Article
Art
Awe and wonder
Belief
Creed
4 min read

The art of astonishment

Why I am still bowled over by Easter’s implications.

Jamie is Vicar of St Michael's Chester Square, London.

A painting depicts Jesus talking to disciples at a meal.
Caravaggio's The Supper at Emmaus.
The National Gallery.

Recently I wrote about how it would be helpful for those of us in the church to be honest about what we don't know.  

Mary Oliver wrote: 

'Truly, we live with mysteries too marvellous 

to be understood… 

 

Let me keep my distance, always, from those 

who think they have the answers. 

Let me keep company always with those who say 

"Look!" and laugh in astonishment, 

and bow their heads.' 

We begin life by thinking we know everything, and we end it by thinking we know nothing at all, or, very little. Easter confronts us with what we don't know, and what is too marvellous to be understood comprehensively. Sure, the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus is surprisingly staggering. Take Francis Collins, who was Director of the Human Genome project and led the US government's COVID-19 pandemic. He said that he grew up thinking faith was the result of emotionalism or indoctrination. Although his job was saturated in evidence-proving hypotheses, he hadn't taken the trouble to look at the evidence in arriving at his conclusion that God didn't exist, before doing so and giving his life to Christ. 

But even when you've surveyed the wondrous cross and its aftermath, the implications of Easter are unscientific and unsettling, as well as documented and liberating. Try as we might, we can't pin down Jesus. Rowan Williams offers that: 

 "One of the strangest features of the resurrection narratives is precisely this theme of otherness, the unrecognisability of the risen Jesus… For some at least, the encounter with the risen Jesus began as an encounter with a stranger".  

We see this as Mary Magdalene mistakes Jesus for the gardener at the tomb, and similarly with those on the road to Emmaus on the day of the resurrection. They had known Jesus up close, and yet here they travelled quite some way with him before realising it was him. 

This is most beautifully depicted by Caravaggio in his 'The Supper at Emmaus', hanging in the National Gallery in London. As Jesus breaks the bread, their eyes are opened to see what the breaking of his body meant for them. Jesus was hidden in plain sight all along. With the echoes of Christendom, or the Christ-haunted cultures many of us live in, Jesus is hidden in plain sight for us too. We hear echoes, but do not hear his voice. We see fingerprints, but do not see the scarred hands of the Almighty. And in the renaissance master's painting, we see dramatic light and shade, the freeze-frame burst of astonishment of the disciples. As the National Gallery description offers, 

 'he has shown the disciples as ordinary working men, with bearded, lined faces and ragged clothes, in contrast to the youthful beardless Christ, who seems to have come from a different world.’ 

Amidst the mystery, this revelation comes in relation to us. And this is what Caravaggio depicts: that which we find difficult to understand is the joy of a risen saviour who chooses to walk, talk, eat with fellow humans on the day of his resurrection. But, as Williams writes,  

'He eludes and questions our predictions and projections, recedes and hides before our attempts to arrive at adequate, definitive statements... A theology of the risen Jesus will always be, to a greater or lesser extent, a negative theology, obliged to confess its conceptual and imaginative poverty.'  

Perhaps Caravaggio's imagination is less impoverished than most of us!  

Intriguingly, Williams has also written a poem about how the resurrection changes the way those on the road to Emmaus viewed each other. Maybe the anonymity of one of them (the gospel writer, Luke, only names one) helps us to place ourselves in the middle of this mystery. And that is a good place to find ourselves, if we answer the invitation of the risen Jesus and the God who spoke to a captive people through the prophet Jeremiah  

'Call to me, and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know.’ 

For the disciples, the penny drops, but there is still so much they don't know. This is not to say that they know nothing. Jesus is, in many ways, what Donald Rumsfeld would categorise as a 'known unknown'. Christians believe that Jesus revealed himself in the scriptures, but enough for us to know that there's a lot more to know that we don't know. For those with Christian faith, we don’t exchange the certainty of what we know for mystery, but one of the invitations of the resurrection is to incorporate mystery into faith. And this in itself is not difficult: for to encounter Jesus is to be met with wonder. Those on the road to Emmaus didn’t recognise Jesus at first but their hearts burned within them. For John Wesley, his 'heart was strangely warmed', which strikes me as a very British way of saying his heart was burning within him! 

