I'm pretty chuffed. When you mentioned spending the next few episodes with paintings leading up to Easter, I thought of Dali as a contender. Although, I prefer his Last Supper to the Crucifixion.
His idea of bringing a sense of Divine Beauty to the cross is really interesting as a concept, but I do feel that removing the ugliness from the moment removes an important aspect of the reality. It has a sense of trying to have Easter Sunday on Good Friday, without going through the process of Good Friday and Holy Saturday to get there. There is a way in which this is possible, in that God is outside of time and so all these things are concurrent to him, but as temporal creatures who are way too easily tempted to skip the suffering to get to the good stuff, I'm not sure how helpful this generally is.
It puts me in mind of a conversation I had with a friend at our church and the difficulty we have in partaking in Communion with grape juice instead of wine. The pastors have very well thought out and prayed over reasons for disallowing alcohol at official church gatherings, and we abide by them, but the sweetness of the grape juice takes away an important embodied element of the bitterness present in Communion.
We’re doing two on Dali and his Christ of st john; and then, Lord willing, we will do two on “procession to Calvary” by Pieter Bruegel. And the rest of your comment is so wonderful! In the next episode, we wrestle with those issues in your second paragraph. And I LOVE the part about communion grape juice. I really relate to that!
A couple things came to mind listening to this episode.
One is a favorite line from the Jesus Story Book Bible: “You see, they didn’t understand it wasn’t the nails that held him there. It was love.”
Second, recently a friend asked me why Jesus was still hanging on the crucifix in our home (I’m pretty sure that’s normal for crucifixes, but this caused them theological offense…) I responded that, “well, I suppose being the Lamb slain from before the foundation of the world, He is eternally on the cross, as He is eternally resurrected. I might have even gotten than idea from one of your conversations about eternity and time. Ha! But that’s what I think of when I see this Dali’s perspective of Christ hanging over the world, but no longer with nails holding him there.
I'm pretty chuffed. When you mentioned spending the next few episodes with paintings leading up to Easter, I thought of Dali as a contender. Although, I prefer his Last Supper to the Crucifixion.
His idea of bringing a sense of Divine Beauty to the cross is really interesting as a concept, but I do feel that removing the ugliness from the moment removes an important aspect of the reality. It has a sense of trying to have Easter Sunday on Good Friday, without going through the process of Good Friday and Holy Saturday to get there. There is a way in which this is possible, in that God is outside of time and so all these things are concurrent to him, but as temporal creatures who are way too easily tempted to skip the suffering to get to the good stuff, I'm not sure how helpful this generally is.
It puts me in mind of a conversation I had with a friend at our church and the difficulty we have in partaking in Communion with grape juice instead of wine. The pastors have very well thought out and prayed over reasons for disallowing alcohol at official church gatherings, and we abide by them, but the sweetness of the grape juice takes away an important embodied element of the bitterness present in Communion.
We’re doing two on Dali and his Christ of st john; and then, Lord willing, we will do two on “procession to Calvary” by Pieter Bruegel. And the rest of your comment is so wonderful! In the next episode, we wrestle with those issues in your second paragraph. And I LOVE the part about communion grape juice. I really relate to that!
A couple things came to mind listening to this episode.
One is a favorite line from the Jesus Story Book Bible: “You see, they didn’t understand it wasn’t the nails that held him there. It was love.”
Second, recently a friend asked me why Jesus was still hanging on the crucifix in our home (I’m pretty sure that’s normal for crucifixes, but this caused them theological offense…) I responded that, “well, I suppose being the Lamb slain from before the foundation of the world, He is eternally on the cross, as He is eternally resurrected. I might have even gotten than idea from one of your conversations about eternity and time. Ha! But that’s what I think of when I see this Dali’s perspective of Christ hanging over the world, but no longer with nails holding him there.
Excellence - love the 'magnetic suspension'? (I thought the cross might be steel), and the work of ricochét across expressions idea! Amen!! ♥️