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02.
A Mirror and an Invitation
The painting offers a mirror for viewers, and an invitation. Like the parables, it allows us to identify with any of the three people portrayed in their fear, in their bewilderment, in their shame, in their unawareness, and also in their nearness to the risen Christ who has met them in their sorrow, taught them, offered them comfort, accepted their hasty hospitality, and given them a rare and generous glimpse of glory. It asks us to revisit the story, considering again the paradox it reiterates, that the God who is revealed in Christ is also hidden, and that even the moments of divine revelation we may be granted bring us to another threshold of an unfathomable mystery: “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.”
Most of Rembrandt’s biblical paintings emphasize the paradox that, although we were called out of the darkness into the marvelous light, we still see in this life “through a glass, darkly.”1 Corinthians 13:12 KJV. Scriptures quotations marked (KJV) are from the King James Version of the Bible and is in the public domain in most of the world. “Light [does shine] in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it,”John 1:5, NIV. All Scripture quotations marked (NIV) are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™ but the darkness persists, and humans huddle in its shadows, uneasy and uncertain. “And where are our darknesses?” he invites us to wonder. And where in the midst of those darknesses has a light shone from an unexpected source?
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03.
Different Views
He painted and etched certain biblical scenes repeatedly, coming at them from different points of view that offer surprisingly diverse perspectives and readings. He painted a very different supper at Emmaus twenty years after he completed this one. In his 1648 “Supper at Emmaus,” the gentle light from Jesus’ halo blends with the natural light of evening, as he sits, looking calm and very human, flanked by two disciples and a servant, none of whom seem to be overwhelmed, though each is in a distinctive way deeply engaged. The later painting emphasizes other themes in the story: Jesus’ kindliness, his humanity, his love for those he called his “little children.” In this later depiction he is clearly the one who only a short while before had also said, “I have called you friends.” Less dramatic, though still rich with emotional complexity, it is the reading of someone whose own maturing (the artist was by then forty-two) had perhaps led him to seek and find more sweetness in stories he had so long located at the edge of darkness.
The 1628 version, however, retains its power to challenge all sentimentalities or efforts to domesticate either incarnation or resurrection. It reminds us that the one who so often, like the messenger angels, greeted his disciples with “Be not afraid,” did so because afraid was what they might quite reasonably be. It may well serve to remind us to be content not to seek too eagerly extraordinary mystical moments or paranormal experiences unless they come to us as gifts. We may not be ready to see God. If Christ appeared unveiled to any one of us we might also feel impelled to rush for cover. The word of common wisdom many of us have heard, to be careful what you pray for because you might get it, may well come to mind as we consider how strenuous are the terms of a love so absolute, cosmic, and incomprehensible as to surprise us with a kind of joy that might feel a lot like fear. Perhaps we have known such moments of apprehensive joy, uncertain whether to embrace or hide from the very thing we wished for. To grow out of the fear into the joy may take all the time we are given. It may be what that time is for.
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04.
Supper at Emmaus (1628)
Supper at Emmaus (1628)Marilyn McEntyre, Drawn to the Light: Poems on Rembrandt’s Religious Paintings (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 56.
by Marilyn McEntyre
One of them recoils.
One buries his head in the Lord’s broad lap.
What would you do
if, mid-meal, light suddenly broke
from a body rather like your own
and a stranger suddenly became
in very flesh the friend you mourned?
You would be shocked, no doubt—horror,
amazement, joy, dismay competing,
no words available for the occasion.
You might embrace him, weeping,
or grasp instead at some shred
of rationality while your pupils
contracted and your heart beat in your throat.
It might be harder than you think
to give up three-days’ mourning,
memories already being edited and arranged.
The story had seemed complete.
Having a tale to tell, you might already
have found a way to tell it whole,
rich with mystery, rounded and
resonant with meaning.
You might have been ready
to go back home, tired of all that wandering,
ready to sit at the lakeside and take up
the nets again, writing a little, keeping
your counsel, sharing a parable now and then
with those who had seen him once,
who remembered the picnic on the hillside—
all that bread and fish.
You would have had to give up yet again
what you thought you had a right to claim.
Turns out he meant it—the promise
you’d already begun to turn to metaphor.
Here in dazzling flesh, leaning back
to let himself be seen, he leaves them no choice
but to lay aside sweet sorrow and cancel all their plans
for the aftermath.
Marilyn McEntyre is a Fellow at the Gaede Institute, Westmont College, and teaches medical humanities at UC Berkeley. Her recent books include Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, Patient Poets: Illness from Inside Out, and Reading Like a Serpent: What the Scarlet A is About. A new book, Summonings, is forthcoming from Eerdmans.