Union with Christ is a major theme for the Apostle Paul. His epistles (not to mention the New Testament as a whole) are full of the language of being ‘in’ Christ and Christ being ‘in’ believers—a double habitation. More specifically, Paul describes in several places, including our present passage, how believers’ old selves, in a mystical sense, have died with Christ, and how their new selves have risen with him (see Romans 6:3–14; Colossians 2:11–12, 20; 3:3) and now live in him.

This ‘death’ of the believer is, in part, death to the Law’s power to condemn. Paul was writing to the Galatian church to counter the false teaching that Gentile converts must keep the Jewish Law (in particular, the rite of circumcision) in order to be accepted by God. The true gospel, Paul writes, is that we are justified not by our acts of obedience but by faith in Christ alone—in his obedience, enacted perfectly on our behalf. Paul interprets Jesus’s meritorious life and death as a once-and-for-all fulfilment of the Law’s demands on sinful humanity, such that we are spared the punishment our rebellion deserves. If we are one with Christ—which is the invitation of Christianity—our fallenness has been nailed to the cross, and we are reborn of Christ’s Spirit.

‘Liv[ing] to God … by faith in the Son of God’ (Galatians 2:19–20) entails trusting in the all-sufficiency of Christ as well as assuming the posture of humility, self-giving, and surrender to the divine will that he modelled—living a cruciform life. Julia Stankova visualizes this posture in one of her Crucifixion paintings, in which ten Christ-followers extend their arms in imitation of their exemplar, on whom they set their eyes. Their identities are married to Christ’s. His life flows through theirs, and his holiness—signified by the halo around his head that merges with the cross and becomes a full-body outline—is accorded to them.

Yong You’s Self-Portrait with Mirror in Hand is a more personal take on this passage and its parallels. It is an identity statement—Yong You’s claim of oneness with the crucified and risen Christ. The face in the mirror is Yong You’s, but the hand that holds it has a hole through the palm, one of Jesus’s distinguishing features, which suggests the two men’s mutual indwelling. Through this painting, and like Paul, Yong You confesses the power of the cross in his own life—a power that imputes Christ’s righteousness to him, justifying him before God, and that equips him to live the Christ-life, characterized by love.

Death that brings forth life is the central, vitalizing image of Galatians 2. Roger Kemp explores this idea in more universalized terms (that is, without the theological particularities of Paul) in his Ascension. This semi-abstract painting merges human and flying forms: individuals in cruciform postures flocking with what appear to be birds or airplanes, the two barely distinct from one another. The Ballets Russes de Monte-Carlo, which toured Australia in 1936–37, was influential in his development of these motifs (Heathcote 2007: 44), dancelike as they are. Circles—traditionally a symbol of wholeness or eternity—also fill the composition. ‘For Roger Kemp, art was inseparable from metaphysics’ (ibid 108), and in 1955 he cryptically described his aim as ‘to express the substance within world rhythm’ (ibid 181). Stretched out in death and yet soaring and alive, the figures, Kemp might have said, have died to their baser selves and attained a higher consciousness. Paul would perhaps see in Kemp’s painting Christ giving himself in love to a broken world and calling that world to enter into his death so that it might experience true, Spirit-empowered life.

References

Heathcote, Christopher. 2007. A Quest for Enlightenment: The Art of Roger Kemp (Melbourne: Macmillan)