Monday, December 23
Title: THE HUMILITY OF CHRIST
Scripture: Luke 2: 4-7, Philippians 2:5-7
Joseph also went up from Galilee, from the city of Nazareth, to Judea, to the city of David which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and family of David, in order to register along with Mary, who was engaged to him, and was with child. While they were there, the days were completed for her to give birth. And she gave birth to her firstborn son; and she wrapped Him in cloths, and laid Him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.

Have this same attitude in yourselves which was in Christ Jesus [look to Him as your example in selfless humility], who, although He existed in the form and unchanging essence of God [as One with Him, possessing the fullness of all the divine attributes—the entire nature of deity], did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped or asserted [as if He did not already possess it, or was afraid of losing it]; but emptied Himself [without renouncing or diminishing His deity, but only temporarily giving up the outward expression of divine equality and His rightful dignity] by assuming the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men [He became completely human but was without sin, being fully God and fully man].

Poetry:
After Us
By Connie Wanek
           I don't know if we're in the beginning or in the final stage.
                - Tomas Tranströmer

Rain is falling through the roof.
And all that prospered under the sun,
the books that opened in the morning
and closed at night, and all day
turned their pages to the light;

the sketches of boats and strong forearms
and clever faces, and of fields
and barns, and of a bowl of eggs,
and lying across the piano
the silver stick of a flute; everything

invented and imagined,
everything whispered and sung,
all silenced by cold rain.

The sky is the color of gravestones.
The rain tastes like salt, and rises
in the streets like a ruinous tide.
We spoke of millions, of billions of years.
We talked and talked.

Then a drop of rain fell
into the sound hole of the guitar, another
onto the unmade bed. And after us,
the rain will cease or it will go on falling,
even upon itself.

A LONG WAY DOWN

In this annual feast of riches that is this calendar, where metaphor is shared amongst many interdependent artistic languages, there is in this particular window into the Incarnation a special irony. In our scripture today the great apostle Paul perhaps struggles to put into words something of the immense scope of the “self-emptying” of Jesus divesting himself of unimaginable power (but not character) to descend to our level.  Paul knows what it means to lose the prestige of being a Rabbinical insider amongst  the Jewish elite of Jerusalem, to experience abandonment and marginalization at the hands of his own culture, but this … this is a whole other embracing of limitations.

Jesus the great original Artist, in identifying with us is, while affirming our human place of work, creativity, and cultural mores, is giving up so much. At Christmas we celebrate his immersion into our world, at the humblest of peasant levels in a Bethlehem stable, surrounded by an improbable cast of characters and animals. He accepts the risks involved in illuminating his story in the hands of Mesopotamian foreigners, illiterate shepherds and a very young semi-disgraced Jewish couple.  The musical, poetic and visual expressions relied upon in this very calendar artform, are further eloquent testimony (just as in the Old Testament), to Christ’s continued respectful investment in our own limited but heartfelt attempts to speak to this narrative.

The truly rustic folk carol Beyond All Splendor, elicits a simple truth in very simple accessible instrumentation. In After Us, Minnesota poet Connie Wanek, paints a similar quiet almost rural, study of oarsmen, eggs, books and musical instruments, tools of “everything invented and imagined, everything whispered and sung”^[1] but then checks that pastoral image with a dark sobering afterthought. She seems to sink into the viewpoint, that once haunted the great Solomon also, that there is rain, flooding, impenetrable skies and the futility or vanity of endlessly absurd ages of human existence.  These images (albeit unintentionally) parallel what Jesus knew what threat was coming for himself in “being obedient even unto death”, but the Swiss artist Charles Louis Rivier, does know what is coming in this amazing, but not-completed liturgical fresco, Triptych of the Incarnation.

This work tells a very different story. Commentators^[2] speculate that if it were completed, it would depict a complete cycle from Godhead, to Annunciation, Adoration, Incarnation, Crucifixion, Resurrection and then Ascension on the empty panel on the right. While the setting is in a rustic context of common folk in the artist’s own culture in turn of the century garb, the panel to panel transitions seem almost modern and unfettered in their narrative, but again, ironically, unfinished due to the death of the artist himself in 1957.

Hidden behind the uplifted baby Jesus, is the obscured image of the crucified Jesus. And there it is. Wanek’s referencing of Tomas Tranströmer’s uncertainty of how the story ends or continues, was not Christ’s. Nor is it ours.

Prayer:
Help us celebrate the resurrected and ascendant artistry of Jesus to complete what He began, both in terms of our physical world and we who inhabit it.

[1]  Vanek, Connie, “After Us”, Poetry, January 2001
[2] Gamboni, Dario, Louis Rivier: et la peinture religieuse en Suise romande,  Payot Lausanne, 1985

James Tughan
Visual artist and Educator
Executive Director of The Semaphore Fellowship

For more information about the artwork, music, and poetry selected for this day, we have provided resources under the “About” tab located next to the “Devotional” tab.