Christmas is coming, and with it all the classic images of the nativity, with cosy mangers, donkeys, camels, sheep, wise men, shepherds and a smattering of angelic hosts. I offer you an image of the Christmas season that rarely gets an airing – ‘Rest on the Flight to Egypt’ by Nicholas Mynheer, part of the Methodist Church Modern Art Collection (see link above). Our carol services end with the Magi offering their gifts to the child and we skip over the angelic warnings and the journeys they provoked. The Wise Men return to their own country “by another way”. Joseph gets up in the middle of the night and bundles Mary and Jesus up to flee to Egypt. This part of the Christmas story has been subject to a general amnesia but from the middle-ages on it was the focus of hundreds of religious paintings, often incorporating angels, crowds of saints, sumptuous locations and, as with Mynheer’s painting, fruit!

While the flight has its basis in the Gospel of Matthew (Matthew 2:13-15), the text dealing with the Rest on the Flight comes from an extra-Biblical source, the apocryphal writing known as the “Gospel” of Pseudo-Matthew, which introduces a Date tree under which Mary and Joseph wearily rest. The tree bends down to offer its fruit to the hungry couple and water bursts from it’s roots to quench their thirst.

But in our image the family are resting in the cool shade of an apple tree, with its echoes of the biblical story of humanity’s loss of innocence literally hanging overhead. The consequence of human selfishness [sin] has driven this family from their home to an exhausting (look at the donkey!), isolating and unpredictable existence, just as the same human selfishness drives millions of people today to leave the familiarity of their homes to find refuge and help in safer countries.

Nevertheless, despite the shadow of sin’s consequence hanging over this family, Mynheer has managed to capture hope in abundance: Here In our picture the parents are playing with and ‘adoring’ their child. The child is the focus, the child is their hope and their life. They have nothing to give him but their love, their sacrificial care, their devotion and their joy; but that is enough. And of course, that child is Jesus, who’s life and death literally embodied and revealed to the world the gentle, persistent, undefeatable and irresistible love of God. And we to, with our new circuit and all our churches and chapels, have nothing to give him but our love, our sacrificial care of others, our devotion and our joy; but that is enough.

                                                                                                     Rev Tim Wilkinson