There’s a new image on the streets in the UK this Christmas. It looks like an ultrasound. No, it is an ultrasound of a regular, healthy-looking infant. With a halo. The text reads He’s on His way: Christmas starts with Christ.
The last few years have been all about ultrasounds stuck on fridges in my house and the houses of my friends. Those grainy images are the focus of so much prenatal dreaming and speculation. They are images of longing and impatience. We want to see, face to face, what we still await.
So, in that way, the embryo Jesus is perfect. It reminds us that the Christmas season is about waiting before it is about celebrating.
But it is also a complicated image. For starters, there’s the cheese factor. Because, really, in this day and age, halos are cheesy. I’m not sure how you get around this. Sure, they looked great when Giotto was the hit of the fresco parade, but now? Contemporary depictions of halos come across as hokey rather than holy. The idea of an ultrasound with a halo is a bit off the wall.
Yet, the halo links the image to artistic images of Jesus throughout time. I see it, and I think about Giotto and his surprising blue skies. And about Rembrandt trying to fudge the halo issue in the Adoration of the Shepherds by having the Christ child lit from an unseen source located somewhere between the infant and the closest praying shepherd. Halos are a mark that there is something different going on. This is someone a bit off the wall, perhaps. They are so different that they glow. So different that God must be at work here.
Like other devotional paintings, this depiction of Jesus asks that we consider the mysterious duality of Christ. Fully human, fully divine. The ultrasound, with its own attendant reality, asks us to think about the shocking reality of the incarnation, and to see Jesus as divinely mysterious but human, present but still in the future. He is on His Way.
On the human side of this complicated image, there’s also an echo of the abortion debate going on here. Ultrasounds inevitably are images reminding us of the reality of life pre-birth. When it’s on a fridge, we think about a waiting family, but the nuance shifts when these personal images appear in public spaces. Then, we think about protests and placards and awareness campaigns by anti-abortionists. When I see an ultrasound plastered up on the side of a bus, I can’t help but think about other uses of these images. This is apparently not the intention of ChurchAds, the group who put together the poster campaign. The Trustees of ChurchAds have issued a statement saying: “In the light of some misleading items in the media, we would additionally like to stress that the poster is not, in any way, designed to either support or campaign against abortion.” And yet, the visual connection is there for good or for ill, and it is difficult to ignore completely.
But regardless of all the political and intellectual complication, I like these posters. It isn’t a question of taste, perhaps, but of ideas. I like that I think about my own babies when I look at this poster of Jesus. I like that I wonder about big questions and mythologies, about art and reality, and about human imagination reaching for God.
I even like the cheese, because we can get too precious about Christmas with our lovely children’s choirs and glittery Christmas cards. Something weird and confusing happened at Christmas. Something complicated. Something that lacked aesthetic appeal and had a strange mix of ancient and modern going on. Something divine is afoot at Christmas, and it is something worth the wait.
Happy Advent.
