In the early sixteenth century, the German artist, Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), completed a set of thirty-six woodcuts, which he then printed in a portable devotional book entitled the Small Passion. The heart of the work, twenty-three images in all, do indeed depict the events of Jesus’ last days in Jerusalem, from his entry into the city until his death on the cross. But the book might better have been called The Paschal Mystery, since its very first image comes from the distant, biblical past, the Fall of Adam and Eve, and its last image is Dürer’s interpretation of the Last Judgment; and, so, the artist has created a visual history of the entire arc of Jesus of Nazareth’s life—from the Annunciation to his Burial—but he has embedded this biography in a visual meditation on the meaning of the Christ story. The Son of God becomes Son of Man for a reason, to conquer sin and death and to make it possible for humans to “participate in the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4).
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