John’s story of Jesus unfolds amidst a series of binary oppositions: life/death; belief/unbelief; above/below; descent/ascent; love/hate; light/darkness; flesh/spirit; truth/falsehood. John 3:16–21 deploys several of them.

Through the centuries, John’s interpreters have often turned these oppositions into mutually exclusive domains. The most gnostic of them used the Gospel to develop a cosmology in which the physical world is a dark and evil domain of ignorance, and salvation is liberation from evil matter that only the truly enlightened can realize. Another procedure is to translate John 3:16–21 into a formula for winning a passage from darkness to light. But John’s Gospel is too paradoxical to allow such simplistic applications.

Damien Hirst’s painting, Monument to the Living and the Dead offers us a way into the surprise hidden within the dualism of John 3:16–21 as well as the Gospel as a whole. Hirst has placed dead, exotic, and variously coloured butterflies onto a pair of canvasses painted with household gloss white and black paint. A closer look at the butterflies reveals that each panel offers an inverted mirror image of the butterflies of the other.

He describes the diptych as an attempt to depict:

The split between mind and body, the one and the other, the difference between art and life, life and death, like black and white…. I think of life and death as black and white.… Trying to explain or imagine death is like trying to imagine black by only using white. (Dannat 1993: 63)

John’s juxtaposition of love sent and not received, of people preferring darkness to light, requires a closer look to discover an inversion. Yes, the light has come into the world and humans loved the darkness more than light (v.19). But the revelation of Jesus’s resurrection in John’s Gospel comes when it is still dark (20:1,19; 21:4); Jesus offers his most intimate teaching (John 14–17) in the night of betrayal, arrest, and denial (13:30; 18:1–11; 19:15–18).

Hirst may not intend his butterflies to be signifiers of resurrection, but applying the Christian symbol here, we can see resurrection trespassing the boundaries that divide light and darkness. It is true that God loves the world by sending his Son into the world only to be hated. The rejection of love is its own judgement. But that is not the end of the story. Crucified love threatens binary schemes with resurrection. 

References

Dannat, Adrian. 1993. ‘Damien Hirst: Life’s like this, then it stops’, Flash Art 169: 59–63