Christmas Day has come and gone. Scenes of a stable sheltering a young mother who cradles an infant no longer appear in store windows or on our screens. Yes, Christmas has come and gone, but the meaning of Christmas is just getting started.
So it appeared to me the day after Christmas when I opened the newspaper and saw this photograph on the front page: an image of a caregiver holding a broken, suffering body in her arms. Not a baby cradled in a mother’s arms, but a grown man held just as lovingly, just as tenderly in a young woman’s arms.
Yes, Christmas has come and gone. The child has been born and will grow to be a charismatic teacher and healer and a political revolutionary. He will be killed by the religious and political establishment. And that is when we will see another set of images of Jesus with his mother. Only now she is holding his limp body in her arms, slumped and broken. Her mother love is visible until the last moment.
The image is called a Pieta, the most familiar being Michelangelo’s sculpture in St. Peter’s Basilica. Mary gazes down now not at an innocent newborn baby but at the crucified lifeless body of her son.
“Pieta” embodies sorrow, despair and also mercy, presence and abiding love.
Perhaps it was the blue of the hospital room curtains and the bedding that first caught my eye in the newspaper photo, so similar to the “Mary blue” of many Renaissance paintings of Madonna and Child. Although it was the position of the limp body in the woman’s strong arms as she carried him gently and carefully to the bed that captured me.
Like Mary, cradling her broken crucified son, this is a Pieta for our times.
Pieta is present in hospitals like this one all over the world. The young woman; she could be a doctor, a nurse or and aide; is one among thousands of men and women who, exhausted by grief, by long hours of tending and watching, give every last measure of devotion and solace to those ill and dying during this relentless pandemic.
You may not be a follower of Jesus; You may believe that the story of his birth and death is just a lovely myth. Nonetheless, even if this is so, Pieta; the image of a loving mother holding her broken, crucified child, is a metaphor for all the doctors, nurses, aides and front-line responders who care for the lost and the least, the sick and the dying and who are all too well acquainted with grief. Surely, they are the Pieta for today.
Isn’t that one reason we return every year to the story of a child who throughout his short life gave unfailingly of himself to others, who taught us that love for each other is the foundation of life? And who, perhaps, learned it from a mother who loved him until and after his last breath.