Angels in the Eaves

Angels in the Eaves Commentary by Rodolfo Galvan Estrada III Cite Share Show Bible Passage ‘Your son will live’ (John 4:50). These words of Jesus brought profound comfort to a deeply distressed father. In the Gospel account, the father (an ‘official’) has travelled from Capernaum to Cana upon hearing that Jesus has recently arrived there. When he finds Jesus, he urgently begs Him to come and heal his dying son. Instead of going with him, Jesus sends the father away and simply affirms that his son will live. The father believed in Jesus’s words, and immediately departed home. Although John’s Gospel provides few details about the father’s arrival at his home, this illumination imagines the scene. It is from a life of Christ by Jerome Xavier, a Spanish Jesuit missionary to the Mughal court of the Emperor Akbar (sixteenth–seventeenth centuries). The Emperor had a deep interest in Christianity and hosted Xavier as a guest (Carvalho 2012: 1). He commissioned from Xavier a manuscript about Christ called MirʼāT Al-Quds (Mirror of Holiness) and this illumination comes from one of three extant illustrated copies (ibid). The illumination portrays the father at his home, watching over his son who is lying on the floor. The mother is also nearby, gently gazing at her son with an outstretched arm, as if to comfort him. Downstairs, on the ground floor of the home, several servants remain busy with household tasks. They may not be aware of the full extent of the son’s miraculous recovery, but they are eager to serve (Carvalho 2012: 108–09). The painting also features a woman at the door, ready to receive another visitor. While the Gospel story does not detail the scene at the father’s home, this painting visually depicts the overwhelming relief and astonishment of the moment. This miracle, performed by Jesus from a distance, was understood only by the father, who realized that his son’s recovery was due to Jesus’s pronouncement that he would live. However, the most striking elements of the portrait are the angels just discernible within the arches supporting the roof of the home. These hidden angels evoke a sense of the unseen heavenly presence of God. In some sense, they also reflect the hidden nature of Jesus’s miracle. But as viewers of this artwork, we, like the readers of John’s Gospel, are given privileged access to what only the father knew at the time: that God was powerfully at work in this healing miracle. References Carvalho, Pedro de Moura, and W. M. Thackston. 2012. MirʼāT Al-Quds : A Life of Christ for Emperor Akbar (Leiden: Brill)