December 25, 2009
(The Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ: Christmas Day)

(From The Lectionary Page)

Swaddled in Flesh

Photo of the Rev. Canon Sue Sommer by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer

I was going through some boxes in our basement not too long ago, when I came upon some artwork that had been given to me many decades ago – some six or seven framed reproductions of the Madonna and Child. They had belonged to some friends of my parents who had no children of their own and so, remembering my childhood fascination with the artwork, gave them to me when I was in college. They fascinated me as a child, in part because of their incongruity. In virtually all of them, Mary was depicted seated, wearing a beautiful, richly ornamented dress. Baby Jesus, by contrast, was naked in most of the paintings. This, I recall, used to strike me as a really bad idea. Putting aside the fact that he must have been cold, who in her right mind holds a naked baby in her lap when she’s wearing her good clothes?

But one painting in my little collection stood out from the rest. It was my favorite when I was a child, because it seemed that the artist had really listened to the Christmas story as told by Luke. In this painting, Mary holds a thoroughly, carefully, and to my critical eye as an 8-year-old, “authentically” swaddled infant Jesus on her lap. To her right is a figure of a woman with her right hand upraised in a sort of blessing. It was out of seminary before I learned that the shadowy third figure in the painting depicted Anne -- the mother of Mary, and therefore, presumably, Jesus's grandma.

Now don't go looking for Anne in the New Testament. You won't find her because she's not there. She does appear in the Protoevangelium of James which most scholars date from the middle-to-late second century and which is certainly one of the sources for the devotional piety surrounding Mary that developed over the centuries. Legends of Anne evolved as well, including my personal favorite which has Anne subsequently being widowed twice, marrying two other men and having one daughter by each of them whom she also named Mary. These two other Marys – half sisters both to Mary the mother of Jesus, according to this legend – then became the mothers of six of the disciples.

Well, as I said, that particular painting stood out for me when I was a child because of the depiction of Jesus wrapped in bands of cloth. I would later learn that swaddling clothes were used  for centuries in a variety of cultures as a way of ensuring that a child's limbs would grow straight – and also because, as any neonatal nurse will tell you, most newborns are happiest when life outside the womb mimics the warm, cramped conditions inside the womb. Well I recall tightly wrapping my own newborn child in a receiving blanket, creating what Rick and I came to call a baby burrito.

And so there I was in my basement, surrounded by memories of my own, and holding in my hands a painting of a sacred, shared memory of the birth of our savior. What a thing it was to discover that the image of the infant Jesus tightly bound in bands of cloth still held a fascination for me, though for different reasons

In the gospel passage for today, John goes all cosmic and esoteric on us, trying to describe the indescribable. John the Evangelist gives us no infancy narrative such as we heard last night in Luke’s gospel. Instead, in his magnificent prologue, John speaks of the pre-existent Logos – a term in Greek which we translate as Word – to describe that light-filled, love-filled aspect of God that has been part of the Godhead from the very beginning. John writes, "And the Word became flesh and lived among us." In other words, this transcendent, ineffable Logos of God chose to be swaddled in human flesh, limited at least for a time in full humanity. Now let’s think about that. To be swaddled in human flesh meant for God to choose to experience hunger and cold and thirst, to feel human pain and sorrow, to be weary and in want of refreshment. To be swaddled in human flesh also meant that God chose to experience what it was to be loved unconditionally by Mary and Joseph and, who knows, maybe even Grandma Anne. It was a self-limiting act for God to do this, and yet we believe that God was so bound up with all Creation that this self-limiting Incarnation was the greatest expression of love that God has ever made.

The rest of John's gospel fleshes out how Jesus made God known through his teaching and his miracles, in his self-emptying love that led him to death on the cross. All of them, stories we will hear as the liturgical year unfolds. But for now, for this blessed day at least, it is enough for us to spend some time at the beginning. Not the beginning as John tells of it in his gospel, but as Mary would perhaps tell it if her gospel had been written, with God Incarnate lovingly bound up lying on her lap, and Grandma standing by.