Sermon: An Icon of the Nativity

In my study hangs an icon of the nativity, large and very heavy. How I came by it is a story in itself, but not for here. It’s a true painted icon in the Byzantine tradition, not a reproduction. It shows a rocky, barren landscape with patches of scrub and scrawny animals at pasture. The star at the apex sends a shaft of light into a cave, where, right in the centre of the icon the infant Christ is lying in his crib, wrapped in a cloth that is startlingly white against the dark background. Gazing into it with adoration are three angels. Lying next to the crib is the Virgin Mother. She is not facing her child; instead, she is turned towards another angel who is speaking to her, the Angel Gabriel of the annunciation. At the top, the magi on horseback travel towards the crib from one direction, and the shepherds on foot from the other, urged on by an angel. In the bottom left hand corner, Joseph sits in another cave meditating while the Tempter, dressed as a shepherd, suggests doubts and fears to him. Opposite, two women are bathing the new-born child.

This is naïve painting, with its rustic characters, its lack of perspective, its bright simple colours, its kaleidoscope of biblical episodes all crowded together haphazardly in one image. I like to think it was painted by a man with no pretensions, or much artistic skill, but with much simple faith and fervour. It is, simply, an act of devotion to the Christ-child – as every icon in the Orthodox Churches is an act of love, blessed by the prayers of its painter and the prayers of the faithful. You do not look at an icon. You are drawn into it, as through a window on to heaven; you are led along the way of knowing and loving and praising God. You become a character in the icon, a player in the sacred drama of the incarnation: an angel with good news, or a shepherds or wise man coming to worship Jesus, or Mary bearing him to the world.

This disparate activity going on all over the place, these different stories all compressed into a single image – it feels confusing, disorientating, busy. Until your eye travels to the centre of the icon and to that diminutive figure, so white, so compelling, so still, the centre that holds it all together and tells us that all this movement, this life, has a focus. And then we begin to understand.

I see two pictures of Christmas here. At one level, all this activity stands for the whole world in its limitless diversity. The star speaks of the universe, the rocky landscape our world. Into this flow and flux, Christ comes, powerless, innocent, small. He is the axis round which the vast energies of the cosmos surge, the fulcrum where the huge forces and counter-forces of creation are in balance. He is the pole star towards which the world is orientated and its hopes and longings directed. He is the true bearing by which all positions are triangulated, all inclinations and directions are defined and corrected. He is the centre of gravity towards which all things ultimately fall to their rest, the point of focus where rays of light converge. He is ‘the still point of the turning world’: of nature and nations, planet and peoples. He is little yet he bears the weight of the universe; weak, yet he walks among the galaxies; helpless yet he holds the forces of the universe. He is all these things, for he is the Word incarnate who was in the beginning, and through whom all things were made. ‘This manger is the universe’s cradle.’

At another level, the icon stands for something on a more human scale. For in the birth of Jesus, God not only inhabits the vast spaces of the universe, but comes to us as a presence that is both intimate and personal. The icon tells many stories all at once in a way that when we first look at it seems confused, without any proper grammar to establish connections between them: Mary and Gabriel, Joseph and Satan, two unknown women, the shepherds, the magi, animals and angels flung all over the icon without rhyme or reason. Yet not so, for there is a point of connection, of course: the child at the heart of all this disparate activity, that still small white point of rest. Here is where all their stories converge, are ‘robed as destinies’. In the incarnation, our stories – our little lives with all their dignity and bathos, their tragedies and triumphs, their longings and fears and hopes - are taken up into his and given ultimate value and worth, for God has deemed it worthwhile to come among us. Graham Green says in The Power and the Glory that God is ‘all loves and relationships combined in an immense and yet personal passion’. Christmas proclaims that at the heart of all life lies the mystery of God, and it is towards this mystery that our whole beings should be bent, like the magi and shepherds drawn to the manger and to the infant who is our being and source and end.

For the naïf painter of my icon, the issues of faith were untroubled by questions and doubt. For us, they are more elusive in a complex world of shifting values where Christian faith has to compete in a market place of many beliefs, ideologies and faiths. Yet Christmas beckons us with an invitation to a new simplicity, a new humility, a new love. For in the precariousness and vulnerability of the crib we see everlasting love and power emptied and robed in the swaddling cloths that betoken the form of a servant. It is foolishness, yet wiser than any human wisdom. It is weakness, but stronger than any human strength, this God contracted to a span, incomprehensibly made man . For the love we see in the Christmas images of shepherds and magi, angels and animals, Mary, Joseph and the crib is the wisdom and love incarnate whom we meet and greet in the glory of the sky, and the pain of the world, and here in each of us as we worship this Christmas morning; for

Christ plays in ten thousand places,
lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his to the Father through the features of men’s faces.