Si Smith's 40

by Samantha Klassen

Forty days. Forty illustrations.

A number of years ago, over the course of the forty day Lenten season, UK cartoonist Si Smith drew a panel a day, illustrating Jesus’ journey into the wilderness.

The gospel writers don’t give us much detail about Jesus’ time in the desert. Matthew tells us,

Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. He fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was famished.

Matthew 4:1-2

Given such a brief description, we may never pause to consider the days as days. But Smith’s drawings imaginatively pry open this compressed narrative, parsing out Jesus’ journey of solitude and temptation. Smith gives us a picture of a deeply human Jesus who is delighted, bored, weary, relaxed, scared, distressed and finally cared for as he wanders, crossing paths with “wild beasts” and with angels. We begin to appreciate the duration of this trek, recognizing ourselves in the way the passage of time does its work on the soul.

This is one of the genius things about Smith’s use of comics, also known as “sequential art,” for this project. When we read comics, we automatically translate the sequence of panels into a narrative, even though only portions of the story are shown. Guided by the artist’s choice of pacing and rhythm, our minds fill in the blanks between panels. The pacing in Smith’s illustrations - the way a long period of time is compressed into a few panels, and a short period is stretched across many - pulls us in, emulating the way time starts to seem malleable and squishy when our external clocks and structures are stripped away. In these drawings we see and feel not only the discomfort of that flux but also its necessity, at least for Jesus if not for the rest of us.

Si Smith's 40 raises some questions of significant theological depth and would would make for a rich Lenten visio divina practice. The work can be purchased as a download here or viewed on YouTube.