Rest a while

Many Christian Churches, private homes, and the occasional, brave, commercial property have, as part of their Christmas imagery a Nativity scene. The more common name is a crib.

For the first time in 15 years the annual Santa parade down the main street of Auckland city featured a Nativity scene float.

As I write this reflection, I have a vivid memory of my mother removing the delicate figures from their protective tissue wrapping where they had lain asleep for twelve months.

The tradition of the Nativity scene comes from Italy. One of the earliest representations in art of the Nativity was found in the early Christian catacomb of St Valentine, dating from about AD 380. Another, of similar date, is beneath the pulpit in Sant’Ambrogio in Milan, carved on Stilicho’s sarcophagus.

While these ancient representations laid the foundation, different traditions of Nativity scenes emerged in different countries over the centuries.

The image I have chosen, celebrating Christmas day, is a painting titled, “The Birth of Jesus with Shepherds” from the “Vie de Jesus Mafa” (Life of Jesus Mafa) series.

The pride and delight on Mary’s face is infectious. Her smile is contagious and invitational; “Look at my boy” she exclaims to whoever wants to see!

About the Image

Vie de Jesus Mafa (Life of Jesus Mafa) was an initiative undertaken in the 1970s to help teach the gospel in Northern Cameroon. French Catholic missionary François Vidil worked with Mafa Christian communities in Cameroon to create a catalogue of 70 paintings depicting the life of Jesus as an African man. The plan was to build a resource that would help Mafa people to teach from the Bible in a way that connects with their community.

As in the stained-glass windows in the European medieval cathedrals, where the environment and characters shown belong to the medieval society, likewise in Jesus Mafa paintings the characters and the environment belong to Africa. This visual support of everyday life helps the African believer as they present the gospels orally.

Vidil formed a team of local church leaders, theologians and carefully selected artists. The team would spend time in Mafa communities, reading Bible passages and getting people to reenact them. Vidil and his team would photograph their reenactments as the artist sketched them. These sketches and photographs became the basis of the final paintings in this collection.

More images from this collection are available at Vanderbilt University Divinity Library, USA.

What is special about the Third Sunday of Advent? For much of the Church’s history, this Sunday had a special name: “Gaudete” Sunday.

“Gaudete” means rejoice.

The traditions surrounding this Sunday go back as far as the fourth or fifth century, as does the season of Advent itself.

Advent, our preparation for Christmas, was originally a forty-day penitential season like Lent. In fact, since it used to begin on November 12 (just after the Memorial of St. Martin of Tours), it was called “St. Martin’s Lent.” “Gaudete Sunday” was the Advent counterpart to “Laetare Sunday,” which marks the mid-point in Lent.

On Gaudete Sunday, the season of Advent shifts its focus. For the first two weeks of Advent, the focus can be summed up in the phrase, “The Lord is coming.” But beginning with Gaudete Sunday, the summary might be, “The Lord is near.” This shift is marked by a lighter mood and a heightened sense of joyous anticipation.

Liturgically, the colours lighten as well. The priest usually wears rose-coloured vestments, a hue seen only on Gaudete Sunday and Laetare Sunday. On this day, we light the third candle of the Advent wreath, which is also rose-coloured, or if you prefer, pink.

But lighting candles in Advent is more than liturgical tradition—it’s an act of prophetic hope, as one powerful example demonstrates.

In South Africa, in the face of racial injustice, people of faith began to pray together and, as a sign of their hope that one day the evil of apartheid would be overcome, they lit candles and placed them in their windows so that their neighbours, the government, and the whole world would see their belief.

And their government did see. They passed a law making it illegal, a politically subversive act, to light a candle and put it in your window. It was seen as a crime, as serious as owning and flaunting a gun.

The irony of this wasn’t missed by the children. At the height of the struggle against apartheid, the children of Soweto had a joke: “Our government,” they said, “is afraid of lit candles!”

It had reason to be. Eventually those burning candles, and the prayer and hope behind them, changed the wind in South Africa. Morally shamed by its own people, the government conceded that apartheid was wrong and dismantled it without a war, defeated by hope, brought down by lit candles backed by prayer.

Hope had changed the wind.

During the season of Advent, Christians are asked to light candles as a sign of hope. Unfortunately, this practice, ritualized in the lighting of the candles in the advent wreath, has in recent years been seen too much simply as piety (not that piety doesn’t have its own virtues, especially the virtue of nurturing hope inside our children).

But lighting a candle in hope is not just a pious, religious act; it’s a political act, a subversive one, and a prophetic one, as dangerous as brandishing a firearm.

To light an advent candle is to say, in the face of all that suggests the contrary, that God is still alive, still Lord of this world, and, because of that, all will be well. This is true irrespective of the evening news.

Three persons stand tall throughout our Advent liturgies: the prophet Isaiah, John the Baptist, and Mary, the mother of Jesus.

In our Sunday Gospel, taken from St Matthew (3:1–12), we are presented with the image and metaphor of the wilderness.

The Gospel tells us that John the Baptist was in the wilderness when he received the word of God.

The “wilderness of John the Baptist” refers to the Judean Desert, a barren and arid region east of Jerusalem near the Jordan River and the Dead Sea.

After this encounter, John went forth proclaiming a baptism of repentance. John’s example can help us with our spiritual preparations for Christmas (cf. Matt. 3:1–12).

The “wilderness” is an image for being alone with God.

In the midst of the hectic weeks before Christmas, the Gospel challenges us to create our own wilderness experience, to find a way to be alone with God. In the quiet, we receive the word of God and experience the conversion of heart that makes us receptive to God’s love manifested in the Christ-child.

The practical difficulty, at times, is finding the time to experience that wilderness time.

I am reminded of an incident from my own life. I had been in ministry as a priest for some three years and discovered my daily prayer routine had slipped from daily to occasional. I spoke with an elderly priest in the community in which I was living. He had been ordained some fifty years.

I explained my predicament, looking for some gentle understanding and sympathy, of course. He looked at me kindly and said, “We never have any trouble finding time for those things that really matter to us!”

For me, I realise now, it was not so much a question of finding the time, but rekindling the desire. Once the desire was rekindled, the answer was very easy. For 48 years now, I have gone to bed half an hour earlier and wakened the following morning half an hour earlier.