The town of Livarot, five kilometres from my home, is mainly famous for its cheese. Surprisingly, it also has a thriving art history society. Their most recent conference was ‘The Art of Crucifixion’, exploring the place of Easter in art through the ages. Even in secular, post-Christian France there is a fascination with the death of Christ. The same mood surfaced in the UK at the turn of the millennium, when the National Gallery mounted the now-famous ‘Seeing Salvation’ exhibition. Thousands of people queued for hours to look at paintings of the dying Jesus.
Similar events have happened across Europe. We know Good Friday has changed our history. You don’t have to be a card-carrying believer to see the death of God as a category-defying event. Jesus changes the game even if you’re fuzzy on the details of the game he’s playing.
Non-believers, surprisingly, are sometimes better than believers at appreciating Easter. They view the death of Jesus through art, seeing it as an event to be experienced and explored, rather than a doctrine be be understood. History’s most famous execution is also the world’s deepest mystery. It defies our every attempt to box it in with dogma. Can secular galleries and conferences remind us that God invites us to contemplate the cross more than he requires us to explain it?
This Good Friday, why not explore the death of Jesus not as a doctrine to be understood but as an event to be defined by? Take some time to dwell on the cross, asking God that you will not so much be educated by the experience as changed.
'By what seems impossible, God, you have made hope possible. By a death we can’t begin to understand, you change our hearts. Show us what it means to contemplate your cross and be changed by it.'
