Island Bay Presbyterian Church

The Isenheim Altarpeice

Art Service 3 2009 – Mattius Grunewald[1]

 Preaching from Is 53:1-6 / 7-12

  The painting I want us to look at today I’ve used quite often since I’ve been here as a background picture on the power point. I first discovered it while I was studying in Dunedin and straight away I was struck with its visual power. I discovered the story behind the painting a few months later, and was then even more impressed with it – I’ve been trying to slot it into services as much as can be tolerated ever since.
 Has anyone noticed me using this picture in the past?
 Turn to your neighbour for a moment and discuss, regardless if you’ve noticed it before or not, your reactions to this representation of Christ…

 

 This is a bigger view…
 In the central panel there we have Mary the mother of Jesus dressed in white, Mary Magdalene kneeling at the cross, John the disciple holding Mary the mother, and on the right there is John the Baptist holding a Bible and pointing at Jesus on the cross saying in Latin – “I must decrease that he might increase.”
 This painting comes from the chapel of a monastery hospital in what was once Germany but after WW I was given to France. The town where the hospital was is called Isenheim, so this painting is called the Isenheim Altarpiece. Actually this is only part of the altarpiece. There are 9 different paintings in this work. It sounds like it originally had doors and sliding panels which could be moved to reveal different aspects of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ.

☼ Nowadays however, it’s been cut into pieces and is displayed in a museum in France. If you can spot the man in this photo you can see that it’s pretty big (See Wikipedia page for museum photo)! It is 3m high and comprises of 50sq ft of painting.
 The man who painted this was very famous in his day, but was quickly forgotten. He died of the plague in about 1528, but by 1597 (less than 70 yrs later), when an emperor tried to buy this altarpiece, no-one could remember his name.
 For a while they thought he might be Albrecht Durer who Elaine mentioned in our first art service and who is famous for this engraving of these praying hands. Both these artists did live at the same time and they did know each other and decorate some churches together. But the power of Durer’s art generally comes from its simplicity, it’s clear lines and often just black and white colours. This is in total contrast with the other guy whose works are full of colour and drama.

 So, who was this other guy? This man who painted things in a completely different way to Durer but who lived at the same time…?

 Unfortunately his name was lost so they made up a name for him in the 1700’s, calling him Matthias Grunewald.
 Unfortunately most of his art has been lost too, like his name. People did like him even if they didn’t know who he was. So, when there was a war in which Sweden invaded into Germany, the Swedish army stole every painting of his they could find, only to accidentally drop them all overboard into the sea on the way back home. So, only 10 of Grunewald’s paintings survive today.
 The altarpiece which we’re looking at this morning (and which has been called the greatest German picture ever painted!) was one of his first major works, finishing it in 1516 just 1 year before another German, Martin Luther, nailed his 95 theses to a church door in Saxony, thus beginning the Protestant Reformation.
 The Reformation quickly turned Germany into a place of bloodshed and violence between Protestants and Catholics, so it was a reasonably dangerous time to be in the religious art profession in case you offended one side or the other and got executed as a heretic. (Grunewald managed to survive the politics though, living to be killed by the plague instead!)
 He was a Leonardo Da Vinci kind of character, being both the court artist and main engineer to several Catholic Archbishops, but slowly developed Protestant tendencies – possibly through his friendship with Albrecht Durer. In 1525 he ran away from his job and went to live in a Lutheran part of Germany, dying not long after.

 But, despite doing most of his paintings as a Catholic and including a lot of Catholic imagery that Protestants normally smashed into little pieces before burning them and throwing them into deep pits, German Protestants have loved Grunewald’s work, especially this one. And similarly, despite his erring towards Protestantism at the end of his life, Catholics too have cherished his few remaining paintings.
 And I think that is because of the theological truth and power that Grunewald put into his art that transcends differences of denomination and that can continue to speak to us today.

 

 

 Of course some people hate his art as well, thinking that it’s too gruesome and too unrealistic. Look at Jesus’ hands all cramped and at weird angles; his shoulders seem to be dislocated, his feet are rotting, his lips are blue, and his body is covered with all these little sores – but, there is a significance to these disfigurements, there is a particular illness Grunewald is depicting here.

