Several years ago I was on vacation in Tuscany in Italy and as part of my vacation I was determined to make a sort of pilgrimage to follow what is often called the Piero della Francesca trail, to see some of the great works of art by the famous Italian artist of the 15th Century. My interest had been kindled years ago by the gift of a book devoted to the Frescoes of the True Cross in Arrezzo, the magnus opus of Piero. So my pilgrimage took me to Arrezzo where I saw the then partly restored frescoe series and marveled at their luminosity and power and then on to Sansepulcro and finally to Monterchi, Piero’s mother’s birthplace. It is the latter part of the pilgrimage of which I wish to speak because that was the home of Piero’s most audacious work, the Madonna del Parto, the Pregnant Madonna . But to find it was a challenge.

Monterchi is a small typical Tuscan hill town with steep winding streets and poor signage. In fact the only reason for the average tourist to go there is to see this one fresco which according to the guidebooks was in a cemetery chapel. However since the guidebooks had been written the fresco had been restored and removed to a small municipal museum created for the one work. At last we found it and entered the room where the fresco filled most of a wall of a room. There before us staring out at us was a tall, very pregnant woman in a plain blue dress with angels at either side pushing back curtains which thus provided a frame for the subject. Mary not only faces the viewer full on but her dress is partly open and her right hand is resting on her womb thus highlighting her state. It is of little surprise to discover that when Piero painted this in the mid 15th century he caused a huge scandal. Never had Mary been depicted as an ordinary peasant woman and never as one so lacking in modesty at her state. She stands there bold as brass almost saying “Look at me”. She literally stares at us demanding a response.

What Piero did through his art was to remind us the viewers, us the believers, that this woman was real woman, real human being like us, and that the child she carried in her womb was real child, as human as any child could be. His fresco is what I like to think of as “in your face” theology! Piero understood the Gospel we heard read this morning, the great Prologue to St. John, with its stupendous statement “and the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory”. Stupendous because it breaks through all our categories, all our neat compartmentalized notions of how things are, and announces a new thing, that the very God who created the heavens and the earth, this God, for love of us, came among us as one of us. That he was born of a particular woman at a particular time in a particular place. So often we tend either wittingly or unwittingly to soften reality, to tone down the facts and events in order to better fit our categories, or our comfort. The thought of the great God, the God of creation and redemption as entering our sordid existence seems too much for us, too beyond the bounds of possibility.

But the words of St. John, “and the Word was made flesh” are the very stuff of the good news of the gospel. For the implication of them is that God has taken the stuff of our existence and transformed it in his image. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins captures this truth is his poem “That nature is a Heraclitean Fire”: “I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond.”

Today’s readings help us place the infant Christ in the manger at the heart of the Christmas crèche scene in a much grander context. The prophet Isaiah exults at universal salvation of God which is at hand and which we as Christians see fulfilled in Jesus Christ. Both the Hebrews passage and the gospel see the full implications of the Christ child: that in this child we see the glory of God in our midst. “He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word.” Says the writer the Hebrews. And John says “we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth”.

There is no doubt in the Christian scriptures that this Jesus is fully God and fully Man. The early church had to fight to maintain that truth against all efforts to water it down, to make it more generally acceptable. Ireneus said that which God took (human flesh) that he redeemed. In other words the great mystery of the Incarnation which we celebrate today is that God has taken our whole being, our physicality, our psychology, our sexuality, our rationality, our creativity, all that we are, and made it his own. Nothing is left out. God’s redeeming love is all inclusive, all encompassing.

That is what we proclaim today and that is what Piero was saying so long ago in his fresco of the Pregnant Madonna.

But there is more in that image of the Pregnant Madonna to challenge and illumine us as we worship at the Christmas Creche. For Mary has often been referred to as the Icon of the Church and the Icon for the Disciple. Like Mary carries the Christ in her womb out into the world, so we corporately and individually are called to be Christ-bearers, christophers, carrying the love, peace, justice, mercy, truth, compassion and hope of Christ into our world. That is how the work of the Incarnation is extended. That is how the transformative, creative work of God is extended to the world.

May the God who becomes flesh in his Christ fill us with his Spirit that we may like Mary become God-bearers to his world and become co-workers with God in the great work of Redemption. Amen

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