God Sister Teresa
Filippino Lippi’s Virgin and Child with St John from London’s National Gallery was sent to me last year as a Christmas card and I have had it by me ever since. It is lovely.
Mary wears a red dress and is holding her naked baby partly wrapped up in her beautiful blue cloak. Its lining is black, and it is arranged in an oval, larger than it need be, with the folds at the bottom becoming step-like with the baby’s right foot on the top step; this may well be a reference to Jesus’s descent into Hell, as per the Apostles’ Creed.
The very young John the Baptist carries a stylised cross and his presence here reminds us of John 3:30 – ‘He must increase, but I must decrease.’
Jesus is a large child of about two, totally absorbed by the half-peeled pomegranate in his grasp. This is one of the stickiest of all fruits, not to be recommended in the hands of a toddler while his mother is wearing her best clothes, but it is present because of its numerous symbolic meanings.
From ancient Greece to China, the pomegranate stands for fruitfulness, fecundity, prosperity and ambition. Some scholars believe it was the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden.
For Christians, it means the Passion of Christ, eternal life and the Church, with the seeds representing the Church’s members. The spiritual – as opposed to the visual – meaning of the pomegranate in this picture is infinitely reassuring: it is of the third person of the Trinity holding in his hands the people of God, and this for eternity.
Mary has a firmly resolute jawline; she is also fair, young and very pretty. Lippi has suggested in her a quality that the best paintings and sculptures of Mary often hint at: inner strength. We know that the historical Mary did not look like a Renaissance beauty, but we can work out that she must have had a great deal of character to see her through what we are told about her life in the Gospels.
It is always a relief to find her portrayed without sentimentality. We see her here in the early stages of motherhood, solemn and serene, presenting her son to the world as a charming little boy. We know that, at his death some 30 years later, she will be standing at the foot of the cross, agonisingly helpless, watching him die in unthinkable pain.
In the Gospels, Mary remains a shadowy figure but we can safely assume that, in order to have brought up the child who became the man Jesus, she must have been both exceptionally thoughtful and a woman of unique moral and spiritual standards.
When St Luke introduces her in his Gospel, he emphasises her capacity to treasure things and ponder them in her heart. He then goes on to put between her lips the Magnificat: part hymn of praise and part subversive protest, which echoes so many of the cries of the poor to be found in the Bible.
Mary is the stepping stone between the promises of the coming of the Messiah in the Old Testament and the realisation of these promises in the New.
We are now approaching the birth of our Saviour. We rejoice and are glad.