Pagans were probably confused and a little doubtful when their Christian neighbors invited them to church.
In the early decades of Christianity, evangelists like the Apostle Paul spared no effort in persuading their pagan neighbors of the superiority of the new religion.
Accustomed to revering scores of gods, these early prospects for conversion were likely confused when they went into houses of worship and found no images of holy figures, Father Charlie McClain, priest of St Matthew’s Episcopal Church, told The Rotary Club of McMinnville at its weekly luncheon Thursday.
“They thought Christians were atheists” when they found no images representing Jesus, the Father God or the Holy Spirit, he observed in his remarks from the podium in the fellowship hall of First Presbyterian Church.
But It didn’t take long for the earliest Christians to catch on to the benefits of expressing the central ideas of Christianity in some material form. Sacred art and icons—often believed to confer divine gifts and powers to the faithful—began to flourish in the Second Century and later.
Some of the earliest of these images centered around the Passion of Christ, the Crucifixion and Resurrection, McClain observed.
Leonardo da Vinci, the brilliant painter and sculptor of the Italian Renaissance, gave the world one of the most influential visualizations of the Passover meal where Jesus presided after washing the feet of his disciples, including His betrayer, Judas Iscariot, the Rotary speaker noted.
A centuries-old tradition in Christian art and iconography is the Stations of the Cross, a series of 14 painted or sculpted representations of the Passion, beginning with Jesus’ trial before Roman governor Pontius Pilate. In McMinnville, St Catherine Catholic Church on Faulkner Springs Road invites the community to visit its Stations, perhaps pausing for reflection and prayer.
“I find this very poignant,” McClain said of the Station depicting Jesus collapsing to the ground when trying to carry Hos own cross, the instrument of his execution on false accusations.
This is the scene where Simon of Cyrene, seemingly a random traveler picked out of the crowd in Jerusalem, was ordered to pick up the cross and follow the Christ to Calvary, a place infamous in history for its frequent crucifixions of condemned criminals and suspected anti-Roman insurgents.
Another Station depicts the “weeping women of Jerusalem,” to whom Jesus answers, warning them they should pity not Him but themselves because of the calamities that would soon fall upon them and their children after the injustice of His condemnation.
“Jesus calls attention to the intergenerational trauma” that would follow, including the Romans’ wholesale slaughter of Jews and destruction of their sacred places in 70 AD.
A native of Franklin County and lifelong resident of Middle Tennessee, McClain earned his undergraduate degree in religious studies at Belmont University and completed his seminary studies in the School of Theology at the University of the South.
The clergyman expands on his Rotary message when he appears this week in the FOCUS interview series on McMinnville Public Radio 91.3-WCPI. The half-hour conversation airs Tuesday at 5 p.m. and again Saturday at 9:35 a.m.
