In this final post in the series Who is Jesus, the images are chosen to reflect the love and compassion of Jesus as he meets us in our failure and weakness and touches us with the miracle of grace.
learning to be fully alive, fully human
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The ‘future’ has appeared already: what the Christian life moves towards is the pattern of a human life already lived.
Rowan Williams
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Go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee
Mark16:7
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God is a beckoning word.
Gerard Hughes
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Wlodimierz Kohut Jesus the Good Gardener
Mark’s gospel ends abruptly – with the women being told that the risen Jesus “ is going ahead of you to Galilee: there you will see him, just as he told you”. The irony of this is that throughout the gospel Jesus has again and again, after a miracle, told people to tell no-one – and each time they do. And yet here – after the Resurrection – even the women remain silent.
What difference does it make if you get in touch with the Jesus who offers us a vision
not just of God but of the whole of humanity
a vision of what a fully alive, fully human being is like.
Isaac Fanous Feeding of the Multitude 
Kim Young Gil Jesus and the Woman Caught in Adultery 
Julia Stankova The Healing of the Demon-Possessed Man
Julian of Norwich says that “Love is God’s meaning”: Love is also our meaning. Love is not an ideal or a demand: Love is who we essentially are, made in God’s image, made for love, where, in honouring our capacity for self-transcendence in giving ourselves away, we reach our full stature as human beings.
Mark is a gospel about failure – the disciples’ failure….and ours. Yet it is also an encouraging gospel: we may fail – even again and again – yet Jesus is saying that God is committed to us. Clearly for Mark the resurrection is above all, not a doctrine to be believed but a mystery to be lived. And it is only through the places of weakness and vulnerability and failure that we will be able to hear and begin to live its truth.
Watanabe Sadao Christ Washing the Feet of Saint Peter
Stay with your unknowing, your doubting, your failure and weakness
your poverty
and let the Risen Jesus touch you there.
This is not something we can conjure up, or make happen:
it is the miracle of grace.
Bartimeaus is, according to Mark, what a true disciple of Jesus is. He knows he is addressed, even though he is an outsider: he listens to his deepest desire: he is willing to commit himself and take the next step: he throws off his cloak and lets go of anything and everything that gets in the way of following. We are not told: but if Mark is telling the truth about the disciples and us, then Bartimaeus will fail: for discipleship is not measured by our success at following but about Jesus’ faithfulness in calling.
Image details:
Oscar Towa Fishing with the Children
The image at the top of this post is from Papua New Guinean artist, Oscar Towa, from Keronagi in the
Chimbu Province of the Western Highlands.
He says ‘Jesus like to be with children in village as he can laugh, sing, play games and share meals with them, but now Jesus has taken the children out in a canoe for fishing, always exciting for children. They all are very happy to catch fish. Even the pukpuk (crocodile) face on the prow of the canoe is happy.’
Image and text courtesy Major Issues and Theology Foundation in the catalogue for the exhibition Jesus Laughing and Loving.
Włodzimierz Kohut Jesus the Good Gardener visualizes the gardener metaphor with humor. It shows a Byzantine-style Jesus with a rainbow halo, wearing a hipster sweater and overalls with his name (in Polish) sewn onto the front pocket. With his right hand he blesses, and with his other he holds a watering can. He lovingly waters the “seedlings” in his ceramic planter: that is, human beings in modern dress. They stand knee-deep in the soil in various attitudes, some eagerly awaiting their growth, others resisting it.
Text and image courtesy Art and Theology blog
Isaac Fanous Feeding of the Multitude
Fanous was an Egyptian artist and scholar, who specialized in Coptic art and founded its contemporary school. He was one of the first students of the Institute of Coptic Studies His two-year study grant in the Louvre in the mid – 1960s was a turning point in his career. He took the opportunity, while in France, to study icon painting under Leonid Ouspensky, under whose patronage he developed a passion both as artist and theologian. This would lead, eventually, to his developing a style that was to become the new face of Coptic iconography in the mid-20th century.
Kim Young Gil Jesus and the Woman Caught in Adultery, Christ and Bartimaeus
Kim Young Gil was born in 1940 while his Korean family was seeking refuge in Jilin province, China. His Christian family fled from Korea under Japanese colonization. After Korea became independent, his family returned to Korea, and he later entered Hongik University to study Visual Arts. In his school years, he won the first prize at the Sydney International Art Contest with a painting titled “Upper Room”. This incident had a great impact on his life as he later decided to devote his talent only to draw Christian paintings.
Julia Stankova The Healing of the Demon-Possessed Man
When I was a child I knew that I was born to be an artist. It was a good chance that immediately after leaving my job, friends of mine allowed me to help in their restoration studio. There I had the opportunity to closely observe and touch Bulgarian icons from 18th and 19th century, painted by unknown iconographers.
When I left the restoration studio two years later, I was already mastering the technique of icon-painting on wooden panel, which gave me the possibility to continue my work as an independent artist. I started to develop a kind of symbolic art, in which I was supported by my knowledge of the Byzantine pictorial heritage, on the one hand, and my emotional attraction to the Bible text, on the other.
Watanabe Sadao Christ Washing the Feet of Saint Peter
Watanabe Sadao was born and raised in Tokyo, was a Japanese printmaker in the 20th century. Watanabe was famous for his biblical prints rendered in the mingei (folk art) tradition of Japan. As a student of the master textile dye artist Serizawa Keisuke (1895–1984), Watanabe was associated with the mingei (folk art) movement.
For a printable PDF of the text of this meditation please click here.