 Earlier in the service we read Isaiah chapter 53 (NIV), which contains some famous and moving words…
 Verses 4-6             4 Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. 5 But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.  6 We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

 So, here Christ is revealed in scripture as one who through his death has taken up our infirmities and carried our sorrows; that by his wounds we are healed and our sins have been placed on him – just like the lamb that was sacrificed every year in the temple at Passover.

 The chapter ends with v. 12…
            12 Therefore I will give him a portion among the great, and he will divide the spoils with the strong, because he poured out his life unto death, and was numbered with the transgressors. For he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.

 There are many different ideas in Christianity of why Jesus died on the cross, of what his death achieved for us as people who desire to know and have a relationship with God. Some people defend their idea as the only right one and write big books saying nasty things about people who believe other ideas. Personally though, I’m one of the people who thinks that all of these ideas are probably right!
 With the crucifixion of Christ we’re talking about the death of God for our sake, a pretty major event. I see this event as an explosion of grace and power into human history and into each of our lives as individuals. God died for us! I’m sure that that has achieved many things, brought us unlimited blessings on many different levels.
 And one of those blessings that I believe flows out to us from the cross, is that, as he died on the cross, Jesus took into his body all our sin and shame. That Jesus took on himself all the dark and destructive things we have done. That although he was sinless, he became sin for our sake, that we might be forgiven and washed clean.
 This is echoed in the words of John the Baptist when he described Jesus saying “Behold the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”

 So, in Jesus, God was willing to connect with us and get his hands dirty. Through the cross he is willing to take the shameful and dark things we’ve done off us, to forgive us, restore us and make us whole again. This means that we don’t need to get our lives sorted out before we come to God, we come as we are and it is God who will make us right again.
 Also, as a church it is wrong for us to forbid certain types of people from coming here lest they defile the holiness of this place, it is wrong for us to say that certain sinners can’t take communion – because we’re all sinners, and because sinners are the very people Christ came to save. God in Jesus became human to meet us in our places of brokenness and sorrow, our places of darkness and shame – in order to lift us back into the light.

 Grunewald, it seems to me, believed this, and this is what I think he is saying in this painting to the patients of that hospital.
 Those German monks originally established their hospital to care for people suffering from skin diseases. However, in 1493 a new disease came to Europe, a disease which caused sores to break out all over a victim’s body, caused parts of their bodies to rot while they were still alive, scarring and disfiguring them – a disease that sometimes even drove people insane. No-one knew at that time what this disease was, but it became pretty obvious how you got it – this disease had a pretty shameful source.

 In 1493 Christopher Columbus returned from discovering the Americas, bringing many treasures back from the new world, but also bringing back to Spain the sexually transmitted disease syphilis. Two years later France invaded Italy, attracting mercenaries and prostitutes from all over Europe – including Spain where this disease was beginning to take root. When the war ended and the soldiers went back home they took syphilis with them, spreading it all over Europe and killing 5 million people in quite horrible ways in the space of a few years.
 Some good Christian people said “serves them right, this is God’s righteous judgement on dirty perverts!” But not the monks of Isenheim. They took these shamed and suffering outcasts in, nursed them and showed them the compassion of God.
 By 1514 when Grunewald started painting their altar, this was the main disease they were treating, and he was obviously so moved by the way these monks lived out the gospel to these people in need who were shunned by wider society, that he put it into his painting – he painted Christ as suffering from the gaping wounds and rotting flesh of a syphilis victim.
 In doing this, Grunewald was proclaiming through art to the patients at this hospital that God is willing to love, forgive, restore, and identify with us all. No sin or shame is too great that Christ would refuse to take it into his body on the cross, thereby freeing us from it. Even syphilis, the horrific disease of outcasts and sinners of the 1500’s, so great is God’s love that God is even willing to forgive and take away the shame of that by absorbing it into himself.

 So, grotesque though this painting may be, I find it deeply comforting as it reminds me that God loves me and yearns to have a relationship with me. No matter what sins I commit or what shame I carry inside me, if I repent then Jesus is willing to forgive me, take that from me, and become sin for my sake.

 Hopefully you also find some comfort in that as well.