Hebrews 11

A Question of Faith

Commentaries by Jonathan Evens

Works of art by Colin McCahon

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Colin McCahon

The testimony of scripture no. 1, 1979, Synthetic polymer paint on paper, 730 x 1100 mm, Private Collection; © Colin McCahon Research and Publication Trust

To Our Hopes

Commentary by Jonathan Evens

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Read by Richard Ayoade

‘What is faith?’ A compelling question scrawled across the top of a paper sheet. The painted text continues with Hebrews 11:1—‘Faith gives substance / to our hopes / hopes / and makes us certain of / Realities we do not see’—set out as a Tau Cross. ‘To our hopes’ forms the vertical of the cross and ‘hopes’ is twice repeated. The reinscribed word is perhaps an echo of the tablets of the Law that were broken and reinscribed; hope as future renewal and restoration. A companion work entitled The testimony of scripture no. 2 makes further use of the Tau Cross; as a load-bearing structure supporting a text (Hebrews 11:3) which speaks of the invisible made visible.

The question posed is that which Hebrews 11 seeks to answer. It is a question that preoccupied Colin McCahon throughout his career, to the extent that an earlier work entitled A question of faith (1970) provided the title for a retrospective in 2002.

McCahon began making A question of faith after he ‘got onto reading the New English Bible’ and re-read his favourite passages. Reflecting on this period for his 1972 survey exhibition, he wrote:

It hit me, BANG! At where I was: questions and answers, faith so simple and beautiful and doubts still pushing to somewhere else. (McCahon 1972: 36)

Nine years later, faith and doubt, questions and answers, were still a preoccupation that enthralled him. In The testimony of scripture no. 1 the Tau Cross is given substance as a narrow vertical connecting the wider horizontal bands of text at top and bottom, as though a link between heaven and earth. An answer to the ‘question of faith’ is suggested by showing the cross as connecting the human and divine; a reality that we must work hard to discern but which gives substance to our hope for union with God.

 

References

McCahon, Colin. 1972. Colin McCahon: A Survey Exhibition (Auckland City Art Gallery)

Colin McCahon

A Letter to Hebrews, 1979, Synthetic polymer paint on unstretched canvas, 187 x 240 cm, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington; Gift of anonymous donors with assistance from the Willi Fels Memorial Trust, 1981, 1984-0004-1, © Colin McCahon Research and Publication Trust; Photo: Museum of Te Papa Tongarewa (1981-0004-1)

Yet To Come

Commentary by Jonathan Evens

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Read by Richard Ayoade

Colin McCahon writes in white text on a black ground. Black is for earth, the ground from which new things emerge and potentiality is actualized (Brown n.d.: 5). The white text—though McCahon’s own (human) writing—points to the creative (divine) word which calls life itself into being. Fashioned by the Word of God, the visible comes forth from the invisible and it is by faith that we perceive it. The text, at points, is clear and elsewhere is faded. It is emergent and—as faith not certainty—encompasses doubt.  

McCahon set Hebrews 11:1–16 around a central Tau Cross and alongside a golden triangle. He began with verses 4–15 which recount stories of faith, then returned to the beginning with verses 1–3, including the question ‘What is faith?’, before ending with verses 15–16, which look towards a promised land yet to come.

In Christian tradition, the Tau Cross was associated with the Passover, being linked to the symbol made in blood on the door lintels of the Israelites in Egypt when the angel of death passed over (Exodus 12:7). A symbolism that can be read as both Christian and pre-Christian is appropriate for a letter which reveals Christ as fulfilment of the Hebrew Scriptures. Seeing the Tau Cross as a sign of Christ suggests that all McCahon’s ‘religious pictures are typography; or maps with Christ as their hidden incarnated key’ (Leonard n.d.). 

Gordon Brown, a close friend and biographer of McCahon, suggested that the golden triangle ‘thrusting in from the edge’ toward the cross represents ‘a future Trinity’ (2010: 172). The revelation of the Trinity, which will happen long after the recorded histories of the ancient Israelites, is anticipated here amidst Hebrews’s roll call of the Old Testament faithful. The Trinity, present in splendour, points to the cross, the symbol both of Christ with us and the pathway to the ‘better country’ (v.16) up ahead.

 

References

Brown, Gordon H. 2010. Towards a Promised Land: On the Life and Art of Colin McCahon (Auckland University Press)

Brown, Judith. n.d. ‘‘And Darkness Came over the Whole Land’: Some thoughts on Colin McCahon and the Colour Black’, unpublished article, www.academia.edu [accessed 14 April 2021]

Leonard, Robert. n.d. ‘Colin McCahon, Toi Toi Toi, Kassel and Auckland: Museum Fredericanium and Auckland Art Gallery, 1998’, www.robertleonard.org [accessed 14 April 2021]

Colin McCahon

A Letter to Hebrews (Rain in Northland), 1979, Synthetic polymer paint on 6 sheets of paper, each sheet: 730 x 1102 mm, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Presented through The Art Foundation of Victoria in memory of the Reverend Stan Brown by the Reverend Ian Brown, Fellow, 1984, P6.a-f-1984, © Colin McCahon Research and Publication Trust

