Our “thought” for the day is an image. This is a picture I took of a 17th Century Spanish painting that hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. BTW, walking through the Met’s Medieval and Renaissance Art collections can be a neat spiritual exercise because so much of the art from those periods focuses on Christ.
I appreciate this image because of its realism and power. It is painted on a large wooden panel and hangs high overhead in the museum. To me, it conveys the brutal reality of Christ’s passion, as well as the universality of Christ’s suffering. It’s size and scope, with the sagging, distended posture of Christ’s body, communicate to me that the weight of all the suffering in the world is falling onto the broken body of Jesus. At first blush, this seems a strange jumping-off point for “hopeful” thoughts. Take a moment, however, to allow this image to sink in as you return to our reading for the week in Colossians 2. How does the physicality of the cross communicate hope to you in the midst of your own suffering?
