Gospel in Art: Alas for you Pharisees!

Isaiah, by Fra Bartolommeo 1516 © Galleria dell'Accademia, Florence

Source: Christian Art

Gospel of 12 October 2022
Luke 11:42-46

The Lord said to the Pharisees: 'Alas for you Pharisees! You who pay your tithe of mint and rue and all sorts of garden herbs and overlook justice and the love of God! These you should have practised, without leaving the others undone. Alas for you Pharisees who like taking the seats of honour in the synagogues and being greeted obsequiously in the market squares! Alas for you, because you are like the unmarked tombs that men walk on without knowing it!

A lawyer then spoke up. 'Master,' he said 'when you speak like this you insult us too.'

'Alas for you lawyers also,' he replied 'because you load on men burdens that are unendurable, burdens that you yourselves do not move a finger to lift.'

Reflection on the painting

The Pharisees don't come off well from their encounters with Jesus in the Gospels. They are repeatedly on the receiving end of Christ's condemnations. In Luke's Gospel today the phrase 'alas for you' or 'woe to you' re-echoes through the text some four times, addressed three times to the Pharisees, and the fourth time more specifically to lawyers or canonists, interpreters of the religious law. The phrase sounds odd to us now, archaic, perhaps faintly comic, but it has a strong biblical pedigree. It is the traditional cry of the prophets who tell of the sorrows which God will bring on the unjust, on those who are far from His righteousness. As such, it is a call to repentance, to return to the true worship of God. It must come, then, as a hammer-blow to the Pharisees, who see themselves as already penitent, already close to God in their exact devotions. If they are still far from God in their sins, what hope for the rest of us? The answer must be none, except by the grace of God in the person of Jesus Christ, the Saviour foretold by those same prophets.

This early 16th-century panel of the prophet Isaiah was painted by the Florentine Dominican friar, Bartolomeo, as part of a large altarpiece. The prophet holds in his left hand a tablet with the opening words from chapter twelve, verse two, of Isaiah: 'ecce Deus salvator meus ('Behold, God is my Saviour'). With an outstretched arm he points dramatically with his right hand towards what we cannot see but which is the figure of Christ Himself on a central panel. The prophet might seem a rather solid and youthful figure elegantly dressed in blue and red with a rather jaunty cap, but the reason for that may lie in the subsequent lines of Isaiah 12:2 - 'I will trust, and will not be afraid; for the Lord God is my strength and my song'. No wonder the prophet looks so well! The man who commissioned the altarpiece, one Salvatore Billi, no doubt hoped that he, too, would be blessed by his namesake, the 'Salvator mundi' or 'Saviour of the world'. We share that hope.

Fr Richard Finn is a Dominican friar at Blackfriars, Oxford, where he is currently Director of the Las Casas Institute for Social Justice and teaches Early Church History. A member of the Faculties of Classics, and of Theology and Religion, at the University of Oxford, his book The Dominicans in the British Isles and Beyond, A New History of the English Province of the Friars Preachers will be published by Cambridge University Press in December.

LINKS

Gospel in Art: https://christian.art/

Today's reflection: https://christian.art/daily-gospel-reading/luke-11-42-46-2022/