Behold

So, you guessed it, whoever drew this picture did so out of a curiosity for the dynamic. Subject rotating ninety degrees clockwise to be precise. They took one great Victorian painting and twizzled it round and messed about with it. They obviously liked the rusty studs and hinges and the effect they had had on the ancient material of the door. They liked the door’s overgrown character and the mysterious quality of a secret portal. Just like the lost Mole and Ratty in Wind in the Willows: ‘Behold, we have stumbled upon Badger’s house in the wild wood’; should we knock? Will he answer? Will he be friendly? Will he allow us in?

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William Holman Hunt produced three versions of ‘The Light of the World’ (1851–1854), one now is at Keble College, Oxford; a larger version is in St Paul’s Cathedral, London; and a third in Manchester, England.

That is, of course, apart from the thousands of facsimile copies that hang in places of worship throughout the world.

‘The Light of the World’ in its depiction of Christ, lantern in hand, knocking at a mysterious door overgrown with weeds, is the allegorical embodiment of Revelation 3:20, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.”

It remains, for me, perhaps the most powerful verse in the New Testament offering as it does a unique personal encounter with God on entirely human, not to say, ‘ordinary’ terms.

One such copy hung in my own childhood church placed just to the right of the pulpit and I remember being taken as much by its presence as ever I was by any sermon, unless that sermon happened to be about Revelation 3:20 which, of course, many were.

William Holman Hunt was a painter of allegorical set pieces of his own invention and careful choreography. But the quality of Hunt’s ‘The Light of the World’ does not lie in the invention of the allegory. After all, here, the allegory is the essence of the bible verse itself. The door, a portal to the heart of man, can only be opened from the inside at the volition of the dweller. Admittance is by consent with the prospect of sitting down to eat and talk with none other than God himself.

Much more importantly in my view is that Hunt brings in a quality beyond the allegory and he does this in his depiction of the face and persona of Christ. And it is the loneliness of God that Hunt so brilliantly captures in The Light of the World. Hunt’s Christ isn’t the turner-over of tables, the calmer of storms or the ‘magical’ healer of the sick. Hunt’s Christ expresses the essential quality of loneliness. A loneliness so deep it somehow fills the whole universe.

To my eyes and way of thinking, looking up at the facsimile in my church, it was the straightforward job of the dweller to open the door and be welcoming. To offer hospitality. To offer sustenance to God no less. And in accepting God’s loneliness, man must admit to the loneliness in his own heart.

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This concept of, in a sense, a trading of personal realities always seemed to me to be an astounding narrative and a mighty responsibility. I might recognise that I am incomplete without God but how can God in any way be incomplete without ‘me’? Surely, to even think such a thing is a gross vanity on the part of mankind.

In my picture, sadly, the door appears never to have been opened. Christ has taken himself off and the weeds have grown up to bury the door more deeply in the wild wood making it harder to find. Harder to find perhaps but for one thing and that is Christ’s lantern which remains burning brightly on the step outside.

So, I wonder what my left-behind-lantern is saying exactly?

I’m happy to offer that as an open question…..

End.

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Paul Cook – September 2025.