EASTER FEATURE: The Shock of an Unthinkable Promise Fulfilled
Women at the Tomb, 1903
To help celebrate Easter morning, I turn the spotlight to a window at St. Stephen’s that, though eclipsed by more famous examples around it, says a lot. It illuminates the scriptural version of the first confrontation with Jesus’s promised Resurrection—with thought-provoking subtleties.
The story appears in various forms in the gospels, recounting the return to Jesus’s tomb by faithful women intent on completing burial protocols interrupted by the Sabbath. Surprise. In Matthew’s dramatic account (Matthew 28), the ground shakes, an angel materializes and rolls back the massive stone sealing the burial cave, then sits on the tomb, now open and empty, to announce that Jesus is indeed “not here, for he is risen, as he said.“ The angel instructs the women to confirm his words by seeing for themselves, then carry the news to the apostles.
The story is famous for launching the theme of Seeing for belief that links episodes from the Resurrection through Pentecost. It consequently shapes the abundant Resurrection imagery that represents the women contemplating the vacated tomb and shroud.
Our window instead renders the women’s stunned focus on the angel whose words reach us through the upward gesture; the tomb is barely visible. We, standing within the cave as well, witness the shock of confronting a celestial messenger with an extraordinary claim: Jesus fulfilled his unimaginable promise. Proof and belief are yet to come; mystery is everything as this encounter jolts us from the familiar realm of mortal death to something new.
Piero della Francesca, Resurrection
How different from the wholly symbolic imagery of the Resurrection that features Jesus, stepping or floating from the tomb, triumphant banner in hand, over sleeping or overwhelmed soldiers (sent to prevent disciples from stealing the body to claim the promised Resurrection)
St. Stephen’s window, attributed to prominent Philadelphia designer Alfred Godwin and installed in 1903, closely follows what was then a famous and much-copied contemporary altarpiece by a celebrated Norwegian painter, Axel Ender. Foreigners flocked to see the painting in its commissioned site, a modest church in Molde, a seaport that was a popular stop on fjord cruises.
Ender, Women at the Tomb, 1887, Cathedral, Molde
American critics extolled the painting’s independent blend of naturalism and grace, and the “noblest, most convincing” angel ever beheld (Scribner’s Magazine, 1892, 769). The Churchman (April 9, 1898, 564) applauded its handling of light, in this supernatural cave scene, to illuminate the triumph of light over the darkness of life, “of heaven over death.”
St. Stephen’s window uses the southerly light of its setting to highlight the angel and wash over all three women within the murky cave.
I wonder if this choice of Resurrection story, starring the women faithful, honors this memorial window’s recipient, Eliza Graham McDowell (d. 1902)?
— Suzanne Glover Lindsay, St. Stephen’s historian and curator