Sermons for the Month

The Dirt on Da Vinci
DATE: April 16, 2000
SERVICE: Palm Sunday
TEXT: Mark 14:1-15: 47

“To all of you Saints here this morning, grace and peace to you from God our Father, from His Son, Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit. AMEN

Leonardo Da Vinci's painting The Last Supper has been retouched, refurbished and renovated, and it can now be seen by the viewing public. It's back and it's beautiful, sharper and more colorful than ever! But not everyone is happy about the results.

It took two decades to scrape 500 years of grime off one of the world's most famous paintings. But now that the face-lift has been completed, visitors to the Santa Maria delle Grazie church in Milan can see a much brighter, clearer depiction of the last meal shared by Jesus and his disciples.

Paint and dirt were flaked away a millimeter at a time to get to Da Vinci's original 1497 masterpiece. Over the years the tempera-on-stone painting has been the victim of nine known retouchings; destruction by Napoleon's troops, who used the church grounds as a stable; grease buildup from a nearby kitchen; and the Allied bombing of 1943.

But critics say that the $8 million project stripped away important details, leaving nothing more than fragments of Da Vinci's original work, and that the intervening space -as much as 80 percent of the mural - were filled in with watercolors.

A similar sort of thing happened 2,000 years ago. The crowd on Palm Sunday was pumped up and praising Jesus, but by Thursday night many of the same folks wanted to persecute him. Over the course of four short days, the people of Jerusalem thoroughly retouched Jesus, transforming him from a king into a criminal. Like the experts gazing upon Da Vinci today, we - standing at a distance - decry the results of this sort of capricious retouching.

But it is still going on, isn't it? We still do it - this retouching of Jesus. In China, he's Chinese. In Africa, he's black. In America, he's a white. And this radical renovating is really nothing new. Just as Da Vinci's The Last Supper was blurred over the eons of time, so our view of Jesus has been messed up, bombed out and dumped on by historical, cultural interpretive accretions. For the Crusaders, Christ was a conquering king. For Marxists, he was a revolutionary. For counselors, Jesus is a therapist. For the business world, he's a management guru (check out Laurie Beth Jones' Jesus CEO: Using Ancient Wisdom for Visionary Leadership [Hyperion, 1995]). For children, he is a shepherd.

Of course, what's to complain about? Jesus himself legitimates the Good Shepherd metaphor. But even this interpretation can lead us astray, into a mire of misunderstanding. A few years ago, another denomination published a new hymnal for its children, and the comment of one reviewer cut to the quick. "This book is preoccupied with lambs," he observed. "It will not be surprising if, when the children who have used this book reach adulthood, they see little lambs hopping by whenever they hear a reference to Christianity."

Little lambs. Hopping by. Cute.

So you know what? We need to retouch Jesus again. Peel off, layer by layer, the cultural assumptions, the materialistic bias, the myths that mask the man, the husk hiding the kerygmatic kernel.

The Jesus we will find is committed to love of everyone including enemies, calling us to go in directions we'd much rather avoid - into raunchy red-light districts, over to the cramped apartments of single moms, down to the streets littered with the homeless, into shelters beside stoners and junkies, through the doors of hospices and prisons.

Not that there aren't those who are trying. Leading us in this retouching effort are people like New Testament scholar Robert Funk. The Jesus he finds in the gospels is a secular sage and a social critic who satirized the pious and championed society's poor and marginalized. He spoke in parables and aphorisms, often using humor or irony to make a point. "Jesus was perhaps the first standup Jewish comic," says Funk - a person not interested in being political or programmatic. He argues that whenever we poke fun at the powerful and show compassion for the poor, we are responding to an important aspect of the original, authentic Christ.

Marcus Borg sees Jesus as a "spirit person," a subversive sage, a social prophet and a movement founder. Looking at Scripture, Borg discovers a Jesus who was more concerned about this life than the afterlife, who taught subversive wisdom and who was intent on revitalizing Israel. He was also a "healer or holy person," something of a Jewish mystic and a radical cultural critic who preached the politics of compassion.

"There has never been a more empowering figure than Jesus," insists John Dominic Crossan, a former priest and professor. "If you are empowered by Jesus' life, in my judgment that makes you a Christian." Crossan's retouching of Jesus reveals that he was a preacher who proclaimed God's "radical justice," and lived the idea so powerfully that it inspired a movement that changed the course of history.

Regardless of whether you agree or not with these scholars, it's helpful to be reminded that Jesus was a Jewish peasant who preached love and selflessness, gained some notoriety and was tested, tried under Pontius Pilate, crucified and buried and later appeared before witnesses who took him for the Messiah and dedicated themselves to spreading his gospel. Suffice it to say, the retouching of Jesus is still going on. But why?

Luke Timothy Johnson, a professor at Emory, put it this way, " the Christ of Christianity is "still powerfully alive" - not a shadowy figure behind a thin chronology of sayings and deeds etched in unreliable ancient texts. Christianity is an ever-evolving, ever-changing, ever-growing religion based on personal leaps, tests of faith, and the good works of believers filled with the ever-active Spirit of Christ. Ancient writings may very well encourage us to show compassion to the poor, but we would do well to look more to the future than to the past, and find the face of Jesus in the 21st century instead of the first."

The living Christ is with us right now, and probably more visible in unpopular places than in the hottest hangouts, probably closer to the losers of this world than to the winners. The authentic Jesus is right here, just waiting to be seen, just ready to be discovered.

That's why when you scrape the dirt off Da Vinci, the Christ you should find - is the one in you!

AMEN

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