Side wound of Christ
The side wound of Christ is one of the five wounds of Christ venerated in Christian tradition, along with the wounds on the hands and feet caused by the nails at the crucifixion of Jesus . According to the Gospel of John , a Roman soldier caused the wound with a lance; legend knows his name ( Longinus ), and the Holy Lance is one of the most important Christian relics.
New Testament
It is the evangelist himself, not an editor, who writes Joh 19,33-37 LUT that blood and water came out from the side of the crucified one. At the end of his Passion story he emphasizes (against docetistic tendencies) that Jesus had a real human body. But the evangelist also refers to Baptism and the Eucharist with water and blood ; With John “blood” almost always has a Eucharistic meaning. Charles Kingsley Barrett sums it up: “Most likely John then saw in the leakage of blood and water from the pierced side of Christ a symbol of the fact that from the crucified one emanated those living streams by which men are refreshed and the Church lives."
Augustine: Origin of the Church and the Sacraments
Augustine of Hippo interpreted the Bible passage as follows: When Christ slept on the cross ( cum dormiret in cruce ), his side was pierced with the lance. Just as God created Eve from the side of the sleeping Adam, the Church is born from the side wound of Christ. He varied this thought in different ways: Eve was brought to Adam as partner, the Church to Christ. “The Pauline Adam-Christ parallel is dialectically demonstrated here in playful rhetoric . Eve arises from Adam, who is only asleep, who brought death into the world. From the dead Christ comes new life, the Church and the sacraments. "
For Augustine's interpretation of the biblical passage, it was important that the lance was not pierced, but rather opened. A door will be opened, so to speak, from which water and blood flowed, and through this door Christians enter real life. Augustine identified water and blood with the sacraments without clearly assigning them to baptism and the Eucharist. He described both together as a medicinal drink or as a bath. Augustine probably had in mind that when he was admitted to the church, the Eucharist was offered directly after the full-body baptism.
The Augustinian side wound metaphor was conveyed to the Latin Church of the Middle Ages through Gregory the Great , Beda Venerabilis and Isidore of Seville , where it was further developed in the Catholic veneration of the Sacred Heart of Jesus .
Medieval mysticism
Bernhard von Clairvaux recommended meditating on Christ's wounds. This became typical of Cistercian spirituality. Several spiritual authors considered the wounds of Christ to be a refuge for sinners: for example Petrus Damiani , Juliana von Norwich , Martin Luther . Aelred von Rievaulx used the metaphor of drinking from the side wound and entering it; Luitgard von Tongern followed this in ecstasy .
Crucifixion Representations in Art
The Christian iconography of the crucifixion shows, from late antiquity to the time of the Reformation, the blood emerging from Christ's side wound, often as an arched stream. This can be absorbed by a chalice or a bowl (legend of the Grail). The chalice can stand on the ground or be held by a female figure, the personified church (Ecclesia). The Eucharistic interpretation is particularly clear in artistic depictions of Gregory's mass : the chalice, from which the blood of Christ is absorbed, is on the altar.
Iconography changed with the Reformation. The blood of Christ hits people directly, without a chalice - so programmatically in Lukas Cranach the Elder. J. Depiction of the crucifixion ( Herderkirche , Weimar). "There is no longer any need for ecclesial mediation, no mediation of grace through the sacraments, the blood stream of grace is aimed directly at people."
Hymn poetry
The contemplation of the wounds of Christ was conveyed to the Lutheran piety of the 16th and 17th centuries through texts by Bernhard von Clauirvaux ( Johann Heermann , Valerius Herberger ) and was thus received by hymn writers such as Paul Gerhardt and Johann Rist . In Gerhardt's volley on the side wound of Jesus (CS 21, 4,6) the ego imagines kissing the wound and drinking the blood. For Gerhardt, these are metaphors that are supposed to express how precious the death on the cross is, which Jesus died “for our benefit”. The metaphorical or metonymical meaning of such statements was recognized by the contemporaries, they were found in no way repulsive, but "extremely heart-moving."
Zinzendorf: "Seitenhöhlchen"
The piety of blood and wounds was cultivated in the 18th century, especially by the Moravian Brethren, and it briefly increased to an extreme in the so-called Seitenhöhlchen cult. In 1747 Nikolaus von Zinzendorf moved the "little hell" into the center of piety; it now appears almost constantly in the songs and is imagined as a protective refuge in which Christians live (sleep, eat, work, go for a walk). Initially pars pro toto for Christ, the “little hell” was soon venerated like a divine figure of its own. Occasionally the side cave has been staged solemnly, so there was an "incomparably beautiful" side cave in front of the entrance at the Brothers Choir Festival in Herrnhaag in 1748 , through which one could enter the house, bent a little bit. With the “criminal letter” from 1749, Zinzendorf put an end to the excesses, but the veneration of the side wound continued unabated in the 1750s. Not only in the hymns, but also in a number of pictures (including the first picture ), the wound on the side of Christ was directly connected to the life of the fraternity; several small-format colored drawings illustrate how one imagined life and living in "Hölchen". The wound on the side was the “central point” in Zinzendorf's theology, as it brought Christ's redemptive act to a close on the cross and at the same time represented the goal of individual hope in faith.
literature
- Wilhelm Geerlings : The church from the wound on the side of Christ at Augustine . In: Johannes Arnold , Rainer Berndt , Ralf MW Stammberger, Christine Feld (eds.): Fathers of the Church: ecclesial thinking from the beginning to modern times. Festival ceremony for Hermann Josef Sieben SJ on his 70th birthday. Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn / Munich / Vienna / Zurich 2004. ISBN 3-506-70423-0 . Pp. 465-481.
- Peter Vogt: "Gloria Pleurae!" Jesus' wound on the side in the theology of Count von Zinzendorf . In: Pietismus und Neuzeit, vol. 2006, pp. 175–212.
- Eva Maria Faber: wounds of Christ II: historical-theological . In: LThK 3rd, completely revised edition, Volume 10, Herder, Freiburg / Basel / Rome / Vienna 2001, Sp. 1321.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Udo Schnelle : Antidocetic Christology in the Gospel of John . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1987. p. 229.
- ^ Charles Kingsley Barrett: The Gospel according to John (= critical-exegetical commentary on the New Testament , special volume). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1990. p. 534.
- ^ Wilhelm Geerlings: The Church from the side wound of Christ , p. 473.
- ^ Wilhelm Geerlings: The Church from the side wound of Christ , p. 468.
- ↑ Jeung Keun Park: Johann Arndt's little paradise garden. An investigation into the origins, sources, reception and effects. Göttingen 2018, p. 108 f.
- ^ Sven Grosse: The Spirituality of Paul Gerhardt (1606-1676) . In: Peter Zimmerling (Hrsg.): Handbook Evangelical Spirituality , Volume 1: History . Göttingen 2017, pp. 281–298, here p. 295.
- ^ Peter Vogt: Gloria Pleurae! , P. 183.
- ^ Peter Vogt: Gloria Pleurae! , P. 184.
- ^ Peter Vogt: Gloria Pleurae! , P. 189.
- ^ Peter Vogt: Gloria Pleurae! , P. 188.
- ^ Peter Vogt: Gloria Pleurae! , P. 190 f.