Was Jesus an “Artist”?

“Christ in the House of His Parents” by John Everett Millais (1849–50)

The Canadian pastor and professor Marc Jolicoeur asked me recently whether we could properly call Jesus an artist. As with the idea of beauty, the answer depends. It depends, in this case, on how we define the term artist. If we reach back to its oldest sense, from the Latin “ars,” then we can easily name Jesus an artisan. 

But I also think that Jesus earns the title of artist in the more modern sense of the term. As I argue in my book on the vocation of artists, Jesus “makes” artistic things, chiefly imagination-rich, metaphorically dense stories, and he “makes sense of the world” through artistic means, and by looking at the life of Jesus we can begin to discover the shape of our own, christomorphically oriented artistic calling.

As Jesus uses stories, for example, to reveal the human condition, so artists use stories to reveal humanity’s glory (Divine Comedy) and its misery (12 Years a Slave), its quirkiness (Dr. Seuss) and its gravity (Zero Dark Thirty).

As Jesus makes the unknowable knowable, so too artists make the unknowable in some sense knowable, as Christopher Nolan’s movie “Interstellar” might do.

As Jesus likewise enables us to “sense” the goodness of God, so artists make the goodness of God sensible through sight (Tiffany glass), sound (Looney Tunes), taste (Paella), touch (Coppélia), and smell (Ikebana).

Eusebius of Caesarea once wrote that Jesus held three offices: prophet, priest, king. It is through these offices, the fourth-century bishop argued, that Christ brings about the reconciliation of the world. If our human calling is “in Christ,” then we, too, in some fashion, will engage in prophetic, priestly and royal activities.

Artists, under this light, will be in the business of bearing witness to that which is right and wrong, as Spike Lee's "Do The Right Thing" or Kazuo Ishiguro's novel "Never Let Me Go" do. Artists will offer the things of this world back to God, as Frances Harvergal’s “Take My Life and Let It Be” might do. And they will make things, like silly limericks and surrealist comedies.

And they will do so for Christ’s sake; they will do so in and through the One in whom all artistic things in heaven and on earth hold together.

"The Sermon on the Mount" by Jorge Cocco (2016)