Invisible: the Man of Bethesda Speaks for the Chronically Ill

 

Christ Healing the Sick at Bethesda

Carl Heinrich Bloch (1834-1890)

After this there was a festival of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew Bethesda, which has five porticoes. In these lay many invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed. One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be made well?” The sick man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me.” Jesus said to him, “Stand up, take your mat and walk.” At once the man was made well, and he took up his mat and began to walk. Now that day was a sabbath.  (John 5:1-9)

***

          Can you see me?  Carl Heinrich Bloch has captured so well the reality of my 38 years of illness, as he pictures me actually covered over by a graying, tattered piece of cloth.  I honestly can’t remember how or when that cloth got there.  I may have hung it myself, weary of prying eyes and probing questions that often suggested my illness was all my fault and that I just needed a more positive attitude.  Or it may be that others surrounded me with that cloth because my prolonged illness annoyed them.  It would simply be easier for them if I were invisible.  Sometimes I would overhear people say rude things about me.  “He’s probably just trying to get attention by lying there all the time.”  “It’s all in his head.”   “Maybe he really doesn’t want to be well, because he thinks too much would be expected of him.”  Other times I could feel the fear of some who saw me and then quickly turned away.  “What if something like this should happen to me?  Keep that cloth tucked around him, please.  It’s just too frightening to see him.” 

          At times I wanted to shout out to their rudeness and their fear.  I wanted to tell them how many times I had tried to get into the Pool.  In your modern day language, I wanted to tell them how many doctors I’d seen, some of whom dismisssed me or treated me with impatience because they didn’t have a solution to my problem.  How many psychotherapists and physical therapists I had worked with.  How many different diets I had tried.  How many miles I had traveled in search of a new practitioner who promised miracles.  How many medications I had tried, often feeling worse from miserable side effects.  “Thirty-eight years of this,” I wanted to shout.  “Life hasn’t been easy, but I am living it as best I can.  Please don’t make it more difficult with your unfair judgments and coy suggestions that ‘it’s all in his head’ and that I’d be fine if I really wanted to be.”

          And then that wondrous day of the sudden lifting of that soiled, frayed cloth.  Eyes looking straight into my eyes.  A quiet, but powerful voice, “Do you want to be made well?”  I have to confess that at first I assumed the voice came from yet another stranger who shared all the negative attitudes about me and my illness.  But this stranger did seem rather kind, so I thought maybe I should at least try to explain my problem to him.  “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me.”  Of course, I expected the usual—the cloth dropping back down around me, the familiar words of disdain.  

          But instead, “Stand up, take your mat and walk.”   Words filled with a love and a power that literally burst around me and flowed into every cell of my being.  I did stand up.  I did pick up my mat.  And I did walk.  I walked through the rest of my life.  I didn’t always get everything right, to be sure, but I walked with a heart filled with gratitude, and I tried as best I could to help others who were living as I had lived for so long, chronically sick and often invisible.

          I know there are many of you today who live a life so like my life before Christ lifted that tattered cloth.  Suffering with a chronic or prolonged illness.  Living with all the misunderstanding, avoidance, and loneliness that often comes with such illnesses, whether that illness be emotional, mental, or physical.  I so wish the Christ who walked the earth in my day could do for you all that he did for me.  But his ways are mysterious.  There were many others at the Pool the day I was healed, and they were not healed as I was.  Why?  I do not know.  I know that some of them were angry and jealous.  Why him and not me?  I heard some muttered curses as I walked away. 

          But even though the ways of the healing Christ are quite beyond my understanding—I’m not much good when it comes to unraveling the mysteries of God, I do believe that, during my 38 years of illness, even in my times of utter despair, the healing of Christ was somehow at work in me.  And even though I wasn’t able to “take up my bed and walk,” I was often—not always, but often—able to find the peace and strength I needed to live through yet another hour, through yet another day.  To know that I was not alone.  To know that I was affirmed by God, just as I was.  To know that I could live richly, even with my illness and its deficiencies.  Truly, the healing Christ was there, behind the tattered cloth, even in the darkest moments of those 38 long years.  