To Walk Past

Commentary by Jonathan Evens

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Read by Richard Ayoade

This painting, composed of six sheets of paper, layers the whole of Hebrews 11 ‘across a brooding sky and sea in New Zealand’s Northland’ (Artwork labels 2019). The work offers ‘schematic evocations’ of landscape. Long black strips in the upper sections suggest a rain-swept terrain, viewed from a distance across an expanse of sea filling the lower three quarters. From the sky ‘muted shafts of sunlight’ shine through ‘washed-out cloud formations and slanted sheets of rain’ (Smythe 2019). In the lower sections, the text shimmers like ripples on the Northland waters. In the top right, the reflected fall of light below the narrower strip of land forms one of Colin McCahon’s trademark Tau crosses.

In evoking a challenging landscape through which to journey, Rain in Northland seems symbolically charged with the ‘travels and travails of Christ’s Hebrew forebears’ in their search for the promised land, as Hebrews 11 documents it.

McCahon’s artistic vision was grounded in landscape. He became aware of his ‘own particular God’ driving over the hills from the Taieri Mouth in southern New Zealand to the Taieri Plain, seeing a splendour and beauty ‘belonging to the land and not yet to its people’. He wrote that his work as a whole had ‘largely been to communicate this vision and to invent the way to see it’ (McCahon 1988: 76).

Four months spent in America during 1958 marked a watershed in that artistic outlook. Subsequently, he worked on a monumental scale creating ‘pictures for people to walk past’ (Smith 2001: 2). These include his Northland Panels and other series exploring doubt and faith. By combining minimal marks and dense text, Rain in Northland makes it hard for us to distance ourselves from the work, suggesting that this combination of faith and doubt, as seen in sun and rain, wants to immerse us in the picture so we walk the landscape of faith with the Hebrew forebears of Christ.

 

References

‘Colin McCahon Letters and Numbers: Artwork Labels’. 2019. National Gallery of Victoria, available at https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Colin-McCahon-Labels.pdf [accessed 14 April 2021]

McCahon, Colin. 1988. ‘Artist’s Statement’, in Colin McCahon: Gates and Journeys, (Auckland City Art Gallery)

Smith, Jason. 2001. ‘Essay: Colin McCahon’, in Colin McCahon: A Time for Messages (National Gallery of Victoria)

Smythe, Luke. 2019. ‘Review of Colin McCahon: Letter and Numbers at National Gallery of Victoria, 31 December 2019’, www.memoreview.net [accessed 14 April 2021]

Colin McCahon :

The testimony of scripture no. 1, 1979 , Synthetic polymer paint on paper

Colin McCahon :

A Letter to Hebrews, 1979 , Synthetic polymer paint on unstretched canvas

Colin McCahon :

A Letter to Hebrews (Rain in Northland), 1979 , Synthetic polymer paint on 6 sheets of paper

The Direction I’m Pointing In

Comparative commentary by Jonathan Evens

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Read by Richard Ayoade

Colin McCahon stated that his ‘painting … tells you where I am at any given time, where I am living and the direction I am pointing in’ (McCahon 1972: 26). He also painted the words of New Zealand poet Peter Hooper (1919–91): ‘Poetry isn’t in my words, it’s in the direction I’m pointing’ (1969). Paintings and poems are compasses for a journey of ultimate significance. Hebrews 11 ‘recounts the travels and travails of Christ’s Hebrew forebears’ on a journey towards a promised land that has not yet been reached (Smythe 2019). The text suggests that to travel in this way is a definition of faith. Those commended for their faith react to things not yet seen and live as those looking ‘forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God’ (Hebrews 11:10).

McCahon’s personal journey was bound up in the perception that, in the past, painters had made ‘signs and symbols for people to live by’ but now they make ‘things to hang on walls at exhibitions’ (McCahon 1972: 26). McCahon’s career was a journey of discovering what it meant to be a symbolic signwriter in the twentieth century.

That journey was inspired by youthful sights in Dunedin of a signwriter working on a shop window and a cross-shaped memorial to a parachutist on the North Otago hills (Bloem and Browne 2002: 160, 162). Then there was an encounter with Frank Tosswill, uncle of his friend the artist Toss Woollaston, whose blackboard signs lettered with religious texts and Christian symbols had an impact on McCahon’s thinking about art and faith.

McCahon introduced text into his religious paintings from 1947—his first sustained series in which religious imagery was translated into a contemporary style and put into New Zealand settings. In 1954, he produced the first paintings in which he used words to form the dominant motif—to become the image—often forming landscapes. In these ways McCahon became a symbolic signwriter and, as in his 1959 Elias works (not shown here), used this mature style to explore the deeply human concept of doubt.

He first used passages from Hebrews in Scrolls from 1969 but, in 1970, was specifically asked by a Wellington collector to consider the possibilities this book might hold for a painting. It was not until 1979 that he felt sufficiently confident in his understanding of Hebrews to explore its possibilities in the works included in this exhibition. 

