Midweek: The Nativity

Some time around 1405, Andrei Rublev painted his work The Nativity in the Flesh of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, a lengthy title often shortened to The Nativity. Mary Elizabeth Podles has collected some of her essays in a book entitled A Thousand Words, including her essay on Rublev's work. In this meditation, Podles pulls out elements of the painting and guides her readers in uncovering their symbolism. If you loved pouring over hidden picture puzzles as a child, you will enjoy this taste of discovering details and meaning with Podles' direction in The Nativity today:

[The Savior] is placed at the center of the image, within a womb-like grotto like the one in Bethlehem traditionally associated with his birth. Sharp, angular rocks rise above it to symbolize the harshness of the world into which he is born. He is wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a tomb-like manger as if to foreshadow his grave clothes and future tomb. His very littleness seems to speak of the human frailty he was born to embrace. The lowly workaday animals, the ox and the ass, which symbolize the Jewish and the pagan peoples, regard this newcomer with appropriate surprise...

Mary is the dominant figure of the icon. Stretched at the diagonal on a mandorla-shaped cushion, she who has just borne God leans her hand on her cheek... Her gaze rests on a little gnarled tree at the right: this is the Tree of Jesse, and only she recognizes her little son's royal heritage. Or, it may at the same time be the Tree of Life, which the liturgical apolytikion proclaims "has blossomed from the Virgin in the cave."...

In the corners below her are two additional scenes with a melancholy tinge. ...Yet there is the hope of faith... [A] midwife, identified as Salome, the mother of James, pours out her faith in a kind of Magnificat even as she here pours out water for the baby's bath... The bath, incidentally, both points up the very humanity of Christ's birth, and looks forward to his Baptism in the Jordan and its revelation of his divinity; another tree, perhaps another reference to the Tree of Life, seems to spring from the upper edge of the fount.

...In the upper half of the icon are further signs of hope. ...[S]hepherds approach the Virgin. Their sheep...foreshadowings of the Christian flock, nibble at the Tree of Life. The shepherds have heard the glad news announced by the angels at the upper right. There are four angels: ...they are the Trinity, manifesting their workings in the Incarnation to the humble shepherds. The fourth angel is mostly hidden, representing the hidden face of God, the unknowable who is beyond our comprehension.

Finally, the Trinity...puts in another appearance at the opening of the cave. In fact the babe is not alone: through the merciful working of the trinity, the Godhead has broken through into our inhospitable world in the miracle of the Incarnation, and the world is made new.

~ Mary Elizabeth Podles

"The Nativity"

A Thousand Words