To “Retouch” a Masterpiece
For
God has imprisoned all in disobedience
so
that he may be merciful to all.
(Romans 11:32)
A Maundy Thursday meditation
by Siegfried S. Johnson, April 5, 2007
First United Methodist
Church, 605 West Sixth, Mountain Home, Arkansas 72653
Leonardo Da Vinci’s famed masterpiece,
The Last Supper,
has been retouched. I don’t refer here to Dan Brown’s
Da Vinci Code,
a definite re-interpretation of the famous work’s
intent. I refer rather to the twenty-two year
restoration project begun in 1977 and completed in 1999,
when The Last Supper
was again placed display. It’s back. It’s beautiful.
It’s sharper and more colorful than ever, allowing the
public to grasp its legendary beauty.
Not
everyone is happy. The $8 million project took over two
decades to painstakingly, literally microscopically,
scrape off 500 years of grime, one millimeter at a
time. With the face-lift now complete, visitors to the
15th century Church of Santa Maria delle
Grazie in Milan, Italy can see a much brighter depiction
of the last Thursday night meal shared by Jesus and the
disciples.
Paint
from past restorations and dirt were flaked away, tiny
bit by tiny bit, to get to Da Vinci’s 1497 masterpiece.
The fresco has now survived nine re-touchings, damage
inflicted by Napoleon’s troops (who used the church as a
barracks in 1799), grease buildup from a nearby kitchen
(the work on the wall of the refectory, or Dining Hall,
of the original Dominican Convent), and the Allied
bombing of 1943, which while destroying the Refectory
managed to allowed the fresco to survive.
Critics
of the latest project say the endeavor stripped away
important details, leaving nothing more than fragments
of Da Vinci’s original work, and that the intervening
space, as much as 80% of the mural, is filled in with
watercolors.
Retouching a
Masterpiece.
I tell you this story tonight in order to talk about the
retouching of another masterpiece. Humanity. You and
me. Created in God’s image, but fallen, covered with
the grime of human sin, yet now “retouched”
by grace.
My
insert offers, I think, a most provocative image. Many
of you have attended one or more of our Tuesday Lenten
studies, “Addictions.”
In each of those studies I offered photographs in which
I found the contrast between light and shadow to be
interesting and suggestive of the contrast between our
divine and human natures, our higher impulses brought
into tension with our baser, visceral nature of being
drawn toward sin. When I found this image, I thought it
an appropriate way to conclude our Lenten reflections on
this Holy Thursday evening.
It’s
the image of a growing fetus, wonderfully and naturally
curled in a bubble of amniotic fluid. The half and half
appearance of light and shadow is wonderfully suggestive
of our doctrine of human nature since the Fall. In this
fetus one sees both the foreboding dark of our shadow
nature and the promising light, suggestive of our divine
parentage, a light representing the promise that we
harbor rich potential as God’s children. Under the image
I’ve placed David’s words from Psalm 51, words by which
David acknowledged his shadow and faced up to his
inherent sin. “Indeed,
I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived
me.”
In
James Joyce’s classic work,
Finnegan’s Wake,
there is a mysterious number that constantly recurs,
1132. It occurs, for example, inverted as a house
address, 32 West 11th Street. In every
chapter of
Finnegan’s Wake, some way or another, 1132
appears. What in the world is this 1132? Joyce had
given a clue in his earlier book,
Ulysses,
when Leopold Bloom, one of the major characters, is
walking in Dublin when a ball drops from a tower to
indicate that it is noon. Seeing this, Bloom thinks to
himself that the gravitational law of falling bodies is
32 feet per second, something proven by Newtonian
physics. 32, to Joyce, seems to have been the number of
the Fall, making 33 the number of Renewal, of standing
again after the Fall, of the redemption occurring in the
33rd year of Jesus’ life. And 11, like 33
(its multiple times 3), is a number of Renewal, as are
all the prime numbers (numbers only divisible by itself
and 1). Eleven might represent the number of the
renewal of a decade and, of course, the most famous
decade is that of the ten commandments. In other words,
if I’ve confused you, after we have
fallen by
breaking all ten commandments, 11 is the number of
renewal, redemption.
