Oscar Wilde’s famous story ‘The Portrait of Dorian Gray’ could have been written to illustrate today’s gospel reading. Dorian Gray has his portrait painted as a young man; it reflects his youthful innocence and beauty. As Dorian grows older he remains youthful but strangely the marks of his uncontrolled and selfish lifestyle begin to distort the features of his portrait until it becomes so ugly he decides to destroy it. In the moment he destroys the portrait he dies and a strange transformation takes place. The portrait once again shows him as a youthful man but the marks of his evil distort and disfigure his dead body.

Rembrandt Self Portraits 1628-1669

We can see a similar transformation over time as we examine Rembrandt's self-portraits. In the case of Rembrandt what we find is a growing sense of self-knowledge as life takes its toll and bankruptcy brings wisdom. The self-portraits thus create a visual diary of the artist over a span of forty years. They were produced throughout his career at a fairly steady pace, he was still painting portraits in 1669, the year he died at the age of 63.

These self-portraits trace the progress from an uncertain young man, through the dapper and very successful portrait painter of the 1630s, to the troubled but massively powerful portraits of his old age. Together they give a remarkably clear picture of the man, his appearance, and his psychological make-up, as revealed by his richly weathered face. Kenneth Clark stated that Rembrandt is "with the possible exception of Van Gogh, the only artist who has made the self-portrait a major means of artistic self-expression, and he is absolutely the one who has turned self-portraiture into an autobiography."

The Beautiful life

A rather cruel quotation, variously attributed to Abraham Lincoln, Albert Schweitzer, Coco Chanel, and others makes this point about our faces:

“When you are young, you have the face God gave you. At 40 you have the face life molded, and at 60 you have the face you deserve”

Jesus is challenged to answer the same question, ‘What makes a life beautiful?’ We are familiar with all the remedies that advertisers offer, but they can only help us look good on the outside, what we need is help on the inside.

Servants and Masters

In Jesus' day, the secret of a beautiful life was ritual purity, eating and drinking the right foods, washing regularly, and touching only those things that were uncontaminated. These rules and regulations were encoded in the ‘traditions’ and were strictly observed by the Pharisees and teachers of the Law. The traditions and the law were indeed given by God to lead his people to holiness but over time they had become not servants but masters. Sadly this is what happens to many of God’s good gifts. Money, sex, power, and even food are all gifts of God that have been given to us as servants to enable us to lead good lives, but as our masters, they have become monsters.

Prisoners of the law.

Paul uses this phrase to describe the reality of evil. He calls himself “A prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members.

‘What a wretched man I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Romans 7: 23-25.

Paul, like Jesus, clearly points us to our own appetites and desires as the source of evil. Evil comes not from the outside but from the inside of us. We must face the reality that it is we who are responsible for the transformation of the beautiful gifts of God into the source of evil. When we allow these gifts to become our masters we become their prisoners. Even the Law of God, Paul points out, given to lead us to God, can become a cruel taskmaster turning us into tyrants and hypocrites when it no longer serves the purposes of God.

Many of us have puzzled over the problem of evil, how can God allow it to exist in His world? The answer lies within us. As we consider our lives we must ask the question, ‘What drives us, who are our masters, and who are our servants?’ True holiness begins as we focus our desires and ambitions on God. Somewhere we all need a portrait of ourselves that reflects what is going on inside us! When we can see ourselves as we really are the answer to our dismay is not to destroy that image but to hand it over to the one who has put to death the sin that destroys us, and be transformed by the new life that he gives us.