Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies… (Emily Dickinson)

 Is John 3:16 a cliché? American males paint it on their torsos at football games. Christian athletes draw it on their faces. Outlets sell clothes with John 3:16 logos (one brands itself the ‘3:16 Collection’). In my own home city, there is a restaurant called ‘John 3:16 Malaysian Delights’. John 3:16 is the only passage many Christians know by heart. But what does it and the larger passage in which it is embedded mean?

Art is a way to take a familiar passage and in the words of the American poet Emily Dickinson (1830–1886), ‘tell it slant’. ‘The Truth must dazzle gradually/ Or every man be blind’, her poem goes on to say.

How may art enable a familiar biblical passage to dazzle gradually? John 3:16–21 deploys a set of antonyms that at first glance lock the reader into sharply defined binaries (love/hate; light/darkness; save/condemn). The paradoxical Monument to the Living and the Dead by Damien Hirst is a black and white diptych on which he has placed dead butterflies. Their inverted mirror image arrangement on the opposite panel facilitates comparison so that in seeing one element in the diptych, we also have a gesture to the other. The crucifixion of Jesus is the means toward God’s revelation of love. The elimination of Jesus becomes the means by which he comes to dwell with us (John 14:15, 26; 16:7, 13; 20:22–23). In John’s Gospel (translating the butterfly into its Christian iconographical meaning) resurrection is the event that renders paradoxical the mutually exclusive categories in John 3:16–21. People may love the darkness more than the light, but it is under the conditions of darkness that light shines (John 1:5); resurrection ‘dazzles gradually’ in the darkness of crucifixion.

The second-century CE Farnese Atlas which depicts the fate Zeus inflicted on a defeated god Atlas (to bear the cosmos upon his shoulders for eternity) offers a commonly shared depiction of the exercise of divine omnipotence. But it is not John’s. Rather, the Atlas is an avenue into ‘truth’s superb surprise’ (Dickinson 1999: 494). John’s God does not carry the world on straining shoulders or fate the vanquished with suffering. Freely-chosen, unending, self-giving love is God’s revelation of power.

What does such love call us to at this moment when God’s beloved world is undergoing a mass sixth extinction, this time wrought by human hands? Beloved of Sky, Scorned of Earth by Canadian artist Emily Carr (1871–1945) represents a clear cut with only a couple of skinny conifers passed over as commercially worthless. Carr’s painting asks us to see them as beloved of sky. Perhaps in doing so we can be instructed in the ethical commitments John 3:16–21 invite us to and to join with God in loving this fragile world.

References

Franklin, Ralph W. (ed.). 1999. ‘Poem 1263’, in The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, ed. (Cambridge, MS: The Belknap Press); Amherst Manuscript # 372