But many of us will attest that to encounter the risen to Jesus is to shout 'look!' and laugh in astonishment, and to bow our heads. 

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Article
Belief
Creed
Weirdness
1 min read

The angels called Melanie or Dave that dwell among us

The metaphysical is very much present in our mundane

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A station concourse with a light well above.
Waiting for an angel at London Bridge station.
Network Rail.

There’s either too much or too little written about angels. There’s the serious hermeneutical stuff of divine messengers from scripture. Then there’s the Hallmark sentimentality about guardians, watching over us as nannies may watch their children playing in the park, picking up and comforting them when knees are grazed. 

They’re supernatural, but appear in human form. It’s incarnational in its way. But there’s plenty to notice of angelic manifestation in regular human beings – that nurses are routinely dubbed angels is both exasperating and earned. 

This is the via media, a third way, for angels: They’re called Melanie or Dave, have mortgages, and dwell among us. It’s just that sometimes they’re angels. These thoughts come after an incident I just experienced at London Bridge station. 

We’d just returned from an extended train tour of southern Europe, celebrating a fortieth wedding anniversary and my seventieth birthday. We’d stopped for a bit of lunch between St Pancras and London Bridge and ran late for our Sussex connection. For the first time in three weeks a huge station elevator was out, with no lift in sight. 

A young woman, maybe 23, appeared from nowhere and offered to take the larger-but-lighter case, striding up with it in her glorious white trousers with gold stripes. Then, a second and a half later, a young man of similar age grabbed my smaller-but-heavier bag and carried it up like a small briefcase. 

“Are you two together?” I gasped in his wake. “No,” he said. “You will be at the top,” I replied. It was a crass thing to say. In the movie they would have been. But this was real life. Two commuters offering random acts of kindness, leaving me marvelling at how wonderful young people are. 

And we can leave it there. Two fit (in both senses) strangers noticing a couple, more than old enough to be their parents, struggling. It’s a facet of ageing to which I’m adjusting; I was shocked and surprised a couple of years ago when a young woman offered me her seat on the Underground. It seems so little time since it was the other way around. 

But there it is again. Ordinary people, transcendent behaviour. And, in a metaphysical sense, our young friends at London Bridge really would be together at the top, supported on angels’ wings, though they would laugh that off and the moment would be quickly forgotten. 

These are trivial moments of angelic intervention in ordinary life. But they can be scaled up. When Martine Wright lay mortally wounded with her legs beyond rescue in a bombed carriage of a tube train under Aldgate on 7th July 2005, in her trance of trauma she saw off-duty policewoman Elizabeth Kenworthy picking her way through the wreckage towards her, unquestionably saving her life. She has since described it as like an angel coming to collect her. And who would gainsay that? 

Again, these are flesh-and-blood people, not winged and shining-white seraphs. But they are possessed of the spirit of angels. Who can doubt the presence of angels in the darkest hell that was 7/7? Clearly not Ms Wright. 

These are instances of the human agency of angels. They possess their own reality. But then there are those who experience, as it were, the real thing. I recently encountered a woman and her son after a church service, who described her very recent conversion experience. 

In a moment of darkest despair (which I’m unable to relate), she called out for someone, anything. A figure appeared at her side and she fell into his/her arms. A dream, maybe? But so what if it was? Her life is renewed, as her affirms. 

For my own part, when my father died in 2000, I went to St Bride’s Church, nearby my office in London’s Fleet Street, and asked my friend there if he’d join me in lighting a candle and saying a prayer. Afterwards, as we stood at the little side altar, the figure of a homeless man strode purposefully up the narrow aisle, matted hair and beard, ragged clothes. 

He deliberately walked between us, lit another candle and placed it in the stand next to ours and stood for a moment looking at it. Then he simply walked out again. We knew the local homeless well – we ministered to them. But we’d never seen him before nor seen him since. And here’s another thing: we were intimately familiar with homeless hygiene, but this one had no smell. 

Are there angels? Yes, absolutely. They have no hierarchy. They’re just ever-present servants, from the company of heaven. As apparent to a young woman called Mary, who stuck her head into an empty tomb some time ago and was told the person she sought had gone before her, as to me just a day or two ago as white and gold trousers went before me, taking two steps at a time. 

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Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,500 articles. All for free. 
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?
 
Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

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