Who may dwell on your holy hill? … [Those who] do no evil to their friends … and who do not take a bribe against the innocent (Psalm 15:1, 3, 5 NRSV) 

Psalms 15 and 24 teach that those who would come into God’s sanctuary and receive blessing must exhibit moral integrity in their dealings with others. They must ‘have clean hands and pure hearts’. They must not ‘lift up their souls to what is false’, nor ‘swear deceitfully’ (24:4).

In a small parish church in Dorset, there is a remarkable window by an artist who pioneered the modern rehabilitation of the unusual technique of engraving in glass, Sir Laurence Whistler. It indirectly dramatizes the stakes for these psalms’ ethical imperatives.

This was the thirteenth of a series the artist made, in clear glass, to replace the original windows that had been destroyed when a bomb hit the church during the Second World War. Its installation was long delayed, and controversial (Stanford 2015: 269–76). It represents Judas, known as the disciple who, in the psalm’s terms, took ‘a bribe against the innocent’, betraying Jesus in exchange for thirty pieces of silver.   

Judas is shown at the moment of his death, hanging from a tree. The image draws on the brief account of his suicide given in the Gospel of Matthew: ‘Throwing down the pieces of silver in the temple, he departed; and he went and hanged himself’ (Matthew 27:5 NRSV).

But in Whistler’s vision of this act of desperation, there are hopeful signs of the potential for new life. A shaft of light falls on the disciple’s upturned head. As Judas releases the thirty pieces of silver from his hands, he lets them fall to the ground—which we might read as the abject place of exclusion (Akeldama: the ‘field of blood’ of Acts 1:18–19). But, as they fall away—and in a detail unique to Whistler’s image—the coins undergo a transformation. They appear to sprout tiny shoots. They are springing into bud. It is a profound and poignant image of hope, redemption, fruitfulness, and new life for and from a man dismissed from the Temple, a man who has ‘taken a bribe against the innocent’ (Psalm 15:5).

References:

Stanford, Peter. 2015. Judas (London: Hodder and Stoughton)

With great economy, Psalm 15 distils no fewer than ten behavioural qualities that the faithful worshipper should embody (Brueggemann & Bellinger 2014: 82). Among the qualities of those who would ‘walk blamelessly, and do what is right’ (15:2) is that they ‘do not lend money at interest’ (15:5).

In ancient Near Eastern society, as today, money-lending at interest was ethically problematic. While yielding profits for those rich with the power to lend, it could worsen suffering for vulnerable borrowers. The psalm echoes its proscription in Jewish law (Exodus 22:25–27; Leviticus 25:35–38; Deuteronomy 16:19–20).

Pay Nothing Until April are the words emblazoned over a glossy, picturesque image of a snow-capped mountain. The phrase is familiar as an enticement to buy—to buy, perhaps, something not quite affordable.

Since the Pop era of the 1960s, from his adopted home city of Los Angeles, Nebraska-born artist Ed Ruscha has pioneered a distinctive art practice of exploring words in space—abstract, urban, and natural. Pay Nothing Until April is one of a series of mountain paintings he began making in 1997. Like a sign-painter (Ruscha worked as one early in his career), he superimposes over these scenes of geological grandeur seemingly banal or incongruous words and text fragments, using his own gawky typeface, which he dubs ‘Boy Scout Utility Modern’. Its qualities further reinforce the sense of ‘cheapness’ suggested by the shallow words.

This work features a concise slogan pressing a covert usury—the offer of lent money (15:5) with interest payment deferred—as a lure. The implied human commodification of the earth, which is ‘the Lord’s’ (24:1) in the aspirational image of alpine tourism suggests a secular ‘holy hill’ of its own kind in the cult of beauty and the sublime, here destabilized and ironically rendered cheap by connotations of pop and kitsch.

References

Brueggemann, Walter and William H. Bellinger, Jr. 2014. Psalms, (New York: Cambridge University Press)

O Lord, who may abide in your tent? Who may dwell on your holy hill? (Psalm 15:1 NRSV)

Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? And who shall stand in his holy place? (Psalm 24:3 NRSV)

What qualities must a person have, to come close to God? Psalms 15 and 24 open with searching questions of worshippers seeking admittance—literally or metaphorically—to God’s Temple, evoked by images of a tent and of a hill (15:1; 24:3). The latter calls to mind the ‘hill of the Lord’ whose ascent Jewish tradition most celebrated: Mount Zion.  

A different place of worship, Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral, is today home to a richly suggestive work of contemporary art. Read in the light of these psalms, its very inhabitation of this sanctuary obliquely poses a modern echo of those ancient questions. Who may dwell on your holy hill? (15:1)

Tracey Emin’s For You, in joyously lurid pink neon, is at first sight an incongruous presence in Giles Gilbert Scott’s massive ecclesiastical building. It enshrines a sentence, in the artist’s own handwriting, glowing with a constant, chemical light below the large stained-glass window at the west end, near to where people enter. With a confessional honesty at odds with neon’s commoner associations—with advertising, city pleasures, and commodified sex—it reads: ‘I Felt You And I Knew You Loved me’. First installed as part of Liverpool’s year as European City of Culture in 2008, it has become a popular and abiding presence on this ‘holy hill’.

The words are intimate. The verbs—‘feeling’, ‘knowing’, ‘loving’—are as insistently relational as the capitalized ‘I-You-I-You-me’ of their confession. Such a confession might be one made in prayer, but it looks a lot more like one from a love letter or the bedroom. And it is of course for her unmade bed—‘My Bed’ (1998)—and for her embroidered tent listing ‘Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995’ (1995) that Emin is best known. She has spoken openly of her experiences of underage sex, sexual violence, abortion, alcohol abuse, depression, and thoughts of suicide (e.g. Emin 2005; Cork 2015). The enshrining in this temple of the love of this woman—messy and ambiguous, sensual and devoted—makes space for real experience: for desire (eros), and universal love (agape) to dwell in the ‘tent’, ‘holy’ or otherwise.

References

Cork, Richard. 2015. Face to Face: Interviews with Artists (London: Tate Publishing)

Emin, Tracey. 2005. Strangeland (London: Hodder and Stoughton)