With his hands still clasped in the posture of prayer from his Agony in the Garden, Christ is betrayed with the profound intimacy of a kiss from a disciple he loved – Judas — at his most vulnerable moment. The one whose life-giving breath once breathed life into man is now receiving a death sentence from the breath of man in return.
In the background, we see John fleeing in terror, almost as if he is already looking up at the Crucifixion scene. His head is close to the head of Christ, perhaps to show that their thoughts are aligned.
Peter, who will deny Jesus three times before the rooster crows, holds a lantern that has little to no effect on illuminating the moonlit scene.
The three seemingly faceless guards, decked in armor that glistens in well-painted chiaroscuro, rush Jesus off to be sentenced.
As we find ourselves rushing towards Lent, what would be a more perfect work of art to pray with than Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ?
For any artist growing up in Italy in the late 1500s, Michelangelo would have been a hard act to follow. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was born outside of Milan in northern Italy. The young artist who has come to be known as Caravaggio was born a mere seven years after the now-famous Michealangelo’s death. He would have grown up well aware of the former’s outsized impact on Renaissance Italy's art world. When he was 21, Caravaggio left Milan for Rome.
We can see where he made obvious visual references to the work of the mega-star Michelangelo a few times.
In Caravaggio’s The Calling of Mathew, the hand of Christ reaching out to the soon-to-be Gospel writer looks remarkably like the hand of God the Father in Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam.
We notice a nod to this same image in The Taking of Christ, when Caravaggio uses a similar red cloth to frame Christ, placing him in the exact position of God the Father in Michelangelo’s composition.
Again, in The Creation of Adam scene, Michaelangelo portrays the figures surrounding God as filled with energy, bringing the Father to Adam. This contrasts Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ, where the figures surrounding Jesus rush him to the Cross. If this were, in fact, Caravaggio’s intent, what a poetic gesture it would be to tie these two stories together!
Here, we remember that the Father and Son are one. We can then see that Christ’s being taken in the Garden of Gethsemane places us in the Garden of Eden — the scene of the Father’s first “agony in a garden,” where Adam and Eve betrayed him in their disobedience. This re-presentation of man’s original sin makes Caravaggio’s image of Christ’s betrayal all the more poignant and painful — it is a sharp blade that reaches all the way back to Genesis. We see Christ being pulled from the prayer where Luke tells us he sweated blood. The shadows falling on his face appear like a skull, with his crossed fingers like a pile of bones, completing the image that foreshadows his death. As Isaiah foretold it, death had come for him, but “like a lamb led to the slaughter, he opens not his mouth" (Is 53:7).
The darkness and authority of the soldier’s hand that has come to chain Jesus seems to have more of a hold on Judas than it does on our Lord. And isn’t this the true nature of sin? In the moment of temptation, when we think we are getting what we want — what we deserve, even — the reality is that we become prisoners to that very thing.
Judas betrayed Christ, convinced in the moment that turning Jesus over to the authorities was the right choice. Matthew tells us that he immediately came to despair it, tried to give back the money, and then hanged himself. It has been said that the mirror-like finish on the guard’s armor should cause us to reflect on the times when we have betrayed Christ or been an accuser ourselves.
Simon Peter stands in stark contrast to Judas’ despairing character. He is ignored by the guards, holding up a lantern. This lantern is a beacon of hope for us — Peter has not yet betrayed Jesus, but he will. Peter will go on to be the Rock on which Jesus builds his Church, and we know the resurrected Christ will forgive him for his three betrayals.
As true love goes, Christ enters into the very wound that Peter carries from having betrayed Jesus. “Peter, do you love me?” he will ask three times, once for each betrayal. And Peter will respond, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you” (John 21). Jesus did, of course, know, but these words are for Peter, not for Jesus. It is a breathtaking moment of reconciliation and intimacy, one that should shake us all to the core. Christ wants to enter into our wounds, whether self-inflicted or caused by others, and heal us right there.
February is a month when the secular world focuses on love. As a people of faith moving into a time of preparation for Lent, we have the opportunity to see the kind of love that God offers us. When Jesus opened himself up to his disciples, he did so completely and without reserve. This is how he loves us and calls us to love as well.
Loving in this way makes us vulnerable, and we have all experienced the pain, rejection and loss that can come through such openness. How beautiful, then, that God became a man and experienced every human condition except sin — that he knew the agony of being betrayed by an intimate friend.
As we enter into Lent, let us keep this image before us: that Christ calls us to a love that, outside of the dark accusing armor of the enemy, chooses to be vulnerable and which looks beyond the Crucifixion to the Resurrection.
