The God of small things

Kitchen Maid with the Supper at Emmaus,” an early work in oil by the Spanish painter Diego Velasquez, portrays a young black female servant hunched over the basin, jug and pitcher on the kitchen table. She glances sideways, to her right, through a backwall window, to a group of men talking in the background.

The word “Emmaus” refers to no other than the incident narrated by Luke in his Gospel about two disciples of Jesus, who earlier in the day of the Resurrection, walked from Jerusalem to Emmaus talking about recent events. Unrecognized, Jesus came up and walked with them and asked what they were discussing.

Not knowing him, they expressed surprise at his ignorance of the happenings in Jerusalem, of how the chief priests and rulers had Jesus sentenced to death and crucified, a pity, since the disciples had considered Jesus a prophet and hoped that he would redeem Israel.

That was three days ago, they said, and that morning some of their women went to the tomb and—which their companions confirmed—it did not have his body, and, moreover, the women claimed to have seen angels who declared that he was alive.

Jesus chided them for being too slow to believe that the Messiah would suffer before coming into his glory and, citing Moses and the prophets, enlightened them on what the Scriptures had affirmed about him.

When they were nearing Emmaus and Jesus made as if he still had far to go, they urged him, “Stay with us, for it is nearly evening; the day is almost over.” So he went in to stay with them.

At table, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and gave it to them. At that moment, their eyes were opened and they recognized him. But Jesus disappeared from their sight.

Velasquez chose the moment when Jesus and the disciples sat at table, before the latter knew his identity. For a long time people saw only the female servant in the painting and took it as just one of Velasquez’s kitchen pieces, until restoration work uncovered a wall opening through which could be viewed Jesus and the two disciples seated about a table.

Denise Levertov wrote a poem, entitled, “The Servant-Girl at Emmaus (A Painting by Velasquez)”—an ekphrasis, or literary description of or commentary on a visual work of art.

“She listens, listens, holding / her breath”—the poem begins. And the reason the servant girl pays attention is his voice, the voice of the man “who had looked at her, once, / across the crowd, / as no one ever had looked? / Had seen her? Had spoken as if / to her?”

Only a moment ago she handed to him the platter of bread and saw his hands, and she wonders if they were “Hands he’d laid on the dying and / made them well?”

Next, his face—was it not the face of the man “they’d crucified for / sedition and blasphemy / …whose body disappeared / from its tomb.” Who according to rumors “some women had seen this / morning alive?”

The men do not recognize him, but the girl in the kitchen, “absently touching / the winejug she’s to take in” and “intently / listening, // swings round and sees / the light around him / and is sure.”

Although in his account Luke does not mention the presence of anyone else, that of someone serving may be presumed, although, perhaps because he was Spanish, Velasquez made the attendant a black woman, a Moor.

In putting the servant girl as first to recognize the risen Christ, Levertov makes a statement—that, as time and again Jesus stressed in his teachings, salvation comes to the humble in status ahead of the favored and privileged.

That the revelation should happen to the servant in the middle of her chores in the kitchen means that the spiritual is intermingled with the mundane, that we can at once be both Martha and Mary as we go about our daily lives by turning our work into prayer. After all, as St. Teresa of Avila said, “God is to be found amid pots.”