She Knows Things
Rembrandt, Holy Family, 1645
I love this Rembrandt painting depicting mother Mary tenderly tending her baby. She is so young, isn’t she, yet somehow she knows things already. She is holding the holy scriptures, well lined, long read, open I suspect to Isaiah and the other eloquent prophets, passages she has read all of her life over so many dinner tables.
One of those passages, I am sure, is just the one I have been meditating through Advent:
18 Stop dwelling on past events
and brooding over days gone by.
19 I am about to do something new;
this moment it will unfold. Isaiah 43:18-19
You get the feeling Mary is pondering: “Could this promise possibly be my baby, right here, the something new God has planned for some seven hundred years. He’s here. It’s happened. Could he and I actually be part of the big story?”
And then she reads:
Let the wilderness and the parched land be glad,
let the desert rejoice and burst into flower.
2 Let it flower with fields of asphodel,
let it rejoice and shout for joy. . . . Isaiah 35:1-2
But we have waited so long, she must reflect, so many times lapsing into disappointment, driven toward defeat and despair, persecuted, threatened with annihilation, brought so low. Could this really be the time for something new? Could my baby be the one to usher in this new flowering and rejoicing and shouting with joy?
We are told “the child’s father and mother were full of wonder at what was being said,” and “his mother treasured up all these things in her heart.” You can see it in the painting. When God unfolds his great mystery, it’s time to stop and ponder. It’s time for our hearts to be filled with joy, despite the fearsome world in which we find ourselves.
How can we possibly, in our day, live into this ancient story? How do we look intently at the baby, while reading the old, old story in our Bibles? We don’t deal very well anymore with mystery, that’s for sure. We find ourselves more able to brood over days gone by, collecting in our hearts the flattening skepticism that so defines our age. The mystery that has come upon Mary is no less beyond understanding for her than it is for us in our dark days. We reach too into the mystery, beyond understanding. We want to hold that mystery in our arms?
Rembrandt has a way of putting himself in his paintings. Can I possibly be part of Rembrandt’s painting here? There’s Joseph going about his carpentry as usual. That’s me, carrying on my ordinary life, busy with things, pursuing dreams, enduring my own measure of darkness. But wait, look, this mother is tending her baby. Something new has come. It has taken form, actually, now, in real life. It changes everything. I can no longer look at the ordinary in my life as anything but extraordinary. Life breaks out into songs of joy.
This is my reverie this morning. Something new has happened. It is mystery beyond my grasp and yet it enters into my heart with the story of this tiny baby. It is no longer just a story, with it’s long tail of history. No, it is here in this tiny body. It is my time for life-changing pondering. It is my time for choosing to look around. Isn’t the world, against all odds, even now, breaking into blossom? Isn’t the world now singing for joy? The baby has come. Something new has broken through.