Justin Appel
Dear Friends in Christ,
I cannot read today’s Gospel lesson, Luke 8:16-25, and the story of Jesus calming the sea without thinking of a bit of music: Eriks Ešenvalds’ St. Luke Passion.
The work is an impressionistic collage of scenes from Luke’s Gospel, connected in a temporally disjointed sequence. Thus, moments of action, located in the story’s present mingle with reflective episodes, some in the past and another wholly imagined, notably the parable of the Prodigal Son. It's an unusual passion, to say the least!
In order to produce a certain linear progression, Ešenvalds connects several scenes with a dissonant and tempestuous “storm music”: 1) as the crowds shouting “crucify him!" before Pilate; 2) as Jesus speaks to the wailing women as he carries the cross, “Weep not for me…for the days are coming…then they will say to the mountains and to the hills: ‘Fall on us, cover us!’”; and finally, 3) when Jesus calms the winds and the sea.
In Part 7 of the Passion, Ešenvalds sets the final moments of the crucifixion (“Father, into thy hands…”) just before sinking back into a sort of retrospective dreamscape, in which Jesus himself falls asleep in the boat. The ensuing storm fuses the previous bits of storm music into a dramatic arc, suggesting that the forces of human sin and death have been themselves a kind of storm that confronts Jesus.
In the end of the scene, Jesus calms the storm, even as the winds release their fury and subside into a sort of exhausted stillness. The resolution in the story seems cursory, not final nor certain, and this is where Ešenvalds inserts a poem by Christina Rossetti, A Prodigal Son, and draws the various threads of the story together. In this way the parable itself and its resolution become the denoument of passion story, and we are left to contemplate various resonances of homecoming.
If you want to hear Part 7 and 8 (10 minutes), simply cue the video below to 22:25 and watch to the end. Or if you can, enjoy the whole St. Luke Passion!
Yours in Christ,
Justin