Monday Morning Music Ministry

11-20-23

Our post-Christian culture has become, rather, so anti-Christian that it sometimes has to distort the past to justify the brave new world. Here are examples of notable figures from history whose relationships to Christ have been suppressed, and will surprise some people.

Vincent van Gogh is generally regarded as the greatest of artists, or among the few supernal geniuses who put brush to canvas. His works are respected and valued, yet his private life often is viewed as sad and twisted; that he was a disturbed figure to be pitied; that cutting his ear and committing suicide are evidences of an unbalanced mind.

Vincent’s life was troubled, certainly. Of many hundreds of paintings, he sold only two in his lifetime. He continually relied on friends and his brother for money. Once when especially despondent, he drank too much and was almost institutionalized.

Yet. Vincent was the son of a pastor, and brother of another. He aspired to be a minister himself, but was turned down by a seminary. He visited missions and charity halls, even once traveling to London to minister to the poor. He was almost as beset by what he felt as his inadequate service to Christ, as by his paintings’ lack of acceptance. I have just finished his Complete Letters – three massive volumes; how did he find time to write so much and paint so much? – and they are filled with Christian references. Until recently his Biblical-themed paintings were sublimated, but there are many, and they reveal his profound faith.

His brother Theo was the recipient of most of Vincent’s letters. In one typical example he wrote of his heart and his art: to paint men and women with that something of the Eternal which the halo used to symbolize, and which we seek to convey by the actual radiance and vibration of our coloring. Among Biblical scenes he painted, many people see allegorical compositions in paintings like “Cafe Terrace at Night,” elements of which echo the Last Supper.

To much of the world today, van Gogh is thought of as a crazy man who cut off his ear. Modern studies have concluded that he did not commit suicide but was killed by a stray bullet. But a genius who was passionate about Jesus and wanted to reflect God’s glory in his art? Our age does not want to know that van Gogh!

Another figure from history whose persona is firmly established is Oscar Wilde. Playwright, poet, aesthete, epigramist, he also shocked Victorian England as a homosexual and proud pedophile. Only after the father of Wilde’s most consistent lover grew enraged, was the writer lambasted in public and convicted under Victorian statutes against immorality. Subsequent to a colorful public prosecution, Wilde was thrown in jail.

There (in Reading Jail, or Gaol as the Brits spell it) he might have rotted. Well, in fact he very nearly did rot. But he did not buck the system nor shake his fist at the bench or the heavens. In books like The Ballad of Reading Gaol and De Profundis he reflected a recognition of his sins – personal and social – and evinced a respect for Jesus Christ. He sought out clergy; he expressed his need for absolution.

Wilde wrote, near the end of his life: That is the charm about Christ, when all is said: He is just like a work of art…The little supper with His companions, one of whom has already sold Him for a price; the anguish in the quiet moon-lit garden; the false friend coming close to Him so as to betray Him with a kiss; the friend who still believed in Him, and on whom as on a rock he had hoped to build a house of refuge for Man, denying Him as the bird cried to the dawn; His own utter loneliness, His submission, His acceptance of everything… the crucifixion of the Innocent One before the eyes of His mother… the terrible death by which He gave the world its most eternal symbol; and His final burial in the tomb of the rich man, His body swathed in Egyptian linen with costly spices and perfumes as though He had been a king’s son.

Oscar spent his last days in exile in Paris, destitute and sick. He had not lost his trademark wit, even self-deprecatory. He complained of the cheap boarding-house room in which he lived: “Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.” Modern studies have focused on Wilde’s earlier aggressive iconoclasm and flamboyant homosexuality, but not much on his embrace of the Savior. Oh, not in these times.

I nominate a third person, or people, who can be in the category of “those we didn’t know were Christians.” Myself. I will explain:

I was at a party a number of years ago. Cartoonists and writers, folks I knew fairly well, but I was chatting with a friend’s wife I barely knew. The subject of a recent project was raised, and she said, startled, “Oh! You’re a Christian? I didn’t know!” Now: she was a committed believer too; and the statement was in the mode of “Oh! You’re left-handed?” or “You’re a vegetarian? I didn’t know that!”

I am neither one of those people; however the point is relevant – I immediately was “convicted,” a truth brought home to me. She knew the professional-Rick but not the Christian-Rick… and there should be no difference. Van Gogh and Oscar were, respectively, celebrities wrapped in eccentricities or end-of-life controversies; and whose reputations were “protected” by those who cared little about publicizing their spiritual rebirths.

You and I, on the other hand, are – I hope and assume – alive and kicking. If we are Christians, that fact should not take anybody by surprise. “They’ll know we are Christians by our love,” a song goes. We don’t wear signs around our necks, and should not have to wear jewelry or lapel pins to announce or prove our faith-commitments to anyone.

We must not be ashamed of the Gospel. We can show love. We can forgive. We can share the words of Christ. We can serve the needy and the sick, the broken and hurting. We can – first of all – confess Jesus as the Son of God; believe that He rose from the dead after sacrificing Himself, taking our sins upon Him. The Holy Spirit will then see that we bear fruit as Jesus intended.

… And soon we will be saying to each other: “Oh! You’re a Christian too? I knew it!”

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Click: Vincent – Starry, Starry Night