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Please Take Me In

by the Rev. Dr. Michael Johnston

When I was the young curate at St. Matthew’s, Evanston, the then rector used to like to tell his version of Clement Clark Moore’s Christmas Story both to the parish children and any adult who would listen. His version began in the usual way:

“Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house,
not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
The stocking were hung by the chimney with care
in hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there.”

But you know how that one ends up, and somewhere along in here — when the children are nestled all snug in their beds —- the rector’s version would take a hard right turn. It goes more or less like this.

The dusting of flurries had turned to a steady, fluffy snow during the Midnight Mass. So the walk home made it feel like Christmas had really arrived. By now the house was quiet. There was a stiff eggnog by the fire after church, a couple of presents to unwrap, and then off to bed. So the doorbell at this time of night was odd. You must be dreaming. Maybe that second eggnog!

But no, you realize —— through that haze of half-sleep —- it really was the bell, because it rings again. Twice this time. The clock on the night stand reads 3:15. Who could possibly be at the door this time of night? A last minute FedEx!?! It rings again, just as you roll over, intending to ignore the intruder and go back to sleep. But now you’re actually wide awake.

Slipping on your robe, you descend the stairs as the bell rings one last time. A tentative peak out the front door window. Nothing. Or, more accurately, no one. Maybe you were dreaming after all. Then you notice.

A cardboard box sitting on the porch. You crack the door. And, yes, there’s a box lightly dusted with snow. Not sealed, but shut with one of those tricky four-way folds that close the flaps in on each other. The ink on the label is beginning to run from the melting snow, but it’s clearly got your name on it together with the words “Please take me in.”

Now opening the door fully, you grab the box by one of its folds and drag it into the hallway. Inside is a bundle of folded blankets, faded and tattered at the edges. Below the bundle something moves, and as you fold the blankets back, what you find below is a baby. And pinned to his swaddling clothes is the note that reads, “Please take me in. You’re the only thing I’ve got.” So you lift the child from the box into your arms…which is roughly where the Rector’s Tale ends.

It’s a stunning metaphor, with ancient crib ceding to modern cardboard, where the boy king becomes an abandoned homeless infant left on your doorstep. Indeed, take him in, you’re the only thing he’s got.

Christmas, of course, is replete with metaphors. So let me offer you another one.

In the rural Tuscan village of Monterchi, southeast of Florence, there is a very small museum devoted to a single work of art:  (The Lady of the Birth).  (Read more about it on Wikipedia.)

Originally the fresco decorated the cemetery chapel of the village —— hence the location of its current museum —- and may have been painted as a memorial to Piero’s mother, who was born in Monterchi and died there in 1459. Piero probably executed the work sometime shortly after his mother’s death; there is no other reliable dating.

The first thing you notice about the fresco is that Piero’s Madonna is most obviously pregnant, which is itself unusual in the image tradition. I have run across one or two otherwise ambiguously pregnant Madonnas, but this one is clear. A number of details suggest a woman very close to term: the sway of her spine; the placement of her left forehand at the back of her hip; and, as a woman obstetrician on one of my trips pointed out, “She is growing out of her maternity clothes. I tell. my patients,” said the doctor, ‘that when they can’t stand being pregnant one more minute, they’ ye got two more weeks. That’ s what I’ d tell this Mary.”

There is, then, nothing spiritualized about this rendering of the Incarnation; Madonna del Parto carries not only the logos of God, but a real, fully human child. Leave aside that she also bears the common features of the local Tuscan woman. You could spot her today, carrying her string bag full of groceries in any one of the market squares in any village of Northern Italy. She might even have a toddler in tow who looks remarkably like one of the angels in the fresco. In other words, Piero della Francesca painted from what he saw around him, bringing earth and heaven together.

The other striking detail of Madonna del Parto is that Piero has located the figure of Mary within a flower—covered tent, very much like those occasionally still erected for special events on the lawns of the country houses of the region.

It occurs to me that the tent is unlikely to have been associated with the Incarnation prior to the Renaissance. Artists of earlier periods would have relied on the Vulgate of St. Jerome as the sole referent for their works. Thus, incarnational images prior to the 15th century are likely to have echoed only the Latin version of John 1:14: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”

But by Piero’s day, the Greek New Testament had been recovered, and literate western Europe knew the Johannine verse in its Greek original:

“And the Word was made flesh and tented among us.” In fact, it is not too far off the mark to translate the Greek as “And the Word became flesh and tented in our very neighborhood,” which gives the Incarnation an even more immediate and local, less theologized, action of God.

The tent occupies almost all of the fresco space, and a pair of angels hold back its flaps to reveal the Virgin. She, in turn, opens the folds of her dress above the womb, as though to reveal the divinity which has chosen, for a time, to reside there. In short, Our Lady is presenting the child to the world. “Please take me in. You’re the only thing I’ve got.” Or rather, given the currencies and chaos of the times, “Please take me in. I’m the only thing you’ve got.”

The world into which the boy—king was born, like ours, was not a very pretty place. The Palestine over which Herod ruled for Rome was a place of grinding poverty for the masses, where wealthy tax collectors made their fortunes by extortion; and pregnant, homeless teenagers sought shelter in caves or cow barns…or cardboard boxes.

Somehow this all sounds strikingly familiar, even modern. And hardly any of it is the idyll of our beloved carol about Bethlehem in deep and dreamless sleep. Even believing people have to admit that when God comes to be with God’s people, it is not a world of sugar plum fairies and Harry Potter knock-offs. There would, in fact, be no need for “God with us” in such a “never, never land.”

Rather the world that Jesus Emmanuel comes to is the real world of poverty, callous cruelty, and inconsolable grief. It is this world and none other that needs a Savior. Needed one back then, still needs one now. So please, take him in. Open the folds of your heart and allow him to tent there. He’s yours. In fact, he’s the only thing you’ve got.