The Face of Christ
My life has fallen into a few stages.
As a child I lived in Box Hill when it was a Village. I then became Pastor to the Slums of Inner Melbourne for eight years. I was then a Country Parson and a teacher at a One Teacher Bush School out at Jackson Creek in Western Victoria and then for thirteen years, I was a Suburban Minister in one of Australia’s largest suburban ministries.
And now, for more than 20 years I’ve been Superintendent in Sydney of Wesley Mission, Australia’s largest church ministry.
I’ve told you stories of people in each of these places.
Tonight I want you to come with me into the heart of the city.
I had always felt, since my days in the slums of Melbourne, that just because people may be poor or illiterate that does not mean they should be devoid of experiences of the fine arts.
To this end I have always encouraged people who were disabled to develop their skills in art – sometimes painting with a brush held in their mouth or assembling materials cut out from magazines and the like, according to the level of their intellectual ability. This in turn led me to try to help some people who suffered from drug and alcohol abuse to develop artistic talent. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, I encouraged a number of talent quests were people who were socially disadvantaged had an opportunity to try for cash prizes in order to motivate them into doing some creative works.
There was an unexpected side to this. One homeless man had a real talent for drawing the heads of horsed and in those days it became fashionable to paint on black velvet. He painted a few horse heads on black velvet and to his surprise was able to sell them for about $100 each. That in turn lead him to develop his skills, he framed some of them and could sell them for two or three hundred dollars each. Before long he had a good little one-man business, selling at stalls and markets.
Another successful venture concerns some Aboriginal homeless people. They were the unattractive, indigenous people of our community. Noisy, aggressive, homeless and drunk. But we got a number of them involved in painting traditional dot paintings. As a result they were sold, much to their surprise, at very high prices. Soon, several of them joined together as an industrious small group of Aboriginal artists earning quite a reasonable income through their dot paintings. Another young Aboriginal man remembered seeing his father and uncle making Didgeridoos and after a field trip, brought back sufficient quantities of Didgeridoos and after a field trip, brought back sufficient quantities of suitable wood from which he carved and painted didgeridoos, which were selling at $250 each. Our little attempt to introduce them to art, had introduced them to a new way of life to independence and income.
I have long been interested in helping students develop their abilities in drama and had since the mid-1950s constantly produced dramas in the churches where I ministered. This in turn led us to produce dramas for socially underprivileged people and for the homeless people. That set us up to develop the Wesley Institute for Ministry and the Arts where professional teachers could teach talented young people all of the arts and where they could gain degrees as a result of their study.
One of our graduates in this area, Ruth Polly, has developed the well known “Milk Crate Theatre” among homeless people where she has captured the vision and has taught homeless people and drug addicts how to get a new sense of self worth and significance through acting in dramas.
Just because people are hungry and homeless doesn’t mean to say that they can’t appreciate great beauty. Consequently, in all of our centres for the homeless and the poor, the disabled and the intellectually impaired, I have insisted that we include fine works of art. In all of our retirement villages, hospitals and nursing homes we have good quality paintings on all of the walls and when we rebuilt Wesley Centre I made sure that we put good quality paintings and pictures throughout the building.
Where possible I have also encouraged our people to attend drama and music productions, choral festivals, dance performance and opera. To this end I have asked promoters of festivals to give us free tickets so that I could dispense them among the poor and homeless so that they too can enjoy great art, good music and fine singing.
Many of the clients with whom we work do not appreciate this attempt. They are interested only in the immediate things, accommodation, food and drink. But there are many others who become inspired, and as part of rehabilitation therapy and socially upward mobility, poetry and art play a part in finding better standard of living.
It was with this in mind that I organised in 1980 a most incredible art exhibition that occupied our largest auditorium in the old Wesley Centre. This was an ideal auditorium because the walls were extremely high and the paintings that I had for this exhibition were extremely large. Some paintings measured 10 feet wide and 6 feet deep and most of them came with huge gilt frames requiring two men to carry each.
We established this art exhibition in the auditorium because I wanted people to see what a famous Australian artist thought of Jesus Christ, His world and His life.
Frank Pash of Western Australia who arranged, at the expense of an investor, a semi-trailer to bring all of the paintings to Sydney from Perth, created the paintings. They were to be hung in the Wesley Centre auditorium and also in the Blaxland Gallery at Grace Bros.
I had to add extra security staff to make sure the paintings were secure and we insured them for more than a million dollars while they were in our possession. Although as I remember it, some of the paintings had a price tag in excess of $200,000 each. I used those paintings for a wonderful television special called “The True Vine” which featured not only the pictures and the stories behind them, but also the artist Frank Pash.
I had come to know Frank Pash when he visited the Lyceum Church in a Theatre where I was preaching in early 1980. On the way out he introduced himself and told me of the paintings he had in Perth. I grew particularly interested in how the paintings came into being.
Frank Pash was a great outdoors man known for his paintings of the Australian outback. His paintings sold for large sums of money and had been acquired by some of the great galleries not only in Australia, but overseas. His paintings, I knew, hung in Parliament House, in the National Art Gallery and in Australian embassies all over the world. I remembered his name from having twice won the famous ‘Wynne” prize for landscapes at the Sydney Gallery.
I wondered why a bushman and a painter of famous Australian outback scenes like Frank Pash should have painted 40 or more paintings in a series on the life of Jesus.