          So that’s my story.  I hope something of it will be of some help to those of you who suffer with a chronic illness, and to those of you who know others who are chronically ill.  I hope especially that Christ’s healing will be very real in all of your lives.  Whether you are able to “take up your beds and walk” or not.  God’s peace to all of you.

 

 

The Never-Ending Last Supper?

Café Terrace at Night (1888)

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890)

          A simple, serene painting of a starry evening at a café in Arles?  Or, perhaps, a fresh re-visioning of the last supper of Jesus with his 12 disciples?

          Van Gogh was decidedly not overtly religious at the time of this painting.  In fact, his life was quite the opposite of “religious.”  He was drinking heavily, smoking heavily, frequently visiting brothels.  He looked upon the church with disdain, and in a letter from 1880, wrote that a priest in his surplice “looks like a dangerous rhinoceros.” 

          His life had not always been so.  Raised by a Dutch Reformed pastor and a strict, pious mother in the Netherlands, he had himself aspired to become a pastor.  But without much success.  He failed the entrance exam in theology at the University of Amsterdam and shortly after failed a 3-month course at a Protestant missionary school in Belgium.  Nevertheless, he was sent as a pastor to the coal-mining district of Borinage in Belgium, and there he worked hard to emulate his understanding of the life of Jesus.  After only a short time, however, church authorities determined that his rather unorthodox practice of living in a small hut and sleeping on straw—all to become closer to his beloved parishioners—undermined the dignity of a church pastor.   He was dismissed.

          He wandered uneasily through much of the rest of his life, trying this and trying that, and he finally settled on art with the help of his brother Theo.  But his life was never tranquil.  His physical health was poor, his mental health was poor, and throughout his years of painting, his art was dismissed, even as he had been dismissed by his church.

          It seems, however, that through all of these years of turmoil and often debauched living, van Gogh himself never fully dismissed his faith.  In later years, he wrote to his brother Theo of the Christ for whom he longed.  Christ is, he penned, “a greater artist than all other artists…working in living  flesh.  This matchless artist made living men immortals.”  He also wrote to Theo to tell him that he had a “tremendous need for, shall I say the word — for religion.” 

          Interestingly, this last statement was written with specific reference to his painting of “Café Terrace at Night.”  So it’s no surprise that some art aficionados now see this painting as more than a peaceful evening scene of an Arles café at night.  They suggest that van Gogh was actually creating his own version of Christ’s last supper with his twelve disciples, and they ask viewers to consider the following:

          –Eleven people (though it’s difficult to count precisely in an impressionistic painting!)  are seated at tables surrounding the server.

          –A twelfth person, a dark figure, is seen leaving the scene, even as Judas left the disciples gathered for their last meal with their master. 

          –The server is a man dressed in a long white robe. 

          –A lantern, glowing like a halo, hangs just over the server’s head.

          –Directly behind the server, a cross is visible in the window.

          –Several other crosses can also be seen along the street, one cross stretching high into the starry Arles night.  

          All of these facets of the painting suggest that very possibly something more than a mere evening café scene in Arles is what van Gogh has portrayed here.  But why would van Gogh choose an outdoor café setting for the Last Supper?  Why not paint an impressionistic image of that famous Upper Room?  The answer, perhaps, lies in the fact that the Christ for whom van Gogh longed is a Christ not confined by church walls or church rituals.  He is rather a Christ who lives and can be found and experienced in the midst of life.  He is a Christ who frequents the rooms and the activities of our daily lives.  He is a Christ who comes close in our everydays in order to wait upon us and to serve us.

          So it would seem appropriate for van Gogh to have depicted the Last Supper at an Arles café.  Perhaps his very graphic way of saying that the Last Supper is an ongoing, never-ending event as Christ stands among us in every moment, in every ordinary place of all our days and all our nights.  Stands among us, not to lord it over us or to condemn us, but stands among us to serve us.  To make sure our needs are met, to attend to the smallest details of our lives.  To offer us, in the midst of our living, a croissant, a cup of wine, his very body, his very blood.

          Van Gogh left several empty tables at the front of the café.  An invitation, perhaps, for us to sit with the disciples, for us to know that we are always welcome at Christ’s table? 

