FaithQuest 2010 - "Jesus is the Story"

This series is regarding the paintings 'performed' during Faith Quest 2010.  The weekend revolved around a movie theme and the speakers played with different characterizations of Jesus as found primarily in the Gospel of John.  This painting was painted while Jeff Medders spoke on 'Jesus is the Story.'

In the beginning…

… Jesus was there. 

Time is an interesting idea, especially in painting.  Most forms of art are time based- music, theater, literature.  They all contain the element of time- a beginning, a middle, an end.  Painting is there all at once.  But we’re conditioned to read paintings in terms of time- as maybe snapshots of a longer story- so we insert our own sense of time.

But what about Jesus?  He seems to come into the story in the middle.  Hundreds, thousands of years of the history of God’s people happens before the world hears of the name Jesus in the sense we know it today.  The fact that He came at all is the result of the sins that we committed.  Cause / Effect.  Choice / Consequence.  Before / After.  Only what came ‘after’ was already there in the ‘before.’

So I picked up something from an artist named Jasper Johns.  He would sometimes include writing or words in his paintings.  But often he would start a word on the right side of the painting but then have the word ‘wrap around’ and finish on the left side.  It was the complete opposite of what painting had been trying to do up until that point.  Before you went from a picture that looked like a view out of a window.  You knew the scene goes on past the edges of the painting even though everything is framed nicely within the picture.  The Impressionists took it even further by actually having people and objects cropped by the edge of the painting- similar to the way a camera does (Hmmm… can you guess what period the camera was invented?)

Even abstract art had a sense of infinity- that it could go on forever and ever.  But Jasper Johns thought of painting as an object all to itself.  It wasn’t being or looking like something- it was something itself.  So instead of going off to infinity- the words looped back around into the painting- containing it in its own reality. 

Jesus is the Alpha and the Omega.  There is nothing beyond Him.  If He goes off to one side… He ought to loop around to the other side.  He is contained by nothing else but His own reality.

So lets ‘read’ this painting.  The tree lies before you.  It is your choice to take or not to take.  On the left is the welcoming hand of Jesus, displaying the abundance of the paradise He created.  On the right is the result of taking the fruit- a dry desert that ends with Jesus hanging on the cross.  Or does it end there?  When His hand wraps back around you see His nail-scarred hand re-offering, through His death, the paradise that He is creating for you right now. 

The choice is yours.