Day 14 - Shalom, Shalom

Congregational Federation
Mar 18
3 min read

Christ in Majesty by Jacob Epstein in Llandaff Cathedral

Photo by Richard Cleaves.

Like Coventry Cathedral, Llandaff Cathedral was badly damaged by bombing during the war. After the war, the decision was taken to rebuild. George Pace, the architect wanted to include a striking feature between the Nave and the Chancel. An enormous arch now dominates the interior of the Cathedral; looking towards the clear West Window, as if out into the world, is the figure of Christ in Majesty, with arms extended as it were in invitation, ‘Come unto me all you that labour and are heavy laden’.

The sculptor was Jacob Epstein. This was not the first sculpture of Christ he had created. I first encountered one of his sculptures when on a trip to Liverpool from a Federation Ministers’ Conference on the Wirral. Visiting the Tate gallery, I stumbled on an exhibition called Dynamism. Most of the pieces of art and sculpture had been crafted in the decade before the First World War. Many of the artists played with pieces of modern technology, not least Epstein. It was as if they were placing all their confidence in the modern technology of the period. On the wall, towering over the gallery was his Man with a Rock Drill, a robotic humanoid in control of an enormous pneumatic drill. Then came the war and many of those artists were killed by the very technology they had been celebrating. As for Epstein, he dismembered the humanoid, recast it in gun metal and displayed it without the drill. It’s part of the permanent exhibition at Tate Liverpool.

It was as the war was coming to an end that Epstein created a larger than life Risen Christ. In preparation, he made a maquette of the wounded hands. One was raised as if to call a halt to the madness of the war. The other points an ‘accusing finger at the wound, as if to ask everyone looking at the sculpture how humanity could ever have allowed this protracted war to occur. At the same time, however, the open hand also seems capable of blessing. In this respect, despite the figure’s bleakness, it still holds out the possibility of redemption’ (Cork, R. (1999) Jacob Epstein. London, Tate Publishing, p.42) .

It was thirty years later, on the eve of another world war, that Jacob Epstein returned to that sculpture of The Risen Christ. ‘I should like to re-model this ‘Christ’, he wrote. ‘I should like to make it hundreds of feet high and set it up on some high place where all could see it, and where it would give out its warning, its mighty symbolic warning to all lands. The Jew – the Galilean – condemns our wars and warns us that ‘Shalom, Shalom, must be still the watchword between’ people whoever and wherever they are (Cork, R. (1999) Jacob Epstein. London, Tate Publishing, pp.72–73).

When I see Christ in Majesty in Llandaff Cathedral, I cannot help but think of that earlier Risen Christ. How desperately we need to hear those words again this Lent as Easter approaches, as so much of the world is torn apart by war.

Shalom, Shalom.

Richard Cleaves