The Stations of the Cross and The Empty Tomb are currently being shown at York Minster during Lent and Easter.
Exhibiting alongside The Stations of the Cross and The Empty Tomb will be a newly completed painting, Judas: the Departure, which is revealed during the first week of Lent and during Holy Week, before being hidden away somewhere in the Minster.
The Stations will form an integral part of the Minster’s Easter Liturgy.
Below is a slightly abridged version of a meditation upon the painting delivered by the Very Reverend Keith Jones, Dean of York Minster at the beginning of Lent 2011.
This picture is of a simple dramatic movement: a man putting on his coat.
The immediate impression is of black and white, but in fact there is a good deal of colour here, and beautiful colour too: a warm sand tint on Judas’s neck, most noticeably on his hand; but it also occurs elsewhere, significantly in the background, where it adds a liveliness to the whiteness, and it also gives a hint that the trousers are rather deep brown rather than black. The richness of colour continues in the complex pattern of lemon on the back of his waistcoat which is at the centre of the picture. And then there is blue, a delicate and interesting blue, at its purest in the band along the base of the picture, but also infused into the shadow to the top right hand of the painting.
The figure itself is very upright, the horizontal line at the base emphasising the height of the man who is slim and vigorous in form. Ghislaine Howard is an artist who is always able to catch the way in which human weight is balanced in its daily movements, and it can be seen here in the way the legs are braced for the action with the coat. The action is quite slow, definite, but preoccupied. The arm, too, in the shirt carries a sheen which implies he is well muscled. The face we can tell is bearded, mature but still young. The way the legs are positioned implies that, once dressed up, Judas is going to move, move away, go about business that is his own.
From these schematic observations what do we tell? There is grandeur about this figure, a person who is engaged in an action of vast consequence. We catch him at the moment when decision it turned into irrevocable action, and when he assumes his coat of black – which will make him a very dark figure indeed. Saint John says “Judas went out. And it was night”. The white background is presumably a wall with the hint of a floor. But where Judas is going is the dark, away from the place where flesh and lemon, pale blue and white, colours of life and hope, prevail. You see how from the right hand top of the painting shadow increases: that is the direction of the future, and its presence adds to the menace of the dark that will prevail as Judas goes into action
Judas is not shown at full length. This emphasises the way that the action is paused rather than stopped. We are to consider him while he is caught in this moment of time, even though we know that time does not stop and that he will complete this action, take the next step. Judas is free to act, but also he is trapped, he has lost freedom not to act. I am reminded of the pictures we see in the newspapers: of dynamic people, bankers, soldiers, politicians, who look like the masters of the world but who, of course, are prisoners too; prisoners of what has gone before, formed the situations in which they exercise their limited choices.
This is precisely what the contemplation of the Stations of the Cross allows us to do, to pause in the continuum of suffering, to have the luxury of understanding what life does to people and what it does to us.
You wouldn’t know this was Judas if the title didn’t give it away. He looks rather Edwardian, I think; he strikes me as a character from Strindberg or Ibsen: playwrights who questioned the humaneness of the ambitious and forceful male character. It’s in this sense that this Judas is a tragic figure – in the sense Aristotle meant when he brilliantly remarked that tragedy is about people who are better than we are, being tested to the uttermost. He represents a man trapped by his own self confidence and convictions: the aspects of our society that have won us astonishing triumphs of technology and mastery, but at the cost perhaps of what Jesus called the one thing needful. “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world at the cost of his life?”
There is a profound sadness in this picture, of the kind caught by the clichés from John Wayne or Frank Sinatra about “A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do”, or “I did it my way”. These are the catch phrases of Hell. Or do we see this as somebody who is slowly and in a stunned way reacting to a vast realization that he is trapped? In that case, this is the picture of despair. If so, then Judas is a parable of our impressive but destructive civilisation. So tremendously right and so tremendously wrong. So noble and so cruel. So creative and so globally destructive.
“Judas” will be hidden in the Minster until Holy Week, so look your last on him. We go with this Everyman where we say in the words of Psalm 139: “Surely darkness will steal over me, and the day around me turn to night”. There is a deep compassion in this picture of a troubled man, who is a man with our kind of trouble. This is the sort of way the Jesus might have looked on a man whom he called a friend, even though he betrayed him.
I don’t want to attempt a last word about this picture tonight. The beginning of Lent is not the time for last words, but for first words. I shall revisit him on Good Friday, after this picture has been hidden in the Minster, just as this guilty man will have been lost among the crowds that will have come and gone in this place.
The way Christ shows us is the way that goes into darkness, does not shun it or deny it. Even though thick darkness covers the peoples, the world’s future threatened as never before and so finally, we wait for the Lord, who will meet us there in our darkness. But to that I shall return when I speak about this picture again on Good Friday.
The exhibition of the work is the start of a three year association between the artist and the Minster which will in culminate in 2013 when a specially created new series of the Stations will be exhibited. These works will draw their inspiration from secular subject matter and will mark the 1700th anniversary of the Edict of Milan, which proclaimed religious toleration in the Roman Empire. The Minster is taking the opportunity of this event to centre our thoughts upon the need for tolerance and reconciliation in the modern world.
