want to be
disturbed by something that is inherently disturbing, the Passion of Jesus.
But the Passion is disturbing and confronting. And we enter into a season in
which we should undergo some degree of disturbance or disquiet. That is part
of what lies behind the veiling of our visual aids to worship in Lent. We are
part of a tradition that places considerable emphasis on their importance, we
say that they have a quite positive value. But at this point, we cover them,
not just because we are going into a kind of mourning, which we are, but for
a far more confronting reason. We are admitting the inadequacy of all our
visual aids: none of them really conveys the impact of this event or sequence
of events in all its power to disturb us. We have to find that somewhere else,
not in visual aids. In fact, visual aids can blunt our responses, become an escape from what we need to be confronted by.
What might that be? There are many possible answers, but I will offer just a
few. Basically, if we are disturbed by violence, evil in its external
manifestation as we see it in the Passion of Jesus, then we need to be honest
in recognising its presence both outside ourselves, and within. And having
recognised its presence, to choose appropriate ways of responding so as to
initiate change. Not necessarily shallow activism.
Perhaps I am about to concentrate on our capacity for self deception.
Capacity to kid ourselves that this can't be us. People can do this as a
community. A recent television program looked at, among other things, the
history of the White Australia policy, Yes, it acknowledged that this was a
story of exclusion by the community. But as the narrative proceeded, it was
quick to point out that 'Australia's history has always been one of change'.
It sounded as though the supporters of multicultural values, and those wishing
to dismantle the policy were always there in the wings, patiently waiting. The
flowering of liberalism was just waiting to burst forth, and now that this has
happened, all is well. It was not honest in acknowledging the substantial
agreement and complicity of a large part of community. We need to look deeper
below the surface into many aspects of the communities that form this country,
and not deceive ourselves with such shallow optimism or trust in seemingly
evolutionary progress.
Similar dynamics can characterise our view of individuals, whether ourselves
or others. Recently, a cousin who works in the area of prison assessment and
review was locked in for a day with a group consisting entirely of serial
rapists and murderers. She found this quite disturbing - not because these
people were what they were, but because they didn't possess any distinguishing
features. In many cases, they were 'nicer' than many other prisoners with whom
she had dealt; among them were the well-educated, trained, competent,
articulate. I received a very dour look when I responded: 'just, I suppose,
like the rest of the neighbours in the Broadway, Camberwell'. And in the novel
'Holocaust' which was turned into a television mini-series in the late 1970s,
one of the key points in the story's treatment of the Gestapo was that an
officer involved in systematic mass murder went home from his office desk to
act as an exemplary husband and parent. We need to be careful lest we excuse
ourselves from honest self examination by deciding that serious potential for
serious failing and real evil cannot exist behind surfaces like our own,
because they are ordinary-looking ones. Those who participated in the events
of Good Friday were mainly ordinary citizens, neither the great, the gifted
nor those chased for various reasons by fame and attention. The darkness was
shared by people like us. If we aren't disturbed by that, we should be.
There is another side to this coin concerning self-deception or lack of
awareness or truthfulness about ourselves. It is this. We need to be careful
lest we deceive ourselves about the specialness of evil and suffering as
experienced by us. Communities can do this; so can individuals. Groups can
certainly do this, and claim that there is no suffering that matches or is
like theirs. There is a line of argument that sees the Holocaust as something
unique, stemming from particular factors peculiar to German history and
culture. If that is the case, it has limited meaning for the rest of the world
and its peoples. Instead, I opt for the more frightening possibility: that its dynamics are not grounded in something peculiar to that time and culture, but
that it is an extreme expression of a kind of evil that can rise in many different societies, and could even arise in our own, if we were careless,
complacent, or complicit enough to allow that to happen.
If I think that we could be indulging in dangerous self-deceit as a
community if we were to pretend that nothing like that could ever happen here,
what about deceiving ourselves about the specialness of our own individual
pains and sufferings. When individuals claim that there is no suffering that
matches or is like theirs, they make it very difficult for themselves to
harness anything positive, or learn from, the difficulties and sufferings,
the ways through, experienced by others. They just couldn't be anything like
mine, and if they dealt with things at all positively, then that was because
they just didn't have something to deal with of the same magnitude or similar
dynamics. I can't learn from, receive support from their example or experience
as I face my own. We claim that the Passion of Jesus is in many ways unique.
But we also claim that here, there are also elements that are common for all
of us. And Christian thought has said that not only of the experience of
various kinds of evil and darkness, but of the way through. Whatever way there
was for Jesus, there is something of that available for us. Likewise, the
concept of the communion of saints includes the idea that there are some common
grounds between us, trying to deal with major and minor issues in our lives,
and those who have gone before us. They are not so different from us, that
some of the solutions they found applicable simply can't in any way be tried
by us and found to work .
It would be to state the obvious in closing to remind us of what currently
surrounds us and is in some ways uncharacteristic. In a tradition that
normally puts considerable emphasis on visual symbols, we should have an
almost instant awareness of the blotting out of the normal visual devotional
aids that starts with the veiling at the beginning of Lent and is reinforced
by the change to the more pronounced purple veiling as we move into Passion
Week and Holy Week. It can of course be regarded as a visual expression of
mourning. But it really comes down to a much more fundamental proposition than
that. It is really an acknowledgement of the inadequacy of all our visual aids.
None of them are adequate vessels for conveying the events of Good Friday.
Sheer familiarity can blunt our responses to even the most literal versions
of the Crucifixion and its prelude. Instead, we are invited to be disturbed
by going back to look not at images, but at live human beings, others and
ourselves, and contemplate those for a while. Yes, there are ways through,
very costly ones. But we will only find them, if first we allow ourselves to
be disturbed in one way or another.
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