Now,
Finnegans Wake
has to do with an event in a park in Dublin called
Phoenix Park. The phoenix is the bird that burns itself
to death and then rises out of the ashes to come back to
life. Phoenix Park, to James Joyce, thus becomes the
Garden of Eden where the Fall took place. One
fascinating symbol of redemption, of “rising
from the ashes” of the Fall, is that of a
cross planted in the skull of Adam. St. Thomas Aquinas
wrote, “O felix
culpa,” O Happy Transgression! Here’s the
actual line:
O felix culpa,
O certe necessarium Adea
peccatum,
Quae talem ac tantum meruit
habere Redemptorum!
O happy fault,
O necessary sin of
Adam,
Which gained for us so
great a redemption!
St.
Thomas Aquinas showed us in these lines that the Fall is
the soil from which redemption and divine love issue
forth. Without that Fall, without that death, there
would be no redemption. Out of ten comes eleven.
11-32 -- Risen from the Fall. Risen from the Ashes.
Some
suggest that Joyce may have found inspiration for 1132
from another source. Look again at our text. Not the
words. The reference. Romans 11:32. Now look at the
words of Romans 11:32. “For
God has imprisoned all in disobedience, so that he may
be merciful to all.” 1132. Redemption from
the Fall. Imprisoned in disobedience, yet recipients of
mercy. God’s commandments broken, yet a fresh start.
Our very sin has awakened God’s compassion
and love, and we rise from the Fall as the phoenix from
the ashes.
For
Joyce, the number 1132 was a divine paradox. The cross
of redemption erected in the skull of Adam, we are
raised to a more excellent, more glorious position than
we could have known in a Paradise of innocence. God, in
grace, has “Retouched
the Masterpiece” marred by sin.
After
our Communion, we will strip the sanctuary of color and
leave it bare. We will interrupt the reading of the
Passion account in John’s gospel with Psalm 88. This
is a passage that pilgrims read, as our group did a
couple of weeks ago, while in the hewn out pit beneath
the Church of St. Peter Gallicantu in Jerusalem. This
is known as the House of Caiaphas, and the pits beneath
are known as ancient holding places in Jerusalem.
Tradition has it that for several hours on the night he
was betrayed, Jesus was lowered into that pit where he
stayed in aloneness as Peter, above in the courtyard,
had denied him and fled (Gallicantu means the place of
the cock crowing). In that pit we read this same 88th
Psalm, and the lights are cut off so we can feel the
primitive darkness of the pit as it was in Jesus’ day.
But
from that Pit he rose to Glory. A glorious rising took
place after the fall into the pit, from desolation and
abandonment to Glory and Salvation. “He
has become obedient unto death, even the death of the
cross, wherefore God has given him a name that is above
every other name, that at the name of Jesus every knee
shall bow.”
That
rising from the ashes of the Pit is the experience of
salvation offered to each of us. Architect/sculptor
James Hubbell tells of a man who had a recurring dream
that he was being led to the executioner’s block where
he would be beheaded. In the dream, he knelt at the
block and presented his neck. The sword came swooping
down. But just before it sliced off his head, it glided
into slow motion, glanced off his neck very gently and
touched his shoulder with an elegant tap. What had
begun as an execution had turned into a ceremony of
knighting, marking not the end, but initiation into new
life. The sword of destruction became the source of
honor and blessing. He was raised from the
executioner’s block as one knighted by the King, the
very same King who had proclaimed his death sentence.
Raised
from the executioner’s block are we, knighted by the
very one, the King of the Universe, who had pronounced
the sentence, “The
wages of sin is death.”
We who were
headed to the executioner’s block have been escorted
away from that place of death, raised “a
royal priesthood . . . in order that we may proclaim the
mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into
his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but
now you are God’s people; once you had not received
mercy, but now you have received mercy” (1
Peter 2:9-10).
Sources:
Dr. Leonard Sweet, “The
Dirt on Da Vinci,” in HOMILETICS,
Volume 12, Number 2.
This commentary on Joyce’s
Finnegans Wake is from Joseph Campbell’s
interviews with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth,
Betty Sue Flowers, Editor, Doubleday, 1988, page 116.
The image of the fetus below is found on page 124.