The Last Supper According to Andy Warhol - John 13:31-35

Today is the fifth Sunday of Easter, and as the season goes on, the lectionary gets a little weird. For several weeks, we’ve heard about Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances and and some post-Easter miracles. But today we go back to the last supper in the Gospel of John, in a kind of Easter/Maundy Thursday mash up. For some reason, the church finds it important to remind us about the night Jesus washed the disciples’ feet, broke bread with them, and gave them the commandment to love one another.

As I wondered about that this week, I looked over at a poster that hangs on my office wall. It’s a copy of Andy Warhol’s take on The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci, one of the world’s most famous paintings. At table with his friends, Jesus sits in the middle with the disciples to his right and to his left. Replicas of the da Vinci hang in churches and kitchens around the world. It has been recreated in fine oil paints, paint by numbers, and in Lego figures. It hangs in the finest gilded frames and lives on plastic cards in wallets. It’s the stuff of Dan Brown novels and conspiracy theories about Mary Magdalene. The Warhol version in my office has the traditional image covered with bright, colorful vertical stripes, in typical Warhol style. Unfortunately, it’s not an original, like his silkscreen of Marilyn Monroe that fetched a record $195 million at auction this week.

It turns out that Warhol was obsessed with da Vinci’s Last Supper and made several series based on it. In one, the figures at the table are drawn in black and white, with very large color logos over their heads, like the Dove soap logo, the owl from Wise Potato Chips, and the script initials of “GE.” It’s a strange mix of the sacred and the commercial, much like our lives. In another, he silkscreened that same drawing of Jesus in bright gold on black squares, repeated 112 times on a work 6 feet tall and 35 feet wide. A giant wall of garish Jesuses.

This is the religious art of Andy Warhol, perhaps less well known than the rest of his canon. Did you know that the artist famous for silkscreening celebrities and illustrating everyday products like Campbell Soup cans was in church almost every day of his life, sitting quietly in the back? He could also be found routinely in the soup kitchen near his famous studio serving his fellow New Yorkers. And in his final years, it was da Vinci’s Last Supper that most captured his imagination (Jane Dillenberger, The Religious Art of Andy Warhol).

One series that I find the most fascinating is The Camouflage Last Supper from 1986. It is 6.5 feet by 25 feet, with the classic da Vinci image seen dimly behind green, brown, and gray camouflage. He also made a self-portrait, covering his face in the same camouflage. Perhaps the artist was trying to find a connection between himself and the camouflaged disciples. Here was a man who was both genius and tragedy, a man who reached spectacular heights of fame and creativity and who seemed afraid of life itself. A man who worried about the state of his own soul. He was not a saint, but he was devout. If he could see himself among the disciples, a place I think he longed to be, it was only in glimpses. There might be a bit of camouflaged Warhol in all of us.

At this point you might be thinking: well, preacher, that’s an interesting art history lecture but not exactly sermon material. Yet, I think there’s a message for us in Warhol’s Camouflage Last Supper, and in the lectionary pointing us back to that holy night Jesus shared with his disciples. Perhaps we are all given to obscuring or camouflaging God in our lives, and prone to missing our place at the table with Jesus. Like the artist, we all tend to focus on the complications and the self-doubts. We long to see ourselves in the story but we worry that there is not a place for the likes of us. I think Jesus understood this proclivity in us. And so, what he did the night he washed the disciples’ feet and broke bread with them had to be utterly simple, with a message impossible to miss. He needed to do something that would break through whatever rebuttals we might use to complicate the simplicity of a love that wants to reach us, the simplicity of a grace freely given. Jesus’s arrest and crucifixion were coming, so he had to make that love very plain. He had no time to lose.

Take, eat, he said. This is my body. Take the cup and drink this, all of you. Wash one another’s feet and follow me. Love one another as I have loved you. Take. Drink. Wash. Love, accessible daily actions. These are the words of a man, of a God who seeks to reach us and to love us through each and every barrier and any and all of our camouflage - so that we can go and do likewise. The church has brought us back to this central message of love today. It’s simple, impossible to miss really. And it’s at the heart of who we are as the church.

If you’ll permit me just one more word about that Warhol Last Supper in my office, the one with da Vinci’s painting covered in bright colorful stripes, I want to tell you why I keep it on the wall. To me, it captures the essence of Christ Church. Like the image, we are a mash up of the historical and the contemporary, of tradition and modern engagement. We are anchored in ancient liturgy, music, and prayer, in sacred texts and the stories of Christ. And we are engaged in the search for meaning and ministry in a very modern world.

There are wonderful things happening around here as we reemerge from two disruptive years. Things like art receptions and a children’s theater camp and racial justice work, as urgent as ever. We deepening our connections and pastoral care of one another, rebooting the master plan for our beautiful spaces to make them even more welcoming and engaged with our neighborhood, and growing the Green Groceries ministry to nourish our community, just to name a few things emerging these days. I think of such activities as the bright modern stripes on top of Jesus breaking bread with the disciples. All that we do is rooted in his actions, in his sacrificial love. And in all that we do, may we be reminded of and renewed by his core teaching that night. “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”