God Sister Teresa
Sun and Rain for the Lamb by Mary Newcomb (1922-2008) was Sister Wendy Beckett’s final Christmas card. She sent it accompanied by a short commentary, which she wrote shortly before she died on 26th December 2018.
‘This is not the pure white lamb on the green meadow that we associate with the Son of God,’ she wrote. ‘This is a tiny black lamb, almost invisible, hidden in his mother’s fleece. She is the only support for his frailty and vulnerability, and the field is a barren wasteland, sodden with rain from the storm which is just departing, with a farmhouse in the distance and an empty barn.
‘Yet, before that lamb, there spreads a puddle in which a watery sun, rain almost over, is making the world beautiful. It was to bring this glory down to earth that the little lamb renounced his royal state in the heavens and came to live among us, as unprotected as any human baby ever was. From now until his final sacrifice when he moves back into his natural brightness, he will not only bring the glory of the Son to earth, but will take us into it. We do not just see, but in Jesus we live the Glory of God.’
I thought, when I first saw this picture, that with its lamb it would have made a more appropriate Easter card. Using it as a breviary marker has meant that I have seen it four times a day, every day, for over a year, without ever getting bored with it.
It now strikes me that it is a fitting image for both the birth and the resurrection of Jesus. Easter is the culmination of the Nativity of Christ and Sun and Rain for the Lamb takes us from the vulnerability of his infancy to his helplessness on the cross. There was nothing and no one to protect him and his cry ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Matthew 27:46) expresses unquantifiable darkness, pain, despair and sense of abandonment.
We recognise that he took on the sins of the world but, at the same time, we understand so very little of his death and of the full shock of his question. Had he been wrong all the time? Now we see that he was right all along: ‘I am the light of the world; anyone who follows me will not be walking in the dark; he will have the light of life’ (John 8:12).
Newcomb’s bleak little Norfolk landscape is dark all right, but the light is winning through, bringing with it warmth, life and, in this apparently cheerless countryside, the possibility of a host of golden daffodils.