Archives for February 2015

The “Suffering Servant” illumination from Isaiah will be featured in Visio Divina sessions on Wednesday, February 25, at 12:45 p.m. (30 minutes) and 7:00 p.m. (60 minutes) in the Chapel of Christ the Teacher. This Lenten prayer opportunity is sponsored by Campus Ministry and the Garaventa Center. Campus Ministry’s Interactive Lenten Calendar provides this commentary:

The Prophets describe a coming Messiah who will restore peace and justice to Israel, yet he will be despised by the wicked and bear their sins quietly. Thus, he is called the Suffering Servant. In Jackson’s image, an emaciated prisoner stands above the head of a lamb, referencing the text in which the Messiah endures his tormenters with grace, “like a lamb that is led to the slaughter.” (Isaiah 53:7). The shadow of a modern chain link fence surrounds the Servant, drawing a parallel between the Messiah’s suffering and that of victims of suffering in today’s world. But just as the figure stands alone in Jackson’s image, so the Suffering Servant will one day be singled out by God to reign in Zion.

Regarding the chain link fence, Susan Sink in The Art of The Saint John’s Bible specifies, “This image was taken from pictures of the fence around Guantanamo Bay, Cuba…The confinement closer to the figure suggests the narrow bars of the Door of No Return at Elmina Castle in Ghana, the passage through which Africans were taken onto ships, bound for slavery in the New World.” (vol. 2, p. 68)

An upcoming presentation on Whimsy and Humor in The Saint John’s Bible will likely include this image, previously presented on this blog in January 2014.

A ring-tailed lemur swings on vines adjacent to a passage, the first lines of 2 Chronicles 11. The text reads:

2 “But the word of the LORD came to Shemaiah the man of God: 3 “Say to [King Rehoboam of Judah, Son of Solomon, and to] all Israel in Judah and Benjamin, 4 ‘Thus says the Lord: You shall not go up or fight against your kindred. Let everyone return home, for this thing is from me.’ So they heeded the word of the Lord and turned back from the expedition against Jeroboam.”

The text in brackets is missing. In the original Saint John’s Bible, written in ink on vellum, the scribe could scrape off a faulty stroke or character, but each page of the Bible took 7 to 10 hours to write and so missing lines of text were a bigger issue. The Bible artists solved the problem in a whimsical way, by recruiting animals to lift the missing line into place. Take a look at the display page; the missing line appears at the bottom of the page, and the lemur’s vines have snared it. The vine in the lemur’s right hand traces the correct location for the missing text.

Artist Chris Tomlin, who studied natural history illustration at the Royal College of Art in London, drew many botanical and animal images for The Saint John’s Bible, some of which appeared in previous images on this blog, such as the chameleon at the end of 2 Maccabees, the butterflies on Jacob’s Ladder, and the coral snake and other animals in the Garden of Eden / Adam and Eve illumination. This ring-tailed lemur from Madagascar is the favorite of several library staff.