We met for a cup of coffee the following week and I probed him about the reason behind these famous paintings. The story was a simple one. He was an artist without any religious convictions or interest. Had I asked him 3 years earlier to paint a portrait of Jesus or anything from the biography of Jesus he would have laughed me out of his studio. He was a rather wild man, dedicated to drinking beer and gambling and nothing else seemed to matter except his outback paintings. There was one exception to this. He had a lovely teenage daughter.
I remembered sitting in our restaurant speaking with him as he looked at me and his eyes began to fill with tears. He was not drinking now. He had given away his wild day. He was a totally changed man.
I asked how this change had occurred in his life and how he began his great interest in the life of Jesus. He started by telling me the story of how one night his young daughter was in the front seat of a car that was involved in a bad accident.
These were the days before it was compulsory to wear seatbelts and in the accident his daughter was thrown forwards and her face and body went through the front windscreen of the car. But worse than this, as she was propelled forward at great speed, her face smashed into the rear view mirror of the car, then her head hit the windscreen. The glass mirror shattered and shards of glass pierced her face and eyeballs.
When the ambulance men picked her up from the side of the road and prepared her for transport to the hospital they realised that these splinters of glass in her eyes probably meant that she would be permanently blinded. They needed the most expert of ophthalmic surgeons to remove the shards of glass.
When the news came to Frank, he rushed to the emergency ward at the hospital. His life fell to pieces. He was overwhelmed with doom as the doctors told him that she would be permanently blind in both eyes. The ophthalmic surgeon came out of the emergency ward and said that he had done his best. He had removed the glass from the girl’s eyes and had restitched the eyeballs.
It was his guess that she would be permanently blind but he said to Frank “You can never tell. And I can’t tell. It will be at least a week before I know if she will be permanently blind or not. In the meantime, she must be kept immobile, totally bandaged and sedated. And as for you, the best you can do is to pray for her”.
The words cut like slithers of glass into Frank’s own heart. He was not a man of prayer but now his young girl, the love of his life lay in the hospital swathed in bandages and heavily sedated.
The following week was the worst that Frank had ever experienced. He stopped drinking and started praying. It seemed as if that week would never come to an end. The ophthalmic surgeon told Frank that at the end of the week he would remove the bandages, test the eyes and would immediately ring Frank to tell him the results of the surgery.
Frank prayed as if all of life depended upon it. When the seventh day arrived, he sat by the phone nervously waiting. Then the moment came.
The telephone rang, and as Frank picked it up, before anyone spoke on the other end, an amazing wave of peace flooded his heart and a picture of the face of Jesus Christ burned into his mind.
As that vision impacted on his brain, Frank heard the voice of the ophthalmic surgeon saying: “Mr Pash is that you? Mr Pash? Mr Pash I have good news for you, you daughter’s sight has been saved. She will see again.”
Frank Pash does not know what happened next or indeed there after. His daughter was still heavily sedated. There was nothing he could do – except – paint the face he saw in the vision and that’s exactly what he did.
Frank Pash now started painting the face of Jesus as he had seen it. The vision has never left him and Frank went on to paint painting after painting of the head of Christ, each one having that freshness and vitality of the young man of Galilee. This in turn led him to paint a whole series of paintings concerning the life of Jesus. Frank was a changed man. He now knew Jesus as a personal friend and could picture Him in every detail.
His brother Ryan Pash was a poet and writer and when he saw Frank’s pictures, he immediately began to write appropriate poems that told the story of what Frank was painting. They both travelled to Israel to find background material and there Frank started his sketching and drawing and painting in Nazareth, Bethlehem, Jerusalem and all of the places associated with the life and ministry of Jesus.
I think back on those paintings of Jesus calling the disciplines from their nets by the Sea of Galilee. It’s exactly as I think it would have happened. I look at him with the bride and groom and the crowd of celebrants at the wedding of Cana of Galilee and I can picture Jesus turning the water into wine. I have looked at the paintings of Jesus with sleeves rolled up talking to the woman of Samaria whose personal and marital life was in disarray and offering her living water.
But it’s the paintings that Frank Pash made of “Jesus with Children of Nazareth” that really captures my imagination. “Jesus the Healer”, “Jesus the Friend of Little Children” – there was a freshness and vitality about Him. There were also some very significant touches. If you look closely at the painting “Jesus Healing the Sick”, you will notice among the crowd of children standing around is a young white Australian girl and young Aboriginal boy. All of his paintings have strength of character. “The Storm at Sea in Galilee” is ferocious with its destructive power. “The Soft Night” as he speaks with Mary and Martha about the death of Lazarus has the tranquillity of the evening stars.
Frank Pash is a remarkable painter. His “Crucifixion of Jesus” is stark in its realism and all the details of the story of Jesus somehow take upon themselves a freshness that only an Australian outback artist could see.
The unique collection of paintings “From Galilee to Gethsemane’ have been a wonderful contribution to Christian art. I don’t think we sold ant of his paintings from the Wesley auditorium but thousands of people, particularly the poor, the homeless and those who normally do not go into art galleries appreciated the magnificent display.
On the wall in my study at home, I have a remarkable black and white portrait that Frank did in my office with pen and ink. It is the most compelling portrait of the face of Jesus with such penetrating eyes as I have ever seen. It was an original that he did for me in appreciation of bringing his art exhibition to Sydney. I never failed but to think of the man that saw the face of Jesus when the ophthalmic surgeon told him his daughter’s sight would be saved.
The city of Sydney would grow to be one the world’s great cities and Wesley Mission would grow to be one of the world’s greatest churches and I was privileged to spend each day in the heart of both.
