Art to Heart Invitation

Vincent van Gogh: Olive Grove and Olive Grove, Orange Sky

©2002 by Jeff Dugan

When you visit a modern cemetery, it’s not uncommon to see there a popular statue of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.  He’s kneeling in prayer, and rests his elbows on the top of a large boulder.  Most often the statue is pure white.  The boulder is symbolic of the solidity of the God in whom Jesus places His faith.  The calm, wistful expression on His face, His gently flowing robes, and the whiteness of the stone are all intended to calm and comfort the grieving visitor to the cemetery, and that’s certainly an appropriate goal for a sculpture in a graveyard.

But when a friend of Vincent van Gogh’s painted a similar picture of Jesus among the olive trees, van Gogh was enraged.  In response, van Gogh painted a series of portraits of olive groves, but none of them contains a peaceful, confident Christ.  In fact, there’s no Christ evident at all.

But that doesn’t mean He is not depicted here.  Instead of focusing on a serene church icon that had, in his opinion, lost some relevance to real life experience, van Gogh points to the trees themselves.  He emphasizes their twisted, gnarled trunks and branches and the stubby stripes of the grass.  Absent the figure of Christ, we are left to see in the trees his writhing in unimaginable agony, and in the grass the torment of the lashes He would later endure.  Precisely because van Gogh has removed the familiar image of Christ from the scene, we are better able to experience the profound anguish and emotional trauma that our Lord suffered…and ultimately overcame…on that night. 

Another of van Gogh’s Olive Grove paintings perhaps expresses this agony even more vividly, with the last vestiges of sunlight sinking below the horizon, while the tormented trees writhe and the Garden fills with blood.

In the 2000 performance of the Oberammergau Passion Play, the chorus tells us to “Never forget this scene, for it is here that your salvation was secured.”  Van Gogh’s paintings remind us more powerfully than any comforting sculpture that that salvation was secured only at an incomprehensible cost.

What possible response can we offer to such sacrificial love?  Nothing can truly suffice.  The whole reason the sacrifice was made is because we are utterly incapable of overcoming the barrier of sin on our own.  But our good fortune and great joy is that God is pleased to accept our tithes and offerings, and that in them, we have a small way to participate in the sacrifice that saves our souls.