Discerning the Body

Lack of social and spiritual unity at the Lord’s Table is the central concern Paul is confronting in 1 Corinthians 11:17–33. Australian artist Susan Dorothea White’s painting The First Supper illuminates painful gender, racial, and ethnic divisions that exist in both the church and Australian society.

The composition of The First Supper is modelled on Leonardo da Vinci’s mural of The Last Supper (1492–97/8) depicting the moment after Jesus’s declaration ‘Truly I tell you, one of you will betray me’ (Matthew 26:21 NRSV). White’s painting challenges ‘the acceptance of the image of thirteen men … as a celebrated symbol of a patriarchal religion’ (White 1988). Instead, we are presented with an image of ethnic and racial diversity.

The woman who occupies the place where Jesus sits in Leonardo’s original is an Australian Aboriginal woman, gesturing welcomingly towards the traditional food of her people (witchetty grubs, a blue-green emu egg, nuts, and quandongs [a desert fruit]). The twelve ‘disciples’ are women in traditional dress (except the white woman), from around the world. They represent the various peoples who have become part of Australian society. The woman sitting in the position of Leonardo’s Judas is the only person of white European descent; in front of her is a hamburger and Coke, representing the commodification and economic exploitation central to the colonial project. Paul’s admonition to the Corinthians might seem applicable to her (for all the other women have a bread roll and a glass of water, in common with each other):

When you come together, it is not really to eat the Lord’s supper. For when the time comes to eat, each of you proceeds to eat your own supper… (vv.20–21 NRSV)

This work was painted partially in response to the Australian Bicentennial of 1988, which was a celebration of the 200th anniversary of the arrival of English settlers to Australian shores. Many Aboriginal people saw this as a celebration of white invasion and the devastation of their culture. This conflict is referenced by the Aboriginal Christ-figure’s shirt, which displays the Aboriginal Land Rights flag. Also visible through the window on her right side is the sacred Aboriginal site Uluru, which had recently been returned by the government to the Aboriginal people.

The supper is ‘first’ in that the arrival of English settlers is the ‘first’ moment of a more diverse Australia, but also of a more divided one.

References

White, Susan Dorothea. 1988. Artist’s notes on The First Supper, available at http://www.susandwhite.com.au/enlarge.php?workID=94 [accessed 1 October 2020]

When Jamaican-British artist Graeme Mortimer Evelyn was commissioned to design a contemporary altarpiece for the high altar of St Stephen’s Church, Bristol, he became the first Black British artist to complete such a commission in Europe. The work was to respond to the city’s commemoration of the bicentenary of the 1807 Act to Abolish the Slave Trade and to reflect on the concepts of creation, Imago Dei, reconciliation, and hope (Higgins 2011: 1).

Evelyn’s work was designed to be incorporated in a preexisting nineteenth-century reredos, around a central stone relief of the Lamb of God. His four large fibreboard panels replaced four Victorian ones that were made of tin and that (having become corroded) were beyond repair. Each of Evelyn’s panels was hand-carved in relief and then painted in bold colours—black, red, yellow, green, and blues.

The gaze of the inner two figures draws the viewer’s eye to the Lamb of God carving and to the stained glass above, where Christ is enthroned. They underscore the commission’s concern with how a path of reconciliation is opened between creatures and God, and how the image of God is restored in them.

The figures in the outer panels are looking outward and forward: that in chains on the left signifies ‘Creation’, enslaved to sin but undergoing liberation; that on the right, Stephen (first Christian martyr and patron saint of the church) to whom heaven is opened. He embodies hope. The rays from all four panels draw one’s eye down to the eucharistic altar below, and out to the city beyond.

Just as Bristol’s history played a key role in the work’s conception, it is central to what the work invites continued reflection upon. The city was a major harbour for the English side of the transatlantic Slave Trade. As the harbour church, St Stephen’s blessed every merchant vessel before its voyage, including the slave ships. It benefitted from the merchants’ donations, and served as the burial site for Africans living in Bristol in the era of the Trade.

This reredos calls attention to the issue of social inequality that Paul is critiquing in 1 Corinthians 11:17–33. He writes to the Corinthians in verse 28: ‘examine yourselves, and only then eat of the bread and drink of the cup’. Evelyn’s work calls the church to examine its racial past and the ramifications of that past on the Lord’s Supper in the present.

References

Higgins, Tim. 2011. Reconciliation Reredos, pamphlet for St Stephens Bristol, UK, p. 1

On more than one occasion, contemporary Balinese artist Nyoman Darsane has depicted Jesus sharing a space with two children. This example, entitled Empty Stare, was painted in the year of the Indonesian tsunami in 2004, whose devastating effects accentuated the inequality and destitution that afflict innumerable vulnerable people in that region (Pongracz 2007: 26).

The viewer is confronted by the gaze of two hungry and poorly clothed children. The boy’s knee and an empty bowl have been pushed to the front of the picture plane so that they appear to be sharing the same space as the viewer. Positioned behind the boy and girl sits a dejected Jesus with his head in his hands. He is clothed in a comparable way to the children.

The painting emphasizes Jesus’s solidarity with the poor, and in particular the ‘little ones’ (Matthew 18:6) among them, for whom he has special compassion.

In 1 Corinthians 11:21 Paul chastises the Corinthians for the way the rich are going ‘ahead with [their] own supper’ (NRSV). In doing so, they are ‘show[ing] contempt for the church of God and humiliat[ing] those who have nothing’ (1 Corinthians 11:22). This is the sort of division to which these children attest.  

Empty Stare addresses the Bible’s messages about need, want, and exclusion to contemporary society. Paul’s stark claim is that those who profane the ritual body at the Lord’s Supper by neglecting the poor ‘eat and drink judgment upon themselves’ (v.29). The claim has a powerful visual charge added to it by the way that the children in Darsane’s composition, with their empty bowls and empty hands, are on the very threshold of the painting; almost in our own space. The impression that we might be bringing judgement on ourselves by the way we relate to them becomes vivid.

References

Pongracz, Patricia C. 2007. ‘Religious or Aesthetic Lessons? The Bible Illustrated by Asian Artists’, in The Christian Story: Five Asian Artists Today, ed. by Patricia C. Pongracz, Volker Kuster, and John W. Cook (New York: Museum of Biblical Art), pp. 26–27