Wanted to share an important, short article Focus on the Family has at our website for The Family Project. This article gives a greater picture of how the Fall of humanity, as it happened in the garden, brought four different and devastating deaths upon humanity and each of us as sons and daughters of our original parents. It draws fuller picture of how the Fall diminished our humanity and our most important relationships in four different ways.
The art attached to the article is entitled The Entombment by Peter Paul Rubens. It is one of my favorite paintings because of how it conveys the real, deep, human drama of our Savior’s death for the sins of the world and how a real mother on a real day had to experience the terrible death of her boy.
Look at her eyes, eyes of pain and dramatic mourning. Rubens has them deep, painfully red and swollen from her travel. She is not heroic as in Michelangelo’s Pieta. She is us, how any of us would be at the death of our child. But she also knows the bigger picture of who her boy is and why he had to die. That is why her eyes are directed to the Father, as if to ask “why” but also seeking comfort and assurance.
It is a powerful image.