Suffering and Redemption

HANS HOLBEIN THE ELDER : Christ at Rest (Christus in der Ruhe), or The Pensive Christ, from the Grey Passion, Between 1494–1500 , Oil on spruce wood LOVIS CORINTH : Ecce Homo, 1925 , Oil on canvas MON VAN GENECHTEN : Suffering China, 1943 , Ink and colour on silk Suffering and Redemption Comparative commentary by Qu Yi Cite Share Show Bible Passage Read by Ben Quash One of the tragedies of human existence lies in the contradiction between the pursuit of happiness and the experience of suffering. It is a perennial theme of human life, whether physical or spiritual, that everyone is bound to experience various kinds of suffering: ‘In the world you face persecution’ (John 16:33 NRSV). Lovis Corinth suffered a stroke in 1911, which left him partially paralyzed on the left side of his body, causing him to walk with a limp and suffer from long-term tremors in his hands. In addition to producing many paintings with religious themes, Corinth also made introspective self-portraits throughout his life, including Self-Portrait with Skeleton (1896), Self-Portrait with Harness (1914), and Self-Portrait as Man of Sorrows (1925). The armour, guns, skeletons, and blood that appear in the painter’s works foreshadow the wars, prisons, concentration camps, massacres, and death of the subsequent twentieth century: modern testimony to humanity’s propensity to sin and servitude to suffering (Pfeiffer 1986). It was just these later twentieth-century horrors that the missionary painter Mon van Genechten experienced. In 1930, this 27-year-old Belgian artist was sent to China as a missionary by the Congregation of the Sacred Heart of Mary. He preached for a long time in the barren land of the North China plain. During this period, he learned Chinese painting and craft techniques from wandering artisans and woodcarvers. In 1944, Van Genechten and more than 400 priests, nuns, and lay believers of the Belgian Church were imprisoned by the Japanese army in the Weixian Concentration Camp in Shandong Province, before being sent to Beijing for a period of detention. Even during his imprisonment, he did not stop painting and drew numerous sketches depicting the hardships of ordinary Chinese people (Swerts & De Didder 2002; Chu 2024). It was these experiences in China that enabled him to complete this masterpiece painted on Chinese material, a work that exudes compassion as it discerns and displays the suffering in the faces of Chinese people. Christ’s carrying of the cross (as depicted in the work Suffering China) is only briefly described in the Bible: accounts mention both that Simon of Cyrene carried the cross for Jesus (Matthew 27:32; Mark 15:21; Luke 23:26), and that Jesus carried the cross himself (John 19:17). This ordeal has been particularly commemorated by the countless pilgrims to Jerusalem who have walked the pilgrimage route of the Via Dolorosa but such an experience was (and is) not available to everyone. Thus, from the fifteenth century, an alternative was developed in Europe that recalled Jesus’s journey toward the crucifixion through its artistic visualization, with associated devotions—the Stations of the Cross. Small chapels, with their sculptures and paintings, assembled on the mountain roads around the European countryside reproduce the stages of Jesus’s journey to Calvary. Many larger churches also have depictions of the Via Dolorosa in various media, and the entire sequence of the Stations can sometimes be presented in a single picture. By walking in the mountains or around the inside of a church—or even without moving their bodies, by ‘travelling’ in heart and mind—believers can recognize the various scenes of the Via Dolorosa and meditate on the connection between Jesus’s experience and their own lives. From the way to Golgotha to the stumbling road of exile for refugees in China; from Jesus and his disciples to Jesus and the Chinese refugees nearly two thousand years later, a community of suffering that transcends time, space, race, and culture was formed on Jesus’s Via Dolorosa. And this community can find strength in words first spoken by Isaiah to the Israelites: ‘so he shall startle many nations; kings shall shut their mouths because of him; for that which had not been told them they shall see, and that which they had not heard they shall contemplate’ (52:15 NRSV). In the Pensive Christ, the image of Jesus with one leg raised, one elbow resting on the knee, and the palm of his hand supporting his face is a posture that expresses ‘melancholy’ in the classical period and in later artistic traditions (both secular and sacred). Therefore, it has been used to depict Job’s suffering from leprosy and Jeremiah lamenting the destruction of Jerusalem. It is a posture that shows its subject suffering under spiritual bondage. Whether physical or spiritual, human suffering is inevitable. Through the suffering of Jesus, Christianity has seen it as capable of taking on a sacred meaning, one where affliction is not only a punishment but also a means of salvation. The words of Isaiah 52 have become a key part of this understanding of the suffering of Jesus, as the servant who suffers becomes a figure of veneration: ‘See, my servant shall prosper; he shall be exalted and lifted up, and shall be very high’ (52:13 NRSV). References Lorry Swerts & Koen De Ridder. 2002. Mon Van Genechten (1903–1974), Flemish Missionary and Chinese Painter: Inculturation of Christian Art in China (Leuven: Leuven University Press), 173; Chu Xiaobai. 2024. ‘The Tangle of ‘Chineseness’ and ‘Modernity’: On the Practice of Chinese Christian Painting at Fu Jen Catholic University (1929–1949)’, International Comparative Literature, Col. 7 No.1 (2024): 39–67. Heinrich Pfeiffer. 1986. Gottes Wort im Bild: Das Christusbild in der Kunst. (Wuppertal, München, Zürich: R. Brockhaus).