Always with Us

 

The Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen is the only non Italian sculptor commissioned to have one of his statues erected in St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. He was not allowed to sing his “Monument to the Pope Pius VII” because he was a Protestant; not Catholic. What Thorvaldsen is most known for, however, is his Christus carving known popularly as “The Resurrected Christ.” You can see it today in the cathedral of Denmark’s magical city Copenhagen. Thorvaldsen wanted to create the greatest statue of Jesus ever made. Out of clay he molded a monumental, majestic figure with regal gestures: his face tilted upward in triumph, his hands raised in power and authority.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the unveiling. A partially opened window in his ocean-side studio let night fog and sea spray work their way with the clay. When Thorvaldsen returned to his studio after a brief absence, the upraised hands had drooped. They no longer commanded, but welcomed. The confidently unturned face had lowered itself on the Savior’s chest. The face was no longer that of a King wearing a crown, but a compassionate shepherd worrying about his sheep. At first Thorvaldsen agonized over the time wasted and the need to begin again. But the more he looked at the statue shaped by the mist, the more re realized that this was a more accurate Jesus than the one he had originally conceived. So instead of the inscription FOLLOW MY COMMANDS on the base of the statue, he chiseled another message: COME TO ME.

 

In the creation of the first human, there was another mist that molded the First Adam into an image of vulnerability and beauty. There are two creation accounts in Genesis: A macro one in Genesis 1, and a micro one in Genesis 2. In the Genesis 2 micro-creation story, God creates “Adam,” “the human being,” the first inhabitant of the earth, by breathing into his nostrils God’s breath, the “Breath of life.” Once divine spirit is added to physical matter, Adam “Became a living soul” (Genesis 2:7). No other creature receives God’s own breath as its source of life…until Jesus. In Church theology, Jesus is sometimes referred to as the “Second Adam,” or the “Last Adam,” because Jesus’ perfect humanity expunged the failures and “fall” of the “First Adam.” Now Jesus breathed the “Spirit of truth” into a clueless collection of frightened followers and created a new, living entity, a new form of humanity. Jesus’ Spirit-breath created the community that today we call “The Church.”

 

Go with God,

Pastor Qualley