Walking past these works from 1979 onwards, we pass ‘landscapes’ of splendour, order, and peace; visible beauty belonging to the land and not yet to its people; logic and order revealing their invisible fashioning by their creator. These works, as we journey through them, register experiences of ‘directional travel’, both personal and corporate—McCahon’s own experiences, as well as those of the ancient Hebrews, as well as the Church’s over many centuries. These are journeys on which challenges, struggles, and doubts have been encountered, even as a ‘homeland’ (v.14) is glimpsed. Connecting these works is the Tau Cross, an image that Christian tradition sees as spanning both Testaments—Old and New—signalling events in the horizontal timeline of human history (Passover and Good Friday) that also make a vertical connection between heaven and earth. The Tau Cross becomes a pillar of light for guidance and direction. 

The experience of those documented in Hebrews 11 was of the promised land always out of reach. McCahon suggests this lack of resolution within Rain in Northland. Luke Smythe, a particularly sensitive interpreter because he attends to the repetition of imagery within the different series, notes that the ‘hovering black rectangles that appear here and there amid the text are harder to interpret’:

They suggest editorial redactions, but since no words have been cut from the inscriptions, they are more likely to be gates, of the kind that McCahon had introduced to his painting in the 1960s. He intended these cryptic quadrilaterals to read as obstacles, blocking access to a state of salvation. For him, it was a question of faith as to whether they could ever be negotiated and the promised land attained. (Smythe 2019)

McCahon’s personal journey, involving both faith and doubt, mirrored the ‘travels and travails’ documented in Hebrews 11. Hebrews in turn enabled his understanding that to journey in this way is an expression of faith and to travel towards a promised land is an act of faith.   

 

References

Bloem, Marja, and Martin Browne. 2002. Colin McCahon: A Question of Faith (Craig Potton Publishing and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam)

Hopper, Peter. 1969. ‘Poetry is for Peasants’, in Journey Towards an Elegy and Other Poems (Nag’s Head Press: Christchurch)

McCahon, Colin. 1972. Colin McCahon: A Survey Exhibition (Auckland City Art Gallery)

Smythe, Luke. 2019. ‘Review of Colin McCahon: Letter and Numbers at National Gallery of Victoria, 31 December 2019’, www.memoreview.net [accessed 14 April 2021]

Next exhibition: Hebrews 13:1–25

Hebrews 11

Revised Standard Version

11Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. 2For by it the men of old received divine approval. 3By faith we understand that the world was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was made out of things which do not appear.

4 By faith Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain, through which he received approval as righteous, God bearing witness by accepting his gifts; he died, but through his faith he is still speaking. 5By faith Enoch was taken up so that he should not see death; and he was not found, because God had taken him. Now before he was taken he was attested as having pleased God. 6And without faith it is impossible to please him. For whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him. 7By faith Noah, being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen, took heed and constructed an ark for the saving of his household; by this he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness which comes by faith.

8 By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place which he was to receive as an inheritance; and he went out, not knowing where he was to go. 9By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise. 10For he looked forward to the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God. 11By faith Sarah herself received power to conceive, even when she was past the age, since she considered him faithful who had promised. 12Therefore from one man, and him as good as dead, were born descendants as many as the stars of heaven and as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore.

13 These all died in faith, not having received what was promised, but having seen it and greeted it from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. 14For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. 15If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. 16But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city.

17 By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises was ready to offer up his only son, 18of whom it was said, “Through Isaac shall your descendants be named.” 19He considered that God was able to raise men even from the dead; hence, figuratively speaking, he did receive him back. 20By faith Isaac invoked future blessings on Jacob and Esau. 21By faith Jacob, when dying, blessed each of the sons of Joseph, bowing in worship over the head of his staff. 22By faith Joseph, at the end of his life, made mention of the exodus of the Israelites and gave directions concerning his burial.

23 By faith Moses, when he was born, was hid for three months by his parents, because they saw that the child was beautiful; and they were not afraid of the king’s edict. 24By faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, 25choosing rather to share ill-treatment with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin. 26He considered abuse suffered for the Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he looked to the reward. 27By faith he left Egypt, not being afraid of the anger of the king; for he endured as seeing him who is invisible. 28By faith he kept the Passover and sprinkled the blood, so that the Destroyer of the first-born might not touch them.

29 By faith the people crossed the Red Sea as if on dry land; but the Egyptians, when they attempted to do the same, were drowned. 30By faith the walls of Jericho fell down after they had been encircled for seven days. 31By faith Rahab the harlot did not perish with those who were disobedient, because she had given friendly welcome to the spies.

32 And what more shall I say? For time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets— 33who through faith conquered kingdoms, enforced justice, received promises, stopped the mouths of lions, 34quenched raging fire, escaped the edge of the sword, won strength out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight. 35Women received their dead by resurrection. Some were tortured, refusing to accept release, that they might rise again to a better life. 36Others suffered mocking and scourging, and even chains and imprisonment. 37They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, ill-treated— 38of whom the world was not worthy—wandering over deserts and mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth.

39 And all these, though well attested by their faith, did not receive what was promised, 40since God had foreseen something better for us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect.

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