Daily Devotion for Monday 28th April 2025

Kelly Latimore Crucifixion and Resurrection icons. used under licence

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These two icons were conceived as a matched set, and aim to subvert the deadly dualism of light and darkness in the Christian tradition. They provide a meditation on the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ as the work of the liberator God of Exodus. They serve to remind us that God has  taken the side of oppressed people everywhere and were commissioned not long after the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and so many others. But the immediate impulse came from the death of James Cone in 2018. These icons are meant to bring to mind Cone’s seminal work The Cross and the Lynching Tree.  Kelly was asked to make his point of departure two older images (an El Greco painting of the crucifixion and an Orthodox icon of the resurrection), but to make the composition and other details his own and to portray Jesus and his disciples with African-American features.  The priest who commissioned the icons serves in America – a country with a history of slavery, lynching, and other forms of white supremacist violence and felt it was of crucial importance to make the deep connection (as Cone does) between lynching and the crucifixion of Jesus. Both are public acts of torture and murder, intended to terrify and subject other human beings and keep them in their so-called “place.” It is equally important to have images to pray with to encourage the ongoing process of conversion needed to make us more effective allies and participants in today’s struggles.

Reading    Colossians 1: 24 – 29

I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.  I became its servant according to God’s commission that was given to me for you, to make the word of God fully known,  the mystery that has been hidden throughout the ages and generations but has now been revealed to his saints. To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.  It is he whom we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone in all wisdom, so that we may present everyone mature in Christ.  For this I toil and struggle with all the energy that he powerfully inspires within me.

Reflection

Protestants, generally, don’t like depictions of the Crucifixion in church preferring to focus on the empty tomb.  They can be impatient of Anglican and Catholic art which often focuses, like the first of today’s pictures, on Christ crucified.  Preferring to think of Calvary as a once-and-for-all-time thing, they worry that scenes of the Crucifixion mean we are trying to replay Jesus’ death over and over again.  Yet, one of the many ecumenical convergences over the last 60 or so years concerns our understandings of Holy Communion as a way of making Calvary present now.  It’s a deeply Catholic idea and is given expression in our Basis of Union where we say that, at Communion, “…in obedience to the Lord’s command his people show forth his sacrifice on the cross by the bread broken and the wine poured for them to eat and drink..”  There’s a deep connection between our celebrations of Holy Communion and Jesus’ death at Calvary; it’s mystery more than memory.

Perhaps this is what the writer of Colossians meant by that striking first verse about “completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions…”  It might indicate the writer was uniting their own sufferings with the Cross or it might be a Jewish idea that there would be pain and suffering before the Messiah appeared.  Kelly Latimore, perhaps, takes this idea in the first of today’s pictures by showing that contemporary unjust deaths, especially of black people at the hands of racists, can be united with Jesus’ suffering on the Cross. Jesus is killed over and over again in His people.  After all He said that whatever we do to the least we do to Him.

We, however, can’t linger too long at the Cross without also contemplating the resurrection and our second picture shows a risen Lord triumphing over death, injustice, and pain.  We pray that we will live to see justice reign, evil defeated, and Calvary and the Garden transfiguring all our pain.

Prayer

Help us, Lord Jesus, 
to see where You are crucified in Your people now.
Open our eyes to see the evil that stalks 
both your world and your Church,
that we may ease suffering, 
end injustice, 
and find peace in the empty tomb.
Amen.