Faith Works: Turning from thanksgiving to expectation
We spent most of November talking about the Courthouse angels, figures perhaps of harvest and death, but perhaps a bit more.
From the outside, four figures of Justice dominate people’s image of the courthouse square. But if you go inside, if you are caught up in the austere majesty of the law at work, you will find Ludwig Bang’s two angels keeping your attention. But let’s not forget the man, the woman, and the child, clearly meant to be the same persons repeated in both paintings, while the angels seem different.
And the tools. In one the man wields a scythe, the other the same man a musket. It does not take a preacher, I think, for this passage to come to mind: "They shall beat their swords into plowshares; and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”
From Isaiah 2:4 we get a comprehensive vision of harvest tools, plowshares for grain, pruning hooks for grapevines. Mingled and mixed, grain and grapes, bread and wine.
But there’s also an evocation of Revelation, chapter 14, in a section often headed “The Harvest of the Earth”: “Then I looked, and behold, a white cloud, and seated on the cloud one like a son of man, with a golden crown on his head, and a sharp sickle in his hand. And another angel came out of the temple, calling with a loud voice to him who sat on the cloud, 'Put in your sickle, and reap, for the hour to reap has come, for the harvest of the earth is fully ripe.' So he who sat on the cloud swung his sickle across the earth, and the earth was reaped.”
You might well be thinking now not only of the Bible or the courthouse paintings, but of a song made famous by the Civil War, often sung in 1901 and still well known now: “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” with the lines “He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.” Grapes, wheat, pruning hooks, scythes, terrible swift swords, muskets.
The Revelation passage goes on: “Then another angel came out of the temple in heaven, and he too had a sharp sickle. And another angel came out from the altar, the angel who has authority over the fire, and he called with a loud voice to the one who had the sharp sickle, 'Put in your sickle and gather the clusters from the vine of the earth, for its grapes are ripe.' So the angel swung his sickle across the earth and gathered the grape harvest of the earth and threw it into the great winepress of the wrath of God.”
You could ask the question of our two angelic paintings behind the bar of justice in the heart of our courthouse: do I read them left to right like the printed page, or right to left? Is the message one of the soldier with the gun heading into battle, later on to turn his hand to the harvest, symbolically giving up his weapon for farming tools as Isaiah foretold? That works against the story of the nursing infant on the left, now an upright if young child clinging to a protesting mother now also erect on the right. The growing child indicates a traditional narrative from left to right, while the prophetic story runs right to left, as does the echo of Winslow Homer’s “Veteran in a New Field.”
Perhaps the story is a question for us, the citizens whose courthouse this is.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he’s thinking that the prophetic call to beat swords into plowshares or scythes or pruning hooks is for every generation. Tell him what you think we need for peace to prevail at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
This article originally appeared on Newark Advocate: Faith Works: Turning from thanksgiving to expectation
