Holy Family
- David Wm. Mickiewicz
- Dec 22, 2021
- 4 min read
Christmas II – The Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph
1 Samuel 1:20-22, 24-28; Psalm 84; 1 John 3:1-2, 21-24; Luke 2:41-52
It is impossible to paint the Holy Family realistically. We do not know what they looked like. Their contemporaries left us no record of their appearance, and the Evangelists were completely uninterested in the personal details that we long to know. They were wholly set on the significance of Jesus.
Thus Christian artists have imagined for us the appearance of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, and over the centuries they have done so with great enthusiasm and variation from a reworking of the god, Apollo to a shepherd boy to a bearded, long haired young man.
Each generation, each people, images Jesus as one like themselves. Thus pictures from the Middle Ages on, beautiful as they are, do not reflect any realistic image of Jesus and the Holy Family. They reflect back to us ourselves. We have all grown up with images of a fair-skinned Jesus and parents. The Holy Family is a European family, often aristocratic and noble, whereas the true Holy Family were sun bronzed, Jewish peasants.
How do you feel when you look at Janet McKenzie’s various paintings of the family of Joseph, Mary and Jesus?
The people in McKenzie’s painting, “The Family” are not European or Palestinian. Are they Cheyenne, maybe Apache or Comanche? Covered in blankets, like First Nation Peoples of this continent, they do not look like us.
We are forced to recognize both difference and similarity. We are compelled to look twice and to think again: tall and thinner, longer drawn faces and high cheek bones.
In the painting, “The Holy Family”, McKenzie shows us a group of poor people who have, what is it? African, Mexican or are they Peruvian features? They too, do not look like us. All three have dark skin, a flat nose, dark, short curly hair and full lips.
It is as if the unknown reality of that first Holy Family of Jewish peasants has been transposed into another key. We recognize the melody, the familiar in these images as we are simultaneously confronted by the unfamiliar.
Jesus, Mary and Joseph did not look like us either.
Is it not a similar experience we are having within our country and the US Church? The population of both is moving from familiar white Northern European and olive Mediterranean faces to faces with almond shaped eyes, skin of a variety of shades of bronze and browns, hair that is straight or tightly curled to dreadlocks, and statures that are often shorter and brawnier than our ancestors. Many in our society are reacting with fear and lashing out in anti–Asian, anti–Arab, anti–Semitic, racist and nationalist hatred.
In this fear filled atmosphere we have to take note of a recent incident; the second theft within a month of a painting that has been stolen from the walls of the chapel within the School of Law at the Catholic University of America. Entitled “Mama” by artist Kelly Latimore, it depicts a Black Virgin Mary cradling the dead body of a Black Jesus after his Crucifixion. The image is widely thought to be depicting George Floyd. When asked the question, “Is it George Floyd or Jesus?” the artist Latimore usually answers “yes”.
Missouri’s Episcopal bishop, the Rt. Rev. Deon Johnson, said that depicting Jesus as George Floyd is not sacrilegious but “if anything…more sacred, because here was a real person who became an image of Christ”. The bishop asks, “Why is the image of a Black man who was publicly lynched such a challenge to religious people?”
Why do we fear differences? Why do we believe that some peoples and races are inferior and others superior? This playbook has been used by many peoples, movements and governments throughout history. What would we have thought of Joseph, Mary and Jesus…let’s use their Jewish rather than anglicized names. What would we have thought of Yosef, Miriam and Joshua, if we encountered these poor peasants on our streets?
In McKenzie’s painting, “Holy Family II”, the family is again portrayed as dark skinned with Jesus as a precocious twelve year old. We know the story, one with which many parents will empathize. When they leave Jerusalem, Joseph thinks the child is with Mary, Mary thinks he is with Joseph, and it is only when they gather around the fire in the evening that they realize to their horror that Jesus is missing.
A very human experience of being lost and found as McKenzie portrays the adolescent holding a lamb; the lost sheep?
Jesus asks us to find him in all people, especially those who suffer. Is it not therefore our humanity and suffering that binds us together and makes us children of God?
Whether Hannah, Elkanah and Samuel; Sarah, Abraham and Isaac; Elizabeth, Zechariah and John; or Mary, Joseph and Jesus. Put your own family names in the list.
Then ask, is it our appearance or our humanity and suffering that make us holy?
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