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No.
1, July 2003
A
Head of Christ by Cornelis van Haarlem
(1562-1638)
Sister
Wendy Beckett
We shall never
know what Jesus looked like. Those who wrote about Him, the Evangelists,
were not interested in how He looked but in what He was, what He meant. But
from early times, artists have imagined that face, usually seeng Jesus as a dark-haired man with a short beard and
dark expressive eyes. It is a majestic face they imagine, and they nearly
always show Jesus in His relationship with us. It is Jesus the judge, or
the teacher, or the healer. He is grave, tender, stern, turning on us the
full force of that divine regard. What I find so moving about this picture
is that this Jesus is not addressing us. He is addressing His Father. Of
course, to show Jesus concentrating the fullness of His attention on those
around Him is profoundly theological. He came to give Himself to us. He
died giving Himself to us: that was His purpose. “For this was I born, for
this did I come into the world”. But this human relationship was the
expression of that infinitely deeper relationship with His Father. It was
that oneness, (the Father and I are one) that all pervading closeness, that
sustained Him. He tells us that He never did His own will, only the will of
the One Who had sent him. The Father’s will was His will. Only a few times
in the gospels do we catch a precious glimpse of Jesus speaking to this
totally loved Father. Usually the communications would have been wordless,
so much a part of His being that it needed no visible outlet. Here Cornelis van Haarlem has caught Jesus in a moment of
conflict. We tend to think of Him as always certain, in command,
emotionally invulnerable. But this is not true. There were times when He
was confused, uncertain. “Now is my soul troubled…” Jesus was fully man,
living as we all do in uncertainties, seeking the best way forward. In this
touching picture, He looks upwards, not in anguish, as in that supreme
moment of need, in the Garden of Gethsemane, but all the same, in need. He
attends, with all the force of His being, on the complete support that is
His God and Father, not in anxiety, but in trust, with love, with hope.
This is what prayer is, a turning to God with the absoluteness that we see
here. And this too, His capacity for prayer, Jesus has given us in His
self-surrender. In His relationship with us He has given us, in the Holy
Spirit, His relationship with His Father.
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