Riding The Storm
Rembrandt, The Storm On The Sea Of Galilee, 1633
One of Van Gogh’s gorgeous Sunflowers (there are two series) hangs in the National Gallery in London; Claude Monet’s lovely Grainstacks is displayed in Potsdam, Germany; Johannes Vermeer’s ever-intriguing A Girl with A Pearl Earring finds its home in The Hague. What do these paintings have in common? Well, first of all, they are treasures in the history of great art, to be enjoyed by everyone, to help satisfy our deep longing for beauty. As C. S. Lewis once suggested, we long “to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.” We find in beauty the “promise of glory.”
But there is something else these paintings have in common. A group of eco activists, yelling “Just Stop Oil,” have made vicious attempts over the last couple of weeks to deface these lovely paintings. We have seen a man gluing his bald head to Vermeer’s A Girl; tomato soup splashed over the Sunflowers; mashed potatoes thrown across the Monet. And for what reason? The connection between their cause and destroying these beautiful expressions escapes me. At some dark level, we live in a world bent on destroying beauty.
I think back to the sordid tale when two sophisticated thieves broke into The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and confiscated, among other paintings, Rembrandt’s extraordinary The Storm On the Sea Of Galilee. The stolen painting has not seen the light of day for some thirty years. What is the motivation here? Surely not to sell this painting. Can it be, at that deeper level, the thieves want this picture of Jesus, resting in the boat, like the beauty in which it is captured, never to be seen again.
The Storm On The Sea Of Galilee is based on that amazing story in the Gospel of Mark where Jesus and his disciples, after an exhausting stretch of teaching and healing, decide to cross the Sea of Galilee. Jesus needs some quiet to restore his energy. He falls asleep on a cushion at the back of the boat.
As they set out, an unpredicted squall rises up with ferocious force threatening to capsize the boat. The passengers, all of them followers of Jesus, are caught in utter panic. You can see them desperately, futilely, grabbing at the ropes, trying to give slack to the sails.
THAT day, in the evening, he said to them, ‘Let us cross over to the other side of the lake.’ So they left the crowd and took him with them in the boat in which he had been sitting; and some other boats went with him. A fierce squall blew up and the waves broke over the boat until it was all but swamped. Now he was in the stern asleep on a cushion; they roused him and said, ‘Teacher, we are sinking! Do you not care?’ He awoke and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, ‘Silence! Be still!’ The wind dropped and there was a dead calm. He said to them, ‘Why are you such cowards? Have you no faith even now?’ They were awestruck and said to one another, ‘Who can this be? Even the wind and the sea obey him.’ Mark 4:35-41
Notice, in the painting, one passenger is throwing up over the side of the boat. I can identify. Notice too that Rembrandt paints himself as one of the passengers, clutching onto a rope and holding onto his hat. He is looking straight out at you and me, identifying with us, drawing us into the terrifying scene, perhaps indicting us for little faith. In the midst of life’s violent storms, Rembrandt seems to be asking, can this Jesus really rescue us?
In the story, Jesus is awakened by the panicked disciples. He rebukes the wind and the sea: “Silence! Be Still!” Oh my goodness, the sailors ask: “Who can this person be?” Isn’t this someone we want close by as the storms rage about?
Why would these dark-of-night thieves want to remove this extraordinary painting? Could it be, even subconsciously, they align themselves perfectly with an aggressively secular culture that wants Jesus boxed up and stored in corner of some dank, remote warehouse? In some ways, mysteriously, this impulse feels similar to blotting out beautiful paintings for some outrageous cause.
Sadly, when Jesus is tossed to the sidelines, when beauty is snuffed out, that’s when the storms rage with all their fury. We see it every day. Well, I revolt: We desperately need Jesus in the boat; we need beauty in our midst; we need both for our civilization to survive.