Exposing Nakedness
“Picasso did not paint for the eyes but for the gut. He painted for the gut that the eyes might be opened.”
I was at ease, and he broke me apart; he seized me by the neck and dashed me to pieces. (Job 16:12)
One only has to compare a portrait of Picasso’s wife to that of one his lovers to prove that his strange perspective on reality worked from the inside out.
What we feel as we observe his works is what he feels about his subjects as he paints them. The spirit and desire which animate man and beast not only move flesh but, in Picasso’s world, distort reality. Time and history without fail reveal the true character of objects, people and ideologies. A Picasso is often the exterior of a person or event refracted and distorted by an impression of the spirit or emotion within. It is a history in a single frame, an X-ray study that discovers not the bones but the heart. Emotional reality is revealed in shape and color. In these cases, Picasso’s subjects are “ethical nudes.”
None is more striking or famous than Guernica, a representation of the merciless destruction of a helpless Spanish town, a non-military target, in 1937. The painting itself has a striking history, culminating in the cover-up of a tapestry reproduction at the United Nations before a speech by Colin Powell. It was deemed unsuitable as a background for war mongering.
During his career, Picasso very suddenly turned his back on centuries of tradition. His new style was shocking to the critics of the day. It is still shocking. Reality is broken, cut into pieces and reconstructed— or perhaps arranged on the altar—by a madman. There is an order to it, but not an order we recognize. Or do we? As with the work of many other ground breakers, his work does resonate with us as some level. The gut level.
The book of Revelation is the Bible’s Guernica. The Light of the World, come to show men the way, has suddenly become the harsh light bulb of the interrogator, the flash of bombs and machine gun fire from the sky. Yet men perceive it as darkness. They are helpless to escape the single electric eye in the sky, the heat ray of heaven.
Then I saw another mighty angel coming down from heaven, wrapped in a cloud, with a rainbow over his head, and his face was like the sun, and his legs like pillars of fire. (Revelation 10:1)
The Revelation is the last stage in a Covenant Lawsuit: the pronouncement of sentence. Central to this final act is the drinking of the Covenant cup by a harlot, representing those Jews who refused to drink with Christ. The rite originates in Numbers 5, where a woman suspected of adultery undergoes a “liturgy of inspection.” The pattern of exposure in the liturgical “image” would be played out in her subsequent history.
Jesus turns this rite on its head in his exposure of the accusers of the woman caught in adultery, and He does the same in the Revelation. The Church-State institution ruled by those who accused and condemned the harlots and tax collectors is revealed as the greatest harlot and tax collector. She is made to drink the cup to the dregs. The Jews who refused to sup with their “Husband” drank instead the blood of His Body, the Church, and called down another Mosaic Pentecost as a holocaust (Exodus 32). Just as alcohol removes inhibitions and reveals the heart, so the true character of Jerusalem would be exposed in her final days. The whitewash of Temple worship would be ripped away in a brutal execution. This time, all the veils in Jerusalem would be torn (Hebrews 10:20).
Revelation uses color and shape—and a serrated literary structure—to reveal the thoughts and intents of the heart of a city abandoned by God. It is the entire Bible “gone all Picasso.” The Apocalypse is the epic history of the Old Testament exposed in a thousand naphtha flashes on a single frame. All things came upon that generation. Even if we fail to understand it in detail, we comprehend it at a gut level. The eyes of God are looking for anything untoward about our entrails.
We can, however, understand it in detail. The modern practice of divorcing the Revelation from history and treating it as a general “picture book” of Christ’s work in all ages, rather than as a prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem and the investiture of a new human government in heaven, is a tragedy akin to removing Guernica from the historical context of the event which inspired it. The fact that the events depicted in the painting actually happened gives it not less but more power in application. The same goes for the Revelation. It is not “generic” men and women who call upon the rocks and hills to cover them. It was actual men and women in the first century. Those who stripped the righteous bare would be unveiled. Those who had hidden their faces from Him in the flesh would come face to face with Him in His glory.
Your nakedness shall be uncovered,
and your disgrace shall be seen.
I will take vengeance,
and I will spare no one.
(Isaiah 47:3)
Like the Christians who first heard the seven letters, Jesus gives us in the Revelation an immunizing taste of death—the cup of Communion—that we might avoid condemnation. The Old Testament was given to us as examples, and post-Pentecostal Jerusalem would serve as the final example. If we read it with soft hearts, we ourselves drink the blood of the apostles and prophets, because we are murderers like Paul and adulterers like Mary. We feel it burn as it goes down, judging us from the inside out, revealing our own hatred of God, our own love of the darkness, our own fear of being laid bare. The exposure of the murderous whore is an ethical nude.
During the German occupation of France, Nazi soldiers inspected Picasso’s Paris studio. An officer looked through some Picasso postcards and recognized a reproduction of Guernica. Picking up the card, he asked, “Did you do this?” Picasso replied, “No, you did.” This was an ethical nude.
If someone is offended by the gruesome gang rape and dismemberment in Judges 19, or the ribald references to bestiality in Ezekiel 23, rather than feeling a deep sense of shame before God, it is likely they remain under the judgment of God. Such an “apocalypse” cuts us like a sword and arranges us in cubic pieces on the altar. Such a circumcised heart examines itself and insists on drinking with Christ. We expose ourselves to God that we might not be exposed. We judge ourselves that we might not be judged. We seek shelter in Christ that we might not be crushed by Him.
If we are not preaching to make lost people see their nakedness before God, like the nakedness of Adam, or the nakedness of the pastor of Laodicea, then we are not preaching. Like the biblical prophets, like Picasso, we must deconstruct reality and reassemble it inside out, displaying the animus of the animal. Sermons aimed only at the head, or only at the heart, create what C. S. Lewis called “men without chests.” Head and heart must both be engaged in something which resonates at a gut level. It is not merely enlightening, nor merely touching, but the reassembly, the edification, of the whole man.
When we as preachers drift into muttering like the scribes, or schmoozing like the therapists, we are trying to avoid what God has commanded us to face. Men are to meet with God when the Word of God is declared. When they do so, they must do so as men and not as partial men. They must not send their brains on ahead to see if it is safe. They must not offer up just their hearts to check out how it makes them feel. Rather they should unbutton the shirt and ask God to be merciful.1
Picasso did not paint for the eyes but for the gut. He painted for the gut that the eyes might be opened.
This essay is from Inquiétude: Essays for a People Without Eyes.
Michael Bull is a graphic designer in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney in Australia, and author, most recently, of A Lodge for Owls: Raw Theological Twitter. He blogs at Bible Matrix.