Who among us will deny that our God is an artist beyond compare? From the first cave etchings to the present day, and in all the greatest art galleries of the world, you will find that humankind's attempts at art have been mainly to emulate what He has done. For we see sketches of people and animals, portraits of famous personalities, still lifes of flowers and fruit, and magnificent landscapes of valleys and cataracts. Every artist attempts to do what He has done .... and to render it at lifelike as possible. There is no doubt about it. In the class of artists, defined by artists — all men and women in this field — there is none to compare with the Original.
It turns out that our God is creative. The first verb in the Scriptures is create. And the first thing He created was light. I do not exaggerate to say that all other art derives from that primal act, for visibility itself arises from light. The famous Latin sentence suggests the self-contained perfection of His earliest artwork. It is so elegant as to be a kind of haiku, a mysterious diamond of a poem: Deus dixit, Fiat lux et lux fit. ("God said, Let there be light, and there was light.")
How great is our God's art? Well, if the standard for art lies in the question, "Does it live?" The let us answer swiftly, everything He has created is alive. Let us go one step further: only that which He has created is alive. Even His geology is churning with energy as well know on this Polynesian island, giving rise to new life, to new islands! And this marvel of life fills us with wonder as we watch even the humblest insect exhibiting that strange animation, which shall never devise — that spark, that stirring, that life! Humankind may aspire to extinguish the spark of life, giving one, I suppose, as sense of power over it. For anything we can destroy we feel that we are greater than. But shall draw near, anywhere near, to His artifice, His sacred artform. Shakespeare's sentences four centuries ago reveals man's feeble case. Othello gazing at the sleeping wife, whose life he will take, says:
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...but once put out thy light,
Thou cunning'st pattern of excelling nature, I know not where is that Promethean heat That can thy light relume. When I have pluck'd the rose, I cannot give it vital growth again. |
"That cunningest pattern of excelling nature" — That magic, that holy stirring, that godlike bundle of voice and motion and mind, that art ... which proceeds alone from the finger of God.
How deep is our God's art? Why no sooner has one of His perfections been broken, as in Eden, than in its brokenness we find still greater perfections emerging: from despair to hope; from defilement to redemption; from death to restored life. The season of Spring itself is a brilliant, miraculous display of that power, of living colors and textures that dazzle with their variety and intensity, and softness, and intoxicating with their fragrance, all arising as it does from the season of crystal whites and hushed snowfalls, which have, in their turn, drawn a white curtain before hillsides of blazing orange and gold and auburn leaves and fragrances of fallen apples lying in orchard fields. Living art, life arising from death.
The medievals saw the depth of our God's art in the paradoxical statement felix culpa: "felicitous guilt" or "happy fault." For human failure, they thought, gave rise to the Incarnation and Atonement, which gave rise to the Sacred Mass, which is none other than the Gate of heaven, and the summit of all human experience:
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Ne hadde the apple taken been, the apple taken bene,
Ne hadde nevere Oure Lady ybene hevene Queen. Blessed be the time that apple taken was: Therfore we mown singen Deo Gratias. |
How subtle is our God's art? If subtlety is the art of managing expectations, then the artwork of His Advent and of Good Friday is peerless, beyond imagining.
The Psalmist teaches us that this clay, this media He loves most to work in was us:
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What is man, that Thou art mindful of him?
and the son of man, that Thou visitest him? |
What might this Man be? This God-Man? How should His life go? In what estate would He be born? Answers to these questions have filled-to-overflowing every artform of which humans are capable: drama, opera, poetry .... What should this Man be? And the Scriptures teach us that in each generation God longed to see a human life for which there is mirth in Heaven. He looked for this form of a Man in Eden. He searched for it tirelessly before the flood. Is there one? For ten good lives He would have spared Sodom and Gormorrah. And He took joy in Job, this solitary man, this one virtuous life, which might be seen in earth.
What might the life lived by God, then, be? The answer to this riddle can be seen in its very form. For God emptied Himself of glory and power and set aside divine dignity to enter the narrow prisonhouse of our broken humanity. Thus, the King of the Universe would be born midst mud and straw and lowly animals and their dung. And no one recognized Him among earthly creatures save the dumb animals who knew their Master's scent. Thus, the Lord of Hosts suffered Himself to be a carpenter and a boy of the village, not from royal Judah, but rather from despised Samaria and derided as the son of a single mother, for He was called not son of Joseph but son of Mary .... in a culture where every man is called bar-Jonah, bar-Eleazar, bar-Zechariah. "Son of Mary" was a taunt directed at Him and His Mother. Thus, did the Almighty suffer the insolence even from His bumptious disciples, yet loving each to the last. Thus, the King of Kings laid down His life on an ignominious Cross midst the jeering of a manic crowd and the abandonment of His every follower.
When He had completed this once-for-all performance of grace and humility, of meekness and honor, He permitted Himself only three words, according to St. Luke:
| "It is finished." |
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.