          In the end, we cannot know with certainty, of course, just what van Gogh had in mind when he painted “Café Terrace at Night,” but I find it compelling to think of this scene as a re-telling of the Last Supper.  And as I look at the painting from this perspective, I find myself hoping that van Gogh himself somehow experienced this serving Christ in all the turmoil of his own troubled life.  Hoping that he somehow knew this Christ to be with him as he splashed irises, sunflowers, and starry nights across his canvases.  Knew this Christ to be with him as he roamed the countryside or the hallways of an asylum.   Knew him to be with him in his tiny room, often drunk or hung-over.  To be with him even as he felt himself fleeing from the faith that had once been so dear to him.  To be with him to feed and nourish him.  To be with him to paint his tattered life immortal.

 

A Craggy-faced Christ

          A craggy-faced Christ.  Not exactly the image of Christ with which I grew up.  The Christ of my Sunday School pictures and church wall hangings had quite a different face, a gentle face, a kindly face.  Granted that face was very much a handsome Caucasian face, and not a first-century Jewish face, but there was a certain sweetness, a certain tenderness about that Christ. 

          This craggy-faced Christ is so very different.  This Christ stepped right out of Isaiah 53:3.  He is truly a Christ “despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief” (KJV).  He knows about life.  About its hardships.  About its pain. 

          This Christ is part of a beautiful wood-carving of the Last Supper that our daughter gave to us, a gift from her trip to Croatia a few years ago.

          In this carving, this very craggy-faced Christ sits in the midst of his disciples.  And as this Christ holds out his two burly arms, his hands are clenched around two chunks of bread.  “My body,” he says, knowing full well that his body was soon to be broken for them.   

          And for us.  There’s certainly a place for a smiling, gentle Christ on the picture-walls of our minds.  I like to imagine such a Christ laughing and playfully joining with us in all the fun adventures of our lives.  Like to imagine him dancing through our joyful days.  Like to imagine him sipping a cup of tea with me from time to time. 

          But there are times, many times, when I need and when I can relate more easily to this craggy-faced Christ from the Croatian wood-carving.  This is a Christ who speaks the language of loneliness.  A Christ who knows my deepest sorrows.  Who knows the sorrows of our broken world.  Who knows the pain and fear of refugees.  A Christ who weeps for the chaos and loss when guns tear lives apart in our country and in countries around the world.  Who aches with children and women and men whose lives are curtailed by illness, by hunger, by poverty, by war, by discrimination. 

          This craggy-faced Christ will never offer trite platitudes to ease the pain that so often intrudes into our lives and into our world.  Instead, this Christ offers us the bread of his body broken for us.  Broken on what seemed at the time a God-forsaken cross.  Broken in his descent to hell before God raised him to new life from the darkness of the tomb. 

          This bread is a precious gift.  It’s bread that offers us a measure of peace.  Bread that gives us hope.  Bread that strengthens us.  Bread that keeps us ever in God’s grace.

 

Light in the Darkness

“Savior of the World”

El Greco ( 1541 – 1614)

A dark December day;

dark outside my winter window;

dark inside our too-still house;

dark through all the muscles

of my body, of my mind.

Bombs and missiles frighten

angels in the skies, and bullets shatter

trust across our neighborhoods and schools.

Darkness surrounds and swallows up—almost,

the candles of this waiting Advent time.

*

I turn to the icon* silent in my hands:

El Greco’s “Savior of the World.”

More darkness there:

     of eye,

          of eyebrows,

               of hair, of beard.

And framing all the Christ, a shroud of midnight black:

     threatening,

          brooding,

               dense.

*

I want to turn away, to find a brighter Christ,

the baby Christ of promised peace, the One

to bind and blind the darkness all around.

And then I see.

Behind the darkness, through the darkness, into the darkness,

a strangely halo-ed square of light

shines round the Savior’s face;

shines through his penetrating eyes;

shines onto his blood-red tunic;

shines across his hands, atop his blue-royal robe;

shines un-dimmed by the darkness;

shines in quiet confidence;

shines toward that time when darkness

will be no more.

For now, it is still dark around me.

For now, it is still dark within me.

But as I look into those tender, sorrowful eyes,

a little of that halo-ed light shines hopeful

into me; for now, that is

enough.

*****

*I know. El Greco’s “Savior of the World” is not “officially” an icon, but for me it has become one—even without the sanction of a higher authority.