The Altarpiece That Opens

In the early sixteenth century, the German painter Matthias Grunewald completed one of the most extraordinary works in the history of Christian art — the Isenheim Altarpiece. It was commissioned for a monastery hospital in Alsace, where monks cared for patients ravaged by ergotism, a disease that covered the body in agonizing sores.

Grunewald painted what those patients knew. The outer panels show a Crucifixion unlike any other — Christ's body is not idealized but broken, His skin riddled with the same lesions the patients carried. Every wound says the same thing: He knows. He is not distant from your suffering. He has entered it.

But the altarpiece has hinged wings. And when the monks opened those panels on Easter morning, the patients saw something that changed the air in the room. Behind the agony of the cross blazed the Resurrection — Christ rising in an explosion of golden light, His wounds transformed, His grave clothes falling away like something the wind no longer needed.

The genius of Grunewald was not choosing between suffering and glory. He held both. The hope was not painted over the pain. It was revealed behind it.

That is the shape of Christian hope. We do not pretend the wounds are not real. We trust that they are not the final panel. The Almighty is doing something with our suffering that we have not yet seen — and one day, the wings will open.