The Altar That Faced the Dying

In the early sixteenth century, the painter Matthias Grünewald completed a massive altarpiece for a monastery hospital in Isenheim, Alsace. The patients there suffered from ergotism — a horrific disease that ravaged the skin with open sores and slowly consumed the body. They were brought before the altarpiece as part of their treatment, and what Grünewald gave them to look at was startling.

His crucifixion panel does not prettify the cross. Christ's body is contorted, His skin punctured and discolored, His fingers splayed in agony. Art historians have noted that Grünewald deliberately painted Christ's flesh to mirror the lesions of the very patients who would gaze upon it. This was no accident. The painter wanted every suffering person wheeled before that altar to see something unmistakable: He looks like me.

That is the scandal of the incarnation. The Son of God did not offer a sacrifice from a safe distance. He entered the ward. He took on the sores. He became so disfigured by our sin that Isaiah would later write, "His appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance." The Almighty made Himself unrecognizable so that the broken and dying could recognize themselves in Him.

Grünewald's altarpiece still stands today in a museum in Colmar, France — but it was never meant for a museum. It was meant for a sickroom. And that is exactly where the gospel does its deepest work: not among the well, but among those desperate enough to look up and whisper, "He knows."