The Pacifica Houses

St. Matthew's House

Matthew is historically represented by the face of a man representing the way in which Matthew’s gospel emphasizes the humanity of Jesus, the tone of which is set by the opening genealogy and detailed birth narrative. Grounded in the history and lineage of the people of Israel, Jesus—Matthew makes clear—is the long-awaited messiah of Israel, the son of Abraham, the Davidic King, the incarnation of Israel as the true and faithful son of God the Father–fully God and fully man. God made flesh–something no one thought possible until it happened.

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St. Mark's House

Dangerous, wild, direct, clear, aggressive, Mark’s gospel leaps into action like a lion hunting for prey. No birth narratives, no elaborate staging or history lessons, no prophetic preambles, Mark opens his gospel with the voice of John the Baptist shouting in the wilderness, preparing the way for Jesus’ imminent arrival. His transitions are abrupt and he is impatient with unnecessary description or explanation, preferring to conjure the immediate demands Christ, the lion of Judah, makes on those He calls–today is the day of salvation!

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St. Luke's House

Ox-like in its composition–strong, patient, grounded, thorough, ultimately immovable–Luke’s gospel emphasizes these same traits in Jesus himself and his message of good news for the lowly. In Luke’s gospel we see the humble God whose patience and irresistible strength work to pull from the pit what the world and its powers have tried to press down, to topple those who think they are strong and wise, and to clear the road of obstacles that would keep the poor and needy, those desperate for hope and for help—the orphan, the widow, the diseased, the outcast, and anyone able to see the desperate state of their own sinful heart—from reaching God.

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St. John's House

Written last, St. John’s Gospel finds the apostle John at the end of the first-century, the last living apostle, looking out over decades of the church’s formation—the struggle, the faithfulness, the attacks, and the confusion—and seeing the need to re-emphasize that Jesus Christ is not just a man, a fierce prophet, and a humble King—He is God. Fully God. The one who was in the beginning creating the heavens and the earth in Genesis, the one who will return to end history and establish His heavenly kingdom forever–the kingdom of God.

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The Idea

Pacifica’s Houses are named after the Four Evangelists–Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John–the chief witnesses through time and space of the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ our Lord. The four gospels and the person to whom they testify have fundamentally altered the world’s history, and their civilizational impact on the West is incalculable. From art to architecture, hospitals to human rights, the transformative message of the gospels has become the decisive inspiration for the very best of Western Culture. Yet too often, even in Christian institutions, the focus often drifts from the centrality of the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Christ. If we are honest, the graeco-roman political, artistic, and philosophical traditions often carry with them a greater sense of sophistication and import: we more readily turn to Athens than Jerusalem to advertise our educational bona fides. In fact, it has always been thus. In his Confessions, Augustine describes his embarrassment at reading the gospels because they seemed in his youth to be more barbaric and lowly in their language, metaphysics, and narrative shape than the philosophical theories of Plato or the literature of Vergil. Augustine confesses this to his later shame, as a sign of his immaturity, and yet Christian educational institutions often rehearse this bias, perhaps without meaning to. Pacifica desires to challenge this by re-centering our focus and imagination on the Four Evangelists–their words, their witness, and the King and Savior to whom they point all of humanity. The ground of all truth, beauty, and goodness is Jesus Christ as he has been revealed to us in the scriptures, especially through the testimonies of St. Matthew, St. Mark, St. Luke, and St. John. 


Symbols

The Four Evangelists infused the imagination and artistic expression of the Christian West from the earliest days in the catacombs beneath Rome, to the illuminated manuscripts at Lindisfarne, to the architecture of the great cathedrals of medieval Europe, to the paintings of the renaissance. Pacifica seeks to re-engage and reimagine this rich symbolic system and history of Christian art and architecture by using the traditional creatures and symbols associated with each of the four evangelists–the winged man for St. Matthew’s gospel, the lion for St. Mark’s gospel, the ox for St. Luke’s gospel, and the eagle for St. John’s gospel. Often the four gospels are represented in a single image called the tetramorph, with wings wrapping around each creature, on some occasions with an icon of Christ at the center.