Gospel in Art: The wind blows wherever it pleases

Garden at Sainte-Adresse by Claude Monet,1867 © Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York / Alamy

Source: Christian Art

Gospel of 9 April 2024
John 3:7-15

Jesus said to Nicodemus:

'Do not be surprised when I say: You must be born from above. The wind blows wherever it pleases; you hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. That is how it is with all who are born of the Spirit.'

'How can that be possible?' asked Nicodemus. 'You, a teacher in Israel, and you do not know these things!' replied Jesus. 'I tell you most solemnly, we speak only about what we know and witness only to what we have seen and yet you people reject our evidence. If you do not believe me when I speak about things in this world, how are you going to believe me when I speak to you about heavenly things?

No one has gone up to heaven except the one who came down from heaven, the Son of Man who is in heaven; and the Son of Man must be lifted up as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.'

Reflection on the painting

Jesus speaks about the wind in our Gospel reading today. He says, 'The wind blows where it pleases'. The wind is beyond our control. It doesn't blow where and when we want it to blow. We can harness the wind to some good purpose (using wind turbines for example), but we are never in control of it. Jesus often spoke about day to day realities, like the wind, as a way of talking about more spiritual realities. In speaking about the wind Jesus is, in reality, speaking about the Holy Spirit, 'This is how it is with all who are born of the Spirit', he says. In fact, in Hebrew, the same word could mean either 'wind' or 'Spirit'. Jesus seems to be saying to Nicodemus and to us that the Spirit of God is not something we can control.

We do not take the Spirit where we want it to go; the Spirit takes us where God wants us to go! All we can do is to surrender to the breath of the Spirit within us and around us, to allow the Spirit to direct us and to lead us. Like a flag blowing in the wind, we are to move in response to the movement of the Spirit...

We see two such flags in Claude Monet's 1867 painting Garden at Sainte-Adresse. Monet spent the summer of 1867 with his family at Sainte-Adresse, a seaside resort near Le Havre. It was there that he painted this buoyant, sunlit scene of contemporary leisure, enlisting his father (shown seated in a panama hat) and other relatives as models. By adopting an elevated viewpoint and painting the terrace, sea, and sky as three distinct bands of high-keyed colour (blue, turquoise, green), Monet emphasised a very contemporary take on painting. Twelve years after it was made, Monet exhibited the picture at the fourth Impressionist exhibition of 1879 as Jardin à Sainte-Adresse. We can almost feel the wind in this painting, with the flags waving; the waves of the sea are stirred up by the winds, and the wind is playing in the smoke emanating from the steam boats in the background.

LINKS

Gospel in Art: https://christian.art/
Today's Reflection: https://christian.art/daily-gospel-reading/john-3-7-15-2024/
Competition: The Laudamus Award 2024 for Sacred Art - www.indcatholicnews.com/news/49310