The Power of Love

In Greek mythology, Atlas was one of the Titans who ruled the cosmos until the Olympian gods overthrew them and cast them into the underworld dungeon of Tartarus. But rather than send Atlas to prison, the top Olympian god Zeus condemned him to hold up the heavens and the sky for eternity.

Hesiod (between 750 and 650 BCE) describes his fate:

And by mighty necessity Atlas holds up the broad sky with his head and with his tireless hands, standing at the limits of the earth…. For this is the portion which the counsellor Zeus assigned him. (Theogony, 517–19)

The Farnese Atlas (named after Cardinal Alessandro Farnese who acquired it in 1562) is a second-century CE marble statue that depicts the god’s punishment. The artist animates Atlas’s fate by representing him with flexed torso and straining legs, bent over and crouching as though he may collapse under the weight of the globe that Zeus has hoisted upon his shoulders.

John’s Gospel also depicts a deity supporting a kosmos (the Greek word rendered in English translation as ‘world’), but it is not that of a god straining under the weight of a globe threatening to crush him. In John 3:16, God loves the world and sends God’s son into the world. The event is not a punishment, but a freely chosen and sovereign act of divine initiative. The verses that follow (vv.19–20) describe the rejection of this initiative and serve to dramatize the love that 3:16 acclaims.

Later John will describe this act of self-giving not in the past tense (‘loved’, ‘gave’) but as a constantly arriving event. Martha in her Great Confession will acclaim amidst the grief of her brother Lazarus’s death, in the present tense: ‘I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, he who is coming into the world’ (John 11:27). When John promises eternal life for all who believe (3:16, 18), he means life in the present amidst the strain of the world, a quality of being made possible by God’s continuing self-initiated arrival in love.

The Farnese Atlas and his fate represent one way of thinking about divine strength: revolution, conquest, eternal strain. John 3:16–21 measures divine power with a different calculus.

References

Most, Glenn W. (trans.). 2006. Hesiod: Theogony. Works and Days. Testimonia, rev. ed., LCL 57 (Cambridge, MS: Harvard University Press)

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

Scorned as Timber, Beloved of Sky is one of three paintings Emily Carr created in the 1930s. They were made as commentary on the environmental devastation brought about by large-scale industrial logging that started in the 1860s in Canada’s westernmost province of British Columbia.

Carr creates an undulating depiction of a stripped landscape dominated by billowing white clouds lined menacingly in grey at their top and the bottom. Blue sky struggles to break through. Spindly conifers passed over by the loggers rise from a clear cut. Their flimsy branches appear at the highest points against the clouds. Grey and black stumps are in the foreground of a denuded, brown landscape. Other trees surround them, vulnerable to what the portrait portends.

Carr describes the scene in a journal written at the time of the painting:

There’s a torn and splintered ridge across the stumps I call the ‘screamers’. These are the unsawn last bits, the cry of the tree’s heart, wrenching and tearing apart just before she gives that sad and dreadful groan of falling, that dreadful pause while her executioners step back with the saws and axes and watch … They [the screamers] are their own tombstones and their own mourners. (Carr 1966: 132–33)

The juxtaposition of the beloved sky with the trees helps us to enter the tragedy John 3:16–21 depicts. God gives God’s self in love to the world; people love the darkness more than the light. John’s story of God’s self-giving love centres on the gift of Jesus scorned in crucifixion. His Gospel narrative is not once upon a time. It is recurring. John’s Jesus calls his followers to follow him into the midst of it (John 13:12–17; 15:9–21; 17:18–23).

Carr portrays a tragedy of scorned love. Continuing environmental degradation has only deepened the tragedy. How does John’s story of divine self-giving invite us to engage this tragedy and to receive and practise God’s gifts of love and life?

References

Carr, Emily. 1966. Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of Emily Carr (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin)