Tag: general resurrection

Advent, Day 11: Judgment Day

Victoria Emily Jones1 Comment

LOOK: The Judgment Day by Aaron Douglas

Douglas, Aaron_The Judgment Day
Aaron Douglas (American, 1899–1979), The Judgment Day, 1939. Oil on tempered hardboard, 48 × 36 in. (121.9 × 91.4 cm). National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. [object record]

Born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1899, Aaron Douglas moved to New York in 1925 and became one of the leading artists of the Harlem Renaissance. He studied African art and European modernism, developing his own unique visual language that brought together influences from cubism, art deco, and African sculpture.

In his early career he worked as an illustrator for Black magazines, including The Crisis and Opportunity, and accepted a commission by the esteemed poet James Weldon Johnson to illustrate his collection God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse. After the book’s publication in 1927, numerous other commissions followed, including large-scale murals. In 1944 Johnson established the art department at Fisk University in Nashville and taught there until his retirement in 1966.

The Judgment Day (1939) is based on one of Johnson’s illustrations for God’s Trombones, made to accompany a poem of the same title. It showcases his signature style of silhouetted figures and flat, hard edges.

In the painting, the archangel Gabriel stands astride earth and sea, summoning the living and the dead to judgment with a blast of his horn. He holds the key to the kingdom of heaven, which he’ll open to those who have repented of their sins and trusted in Christ. A bolt of lightning rips through the sky on the left, and on the right, a light ray shines down onto a praying figure who is ready for the great accounting.

LISTEN: “In That Great Gettin’ Up Morning,” African American spiritual | Arranged by Jester Hairston and performed by the Leonard De Paur Infantry Chorus, 1953

I’m a-gonna tell you ’bout the comin’ of the judgment
(Fare thee well, fare thee well)
I’m a-gonna tell you ’bout the comin’ of the judgment
(Fare thee well, fare thee well)
There’s a better day a-comin’
(Fare thee well, fare thee well)
There’s a better day a-comin’
(Fare thee well, fare thee well)

Refrain:
In that great gettin’ up morning
Fare thee well, fare thee well
In that great gettin’ up morning
Fare thee well, fare thee well

Oh preacher, fold your Bible
(Fare thee well, fare thee well)
Preacher, fold your Bible
(Fare thee well, fare thee well)
For the last soul’s converted
(Fare thee well, fare thee well)
Oh, the last soul’s converted
(Fare thee well, fare thee well) [Refrain]

Blow your trumpet, Gabriel
(Fare thee well, fare thee well)
Blow your trumpet, Gabriel
(Fare thee well, fare thee well)
Lord, how loud shall I blow it?
(Fare thee well, fare thee well)
Blow it right calm and easy
(Fare thee well, fare thee well)
Do not ’larm all my people
(Fare thee well, fare thee well)
Tell them all to come to judgment
(Fare thee well, fare thee well) [Refrain]

Then you’ll see them coffins bustin’
(Fare thee well, fare thee well)
Then you’ll see them corpses risin’
(Fare thee well, fare thee well)
Then you’ll hear that rumblin’ thunder
(Fare thee well, fare thee well)
Then you’ll see that forkèd lightnin’
(Fare thee well, fare thee well)
Then you’ll see the stars a-fallin’
(Fare thee well, fare thee well)
Then you’ll see the world on fire
(Fare thee well, fare thee well)
Then he will call sinners
(Fare thee well, fare thee well)
Then he will call sinners
(Fare thee well, fare thee well) [Refrain]

“The Soul’s Garment” by Margaret Cavendish (poem)

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Pelton, Agnes_Translation
Agnes Pelton (American, 1881–1961), Translation, 1931. Oil on canvas, 26 × 21 in. (framed). Collection of Fairfax Dorn and Marc Glimcher. Source: Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist, p. 105.
Great Nature clothes the soul, which is but thin,
With fleshly garments, which the Fates do spin;
And when these garments are grown old and bare,
With sickness torn, Death takes them off with care,
And folds them up in peace and quiet rest,
And lays them safe within an earthly chest:
Then scours them well and makes them sweet and clean,
Fit for the soul to wear those clothes again.

This poem was published in its earliest form under the title “Soule, and Body” in Poems and Fancies by the Right Honourable Lady Margaret, Countess of Newcastle (1653), and appears as above in the book’s second edition (1664). It is in the public domain.

Margaret Lucas Cavendish (1623–1673), duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, was a prolific English writer across the genres of poetry, science fiction, drama, letters, biography, and natural philosophy. A pioneering feminist, she wrote in her own name in a period when most women writers remained anonymous. She spent three years as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Henrietta Maria (wife of King Charles I) at the royal court in Oxford and then in exile in France; it’s there that she met her soon-to-be husband, William Cavendish, then marquis of Newcastle, who remained a great influence throughout her life, encouraging her intellectual pursuits. Cavendish moved in circles that included Thomas Hobbes and René Descartes and, in 1667, was the first woman to be formally invited to visit the Royal Society. She is buried in Westminster Abbey.

Advent, Day 25

Victoria Emily Jones1 Comment

You shall have the trumpet sounded throughout all your land. And you shall hallow the fiftieth year and you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you . . .

—Leviticus 25:9–10

The LORD has proclaimed
    to the end of the earth:
Say to daughter Zion,
    “See, your salvation comes . . .”

—Isaiah 62:11

Immediately after the suffering of those days

the sun will be darkened,
    and the moon will not give its light;
the stars will fall from heaven,
    and the powers of heaven will be shaken.

Then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see “the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven” with power and great glory. And he will send out his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.

—Matthew 24:29–31

“Look, I tell you, lift up your eyes, and see that the fields are white for harvest.”

—John 4:35

LOOK: Middle Eastern manuscript illumination of a trumpeting angel

Trumpeting angel (Islamic)
Angel from a detached page of the Arabic manuscript Aja’ib al-Makhluqat wa Ghara’ib al-Mawjudat, painted in Syria, Iraq, or Egypt, 1375–1425. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper, 38.9 × 24.6 cm (full sheet). British Museum, London.

Written around 1270, Aja’ib al-Makhluqat wa Ghara’ib al-Mawjudat (The Wonders of Creation and the Oddities of Existence) by the Persian cosmographer Zakriya ibn Muhammad al-Qazwini was one of the best known and most copied texts in the medieval Islamic world. This leaf from a fourteenth-century illuminated version shows an angel blowing a long trumpet that resembles a karnay, an ancient brass instrument still used throughout Central Asia, especially Uzbekistan, to herald celebrations.

The British Museum website identifies the angel in this painting as Gabriel; however, according to the hadith (records of the traditions and sayings of the prophet Muhammad) and the verso of this page, it is the angel Israfil who will blow the horn on the Day of Resurrection. Similar representations can be found here, here, here, and here. I sent a query to the museum asking why they’ve titled the painting “The Angel Gabriel” and whether it might be a mistake, and they told me they are looking into it.

Even though the Bible never specifies Gabriel as the trumpeter of the last days, he has come to be associated with that role in Christian tradition. The Armenian church was the first to assign it to him beginning in the twelfth century, and John Milton did likewise in his seventeenth-century epic, Paradise Lost. Gabriel’s trumpet is also a familiar trope in African American spirituals.

Israfil is not mentioned in the Bible. However, because whole hosts of angels exist and so few are named in scripture, all three Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) have naturally taken to supplying some names of their own.

The unknown artist of this image has creatively imagined an angel’s wing that tapers off into what looks like an animal head!

I chose the image for its ability to evoke Christ’s return—which, FYI, Muslims are also waiting for.

LISTEN: “Days of Elijah” by Robin Mark, 1996 | Arranged by Keith Lancaster and performed by the Acappella Company on Glorious God: A Cappella Worship, 2007

These are the days of Elijah
Declaring the Word of the Lord
And these are the days of your servant Moses
Righteousness being restored
And though these are days of great trials
Of famine and darkness and sword
Still we are the voice in the desert crying
Prepare ye the way of the Lord

Behold he comes
Riding on the clouds
Shining like the sun
At the trumpet call
So lift your voice
It’s the year of Jubilee
And out of Zion’s hill
Salvation comes

And these are the days of Ezekiel
The dry bones becoming as flesh
And these are the days of your servant David
Rebuilding a temple of praise
And these are the days of the harvest
The fields are as white in the world
And we are the laborers in your vineyard
Declaring the Word of the Lord

Behold he comes
Riding on the clouds
Shining like the sun
At the trumpet call
So lift your voice
It’s the year of Jubilee
And out of Zion’s hill
Salvation comes

There’s no god like Jehovah
There’s no god like Jehovah
There’s no god like Jehovah
There’s no god like Jehovah

In the fifth century BCE God told Israel through his prophet Malachi, “See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me. . . . Lo, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the LORD comes” (Mal. 3:1a; 4:5; cf. Isa. 40:3).

Four hundred years later came John the Baptist, whom Jesus referred to as Elijah (Matt. 11:14)—preparing the way, preaching the Word.

Northern Irish singer-songwriter Robin Mark invokes Elijah and, implicitly, his new-covenant counterpart, John, in the first stanza of “Days of Elijah,” comparing the ministries of these two prophets to that of the church. Just as John the Baptist prepared the way for the Messiah’s first coming, we are to prepare the way for his second.

The refrain pictures that second coming as a jubilee celebration—as freedom, rest, wholeness, the world set right—announced by a trumpet blast.

We are in the last days, the time between Christ’s two advents. And though we await the fullness of redemption, we do not do so passively. Filled with Christ’s Spirit, we labor as agents of justice and resurrection and praise, as the song suggests.

Above I featured a fairly standard (and skillful!) version of “Days of Elijah” that could be sung by your average church congregation. But here’s one to really knock your socks off: an arrangement by the South African gospel group Joyous Celebration, which they performed live in Johannesburg last month: