Sup­per at Emmaus, Caravaggio

Many years ago, shortly after becom­ing a Chris­t­ian, I came across a remark­able paint­ing by Michelan­gelo Car­avag­gio enti­tled The Sup­per at Emmaus. I was at my school’s library in down­town Chicago—Grant Park was right out­side the win­dow from where I sat. I was flip­ping through a bunch of books that I had grabbed off the shelves. I was just wast­ing time, wait­ing for a class to begin. That day when I caught sight of this paint­ing, it began for me a new way of see­ing Jesus. Imme­di­ately, the paint­ing caught my eye, because it wasn’t your typ­i­cal “reli­gious” work. In fact, it was almost too non-descript, and at first, I didn’t real­ize that it was a paint­ing depict­ing any­thing sacred or reli­gious— it just looked like a paint­ing of a few guys eat­ing together. I’ve only seen this paint­ing in art books, and one day, I hope to ven­ture to the National Gallery in Lon­don and see it up close. I am sure it will then be even more sig­nif­i­cant then when I see it up-close.

Some­thing was spe­cial about this paint­ing, made up of noth­ing more than some oils placed with some thought on the can­vas. As I stood star­ing at it, I real­ized why it held my atten­tion and I rec­og­nized its unique­ness. It was how the char­ac­ters looked. You know what caught my eye? Jesus looks real. Gone is the blond hair and blue eyes. He looks like a real Hebrew guy, olive skin and all. You see, the painter Car­avag­gio did some­thing earth shat­ter­ing in his time as an artist—he painted Jesus like a real per­son; amaz­ingly, he looked human and real-to-life. In fact, very uncom­mon for his time, most of Caravaggio’s mod­els were peas­ants from local vil­lages. Instead of paint­ing the noble and the wealthy as his mod­els for John the Bap­tist or Jesus or any other bib­li­cal char­ac­ter, he was paint­ing the cob­blers, fish­er­men and maid­ens of his day, and there­fore his paint­ings took on a look that was authentic.

With this, in this paint­ing of Caravaggio’s, Jesus looks like a per­son; some­one you could know, the guy next door. He seems approach­able. This is the oper­a­tive word—Jesus in this paint­ing comes off as a per­son. Before this, in the art world—for the artist, Jesus was never a person—He was just “God.” Most of the artists in this period were paint­ing the “majes­tic Christ”—the unap­proach­able Jesus, the one on the throne, the one you needed to sched­ule by appoint­ment. But this is only half the story because Jesus really is a per­son, a friend, a con­fi­dant. In con­trast, with Caravaggio’s paint­ing, you see this “friend” aspect come out onto the can­vas. Jesus is just hang­ing out, eat­ing a meal and shootin’ the breeze. When I saw this paint­ing, this was in my early years in being a Chris­t­ian and this was the Jesus I wanted to get to know. You could get close to him. This is what I wanted. Unlike other reli­gious art I had seen up to that point, it cap­tured Jesus as some­one you would want to get to know. As a con­trast, go look at some of the art work from this period and you will notice that the char­ac­ters are oblong and uncom­fort­able. Let me illus­trate some exam­ples; you might have seen some art depict­ing Jesus like this:

•    Paint­ing No. 1: Baby Jesus is white and his face looks like he’s 59 years old—wrinkled and bald­ing. He wears a smirk, a bap­tismal gown and a bratty look.

•    Paint­ing No. 2: Jesus has his kingly pose, no smile, wea­ried look and it looks as if he might want to think about get­ting a pre­scrip­tion for some Prozac.

Again, these por­tray­als of Jesus’ just don’t seem real. They don’t really tell the story. These paint­ing are depict­ing Jesus as he is not. Car­avag­gio was get­ting into it, paint­ing as if he was there, sit­ting at the very table, and show­ing you some­thing sacred and important.

For us, this is impor­tant, because how we see Jesus can be an impor­tant step in actu­ally know­ing him. If you imag­ine Jesus to be unap­proach­able or dour or aloof, this will obvi­ously impact how you relate to him. The Bible calls this idol­a­try; when we attribute to God some­thing that he is not. This is pre­cisely why read­ing the Bible can be so impor­tant, because in essence, the Bible is over and over attempt­ing to show us who God really is. Because of our cul­ture, our upbring­ing, and what oth­ers tell us (be that our friends or the media), these aspects offer an “image” of God and this often does not line up to what the Scrip­tures say about him. The more and more we can imag­ine (i.e., to sim­ply form a men­tal pic­ture) the real Jesus, the bet­ter we can know him and how he relates to us in our daily lives. When that occurs, things can open up for us in know­ing who God really is.

Here are a cou­ple of verses from the Bible that you can read that per­haps can help you “re-imagine” who God really is:

He reached down from on high and took hold of me; he drew me out of deep waters.
He res­cued me from my pow­er­ful enemy, from my foes, who were too strong for me.
They con­fronted me in the day of my dis­as­ter, but the LORD was my sup­port.
He brought me out into a spa­cious place;  he res­cued me because he delighted in me.

Psalm 18:16–19

I’ll make a list of God’s gra­cious deal­ings, all the things God has done that need prais­ing, All the gen­er­ous boun­ties of God, his great good­ness to the fam­ily of Israel— Com­pas­sion lav­ished, love extrav­a­gant.

He said, “With­out ques­tion these are my peo­ple, chil­dren who would never betray me.“So he became their Sav­ior. In all their trou­bles, he was trou­bled, too. He didn’t send some­one else to help them. He did it him­self, in per­son. Out of his own love and pity he redeemed them. He res­cued them and car­ried them along for a long, long time.

Isa­iah 63: 7–9 (The Message)