Going To Jerusalem, Bound In The Spirit

To the Ephesian elders, Paul says:

And now, behold, I am going to Jerusalem, bound in the Spirit, not knowing what shall befall me there… (Acts 20: 22)

In fact, Paul knows a little more than nothing. He knows that this is his last goodbye to all whom he visits on his journey back to the holy city (20:25).

This is a going into darkness in two ways. It is a going into the unknown, and a going towards affliction (20:23; 21:11,13).

The Polish artist Mirosław Bałka’s vast, steel storage container was the tenth commissioned work to occupy Tate Modern’s gargantuan Turbine Hall. Miked up for a BBC Radio broadcast on Good Friday 2010, I walked into it for the very first time, up a ramp eerily reminiscent of those of the trucks and railway carriages and ghetto gates that played their parts in the genocidal history of twentieth-century Europe. And in more recent times, such containers have enclosed the fragile hopes and vulnerable bodies of migrants desperately seeking a safe haven.

The work’s interior walls were clad in light-absorbing material, and the 30-metre journey to contact, or collision, with the back wall, was one of the most disorienting experiences of total darkness I have ever had. I had to relinquish nearly all my usual forms of self-reliance.

Recalling this profoundly unsettling feeling of peril intensifies my sympathy for Paul’s situation in Acts 20–21. He admits that ‘the Holy Spirit testifies to me in every city that imprisonment and afflictions await me’ (Acts 20: 23). Each gangway he ascends, in each new ship, takes him deeper into danger. He too has to relinquish his usual forms of self-reliance. Those among whom he has preached the kingdom ‘will see [his] face no more’ (v.25) as the darkness closes in. But he is not deflected, ‘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’ (v.24).

This is a series of nine painted scenes which tell the story of the crime, the arrest, the trial, and the execution of a Florentine nobleman called Antonio Rinaldeschi. He was hanged in 1501 for drunkenly throwing dung at an image of the Madonna.

Of special interest in the penultimate panel, in which Rinaldeschi makes his confession before being taken to his death, is the presence of several hooded members of a confraternity whose principal work was to walk with condemned criminals to their executions and to offer them spiritual solace.

They may look sinister to a modern eye, but their members performed a demanding and impressive journey of accompaniment, saying prayers for (or with) the condemned right up until the moment of their last breath. The artist has thrown an angel in among their company to indicate the holiness of their calling.

The demanding accompaniment of the young churches he founded was Paul’s mission, even in extreme adversity:

for three years I did not cease night or day to admonish every one with tears.… In all things I have shown you that by so toiling one must help the weak, remembering the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive’. (Acts 20:31, 35)

Now he is at a point where he is being led to what he knows may be his own death. His closest companions find it is their turn to stand by him. By their words and their gestures, they express a loyalty to and a love for Paul that will abide, whatever will befall him on his return to Jerusalem. It is a fitting return for his own sacrifices on their behalf.

[H]e knelt down and prayed with them all. … And they brought him to the ship. (20:36, 38)

And they all wept and embraced Paul and kissed him, sorrowing most of all because of the word he had spoken, that they should see his face no more. (Acts 20:37–38)

Paul’s determination to make his way back to Jerusalem meets with resistance and protests from those who love him and depend on him. He will face unpredictable ordeals, and possible death. This passage describes a series of moments of kneeling, weeping, and pleading (20:36–37; 21:5, 12).

The imagined scene of Jesus’s final leave-taking from his mother, Mary—a popular subject in Northern Europe—explores many comparable responses.

Unlike some versions of the subject which show Jesus at a distance from his mother—resolute in doing his Father’s will (Luke 2:49; John 6:38), and requiring her not to cling to him (cf. John 20:17)—here he expresses by his embrace how much he treasures what he is about to lose, and how much it costs him.

Paul likewise remains determined to go to Jerusalem, but expresses his love for those he leaves (it is ‘breaking his heart’; Acts 21:13).

And it is not only Paul who will face new trials as a result; the ‘flock’ (20:28) that he leaves behind will as well. Cornelius Engebrechtsz.’s painting of Jesus’s leave-taking allows the jagged points of the shattered tree trunks on the riverbank, the circling birds in the sky, and the looming turrets of the waiting city to signal not just a personal, but a general threat ahead. Paul, likewise, knows that his followers must suffer as he is to suffer, for ‘after my departure fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock…’ (20:29).