Conformed to Christ
Comparative commentary by Ben Quash
I do not account my life of any value nor as precious to myself, if only I may accomplish my course and the ministry which I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of the grace of God. (Acts 20:24)
So says Paul as his turn to Jerusalem echoes a key turning point in Christ’s life, who also ‘sets his face to Jerusalem’ (Luke 9:51). Paul knows what end awaited Christ there, and although (as it will turn out) his own eventual death will be in another city—Rome—he is also convinced that this is a journey from which he will not come back.
Mirosław Bałka is an artist with deep roots in the Catholic art and ritual of his home country of Poland. I found that the chillingly encompassing darkness of the great metal box—entry into which required ‘viewers’ to completely surrender their power of vision—made it an apt work for a Good Friday meditation in 2010 on Jesus’s great cry from the cross.
Paul’s ‘surrenders’ in Acts 20 and 21 are like a preparation for his own Good Friday.
That Paul is, in his own unique fashion, treading the via dolorosa is multiply confirmed in Acts. Like Jesus, he leaves a vulnerable small group of disciples behind him, who long to hold onto him. Like Jesus, he knows they will suffer attacks when he is gone. And, like Jesus, he ‘sets his face’ to Jerusalem, and willingly embraces whatever will await him there.
This is the Paul who feels both Jesus’s death and life at work in him; whose curriculum vitae is the curriculum vitae et mortis of Christ. ‘I bear on my body the marks of Jesus’, he writes (Galatians 6:17). This is why a painting of Christ’s leave-taking like that in this exhibition offers so eloquent a frame for considering Paul’s goodbyes in Acts 20 and 21.
But because the Christ to whom Paul is conformed is also risen—because Paul is downstream from Easter Day—the forsakenness of the ‘black box’ into whose depths he walks is not total. He wants to be in Jerusalem in time for Pentecost (20:16), and the Holy Spirit of Pentecost, which (in Paul’s words) ‘testifies to me … that imprisonment and afflictions await me’ (20:23) also accompanies the apostle on his way, and—along with his Spirit-filled companions—ensures he is not absolutely forsaken.
The members of the confraternities who accompanied the criminally condemned (like the young nobleman Antonio Rinaldeschi) to their deaths also sought to ensure that those to be executed did not feel utterly forsaken. Theirs was a ministry of comfort, in the power of the Holy Spirit, whom Jesus calls ‘Paraclete’ (John 14:16, 26; 16:7): comforter, intercessor, counsellor, advocate, strengthener.
In assertively pursuing a ministry of companionship into the depths of the ‘black box’ of execution, they often carried tavollette—paddle-shaped wooden boards with a handle at the base—for the victims to look at (one is visible in the panel in this exhibition). They might show Christ (who also underwent a criminal execution) or John the Baptist (who underwent a political one), and the insertion of them between the criminals’ eyes and the death that was being prepared for them seems to have been a deliberate attempt to superimpose a sacred reading of their deaths on top of a merely judicial one; to give them the opportunity to believe their fate still narratable as part of a greater story of Christian redemption.
It is in the power of this belief that Christ now lives in him that Paul declares he is ‘ready’ (21:13).
