Holy Wednesday is known in some parts of the world as “Spy Wednesday” – for it was on this day before the Last Supper that Judas Iscariot formed his plan to betray Christ Jesus. In the many depictions of Judas’s kiss in the Garden of Gethsemane – including Fra Angelico’s 1304 fresco in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, above – both Judas and the other disciples’ faces are individualized, as are the faces of the centurions.
In a 1913 lecture Rudolf Steiner touched upon the mystery behind this strange action by Judas:
Slowly and gradually the Christ-being united with the three bodies of Jesus. It took three years. . . Then the Christ-being bound himself more and more to the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Later, when Christ was with the circle of his closest disciples, they were so intimately united with him that he was never separated from them. The more he lived into his body, the more he lived in the inner being of his disciples. . . He would speak through one of them, then through another disciple of the inner group, so that as they went about the land it was no longer only Christ Jesus who spoke, but one of the disciples; but Christ spoke through them. He lived in the disciples with such power that the facial expressions of a disciple through whom Christ spoke changed so much that the people who heard him had the feeling that he was the master.
From the Akashic Record Rudolf Steiner could clearly see that the disciples’s faces became identical with Christ Jesus’s! Judith von Halle also has written of this as the real reason behind Judas’s kiss – as a sign to the centurions to distinguish Jesus from His disciples, whose faces had come to resemble their Master’s.
Yesterday was the 96th anniversary of Rudolf Steiner’s death, and it calls to mind a related pair of mysteries – the mystery of the actual face of Christ Jesus, and the human face as an expression of karma. While sculpting together with Edith Maryon the figure of Christ for The Representative of Humanity at the Goetheanum, Rudolf Steiner gave very exact instructions for how His face should be depicted: “Yes, that is the Christ. That is how my spiritual eye perceived Him in Palestine.” The sculpture stood at the foot of Rudolf Steiner’s bed as he made his transition back into the spiritual world.
Willem Zeylmans van Emmichoven described how, over the three days following Rudolf Steiner’s death, this great Christ initiate’s face went through a series of metamorphoses:
How wonderful he looked on the first day after his death! As though gently sleeping, so peaceful and thoughtful. As though he might wake up at any minute to tell us what his spirit had experienced up in the heavens. On the second day it seemed different to me. There was now a shadow of pain across his spirit-penetrated countenance. As though some of the pain of the many hundreds of friends gathering from all countries was reflected in is face. It was harder to experience joy of resurrection now. But solemn, rejoicing thoughts arose from his illumined forehead. The came the third day, and once more something had changed. Now I saw the face of a saint before me, without pain and without sin. A face that seemed greater than an ordinary human being, but at the same time contained, in miniature, all that is beautiful, good and true. Unreachable, far away from us, but at the same time very close. Divine, but the epitome of human. His noble brow shone brighter than before. His deep eyes concealed world secrets. His beautiful mouth spoke a cosmic language.
Some of the friends attendant upon Rudolf Steiner then created a death mask:
We stood there silently. And when we saw that the mask was a good one, we thought joyfully: God be praised, now many will be able to see this expression of deepest wisdom, inmost love and greatest holiness for centuries to come.
One can readily see the resemblance between the countenance of this greatest of Christ’s servants and that of the Lord’s. One finds the resemblance too in other great individualities of history, such that close study reveals a Grail Family portrait emerging. Paul’s “Not I, but Christ in me” is a truth that goes down into our very physiognomy, our bones and muscle and skin.
Rudolf Steiner was born back into the spiritual world at Easter time, at the time of Nature’s resurrection as well as the Lord’s. Contemplating his countenance alongside the countenance of the Representative of Humanity at the time of this second Spring that sees much of humanity’s face masked, may their family resemblance, their countenances of compassion, wisdom, and truth, inspire our thoughts and deeds as the leaves unfurl this Holy Week leading up to the Mystery of Golgotha.