Finding the Christ Child

It is striking that the only account of Jesus’s early years among canonical early Christian sources (Luke 2:41–52) reports a moment in his adolescence where he is being chided by Mary for failing to inform her and Joseph of his whereabouts. Such an account suggests that, like any other parenting experience, Mary’s rearing of young Jesus involved disciplinary intervention.

Max Ernst’s painting, The Virgin Chastising the Christ Child before Three Witnesses: André Breton, Paul Éluard, and the Painter (1926) takes this idea to—as it might be for some—disturbing proportions.

A cursory examination of the painting is enough to reveal that it deliberately draws its form and content from celebrated works of the Italian Renaissance. Jesus’s golden locks and the style and colours of Mary’s garments immediately recall, for example, Raphael’s paintings of the Madonna and Child. However, Ernst’s use of such elements turns this iconographic tradition on its head, disrupting the harmonious relationship between the blessed Virgin and the infant Christ. Instead of Mary gently cradling her son, here she spanks Jesus’s bottom with such ferocity that she turns its cheeks red and knocks his halo to the ground. The fact that Mary’s halo remains firmly intact throughout this punishment further heightens a sense of theological scandal.

We can see Ernst and his surrealist companions André Breton and Paul Éluard through a narrow window behind the Virgin. Their presence, more than possibly alluding to a triple signature, seems to suggest conspiracy; not only in their staging themselves as witnesses to the sacrilegious scene, but also as witnesses to our presumed uneasiness in seeing it. While Éluard watches the thrashing with a cold, unwavering stare and Brenton resolutely looks away, the artist himself steals a glance at us, the viewing audience, as if to ascertain our response. Sufficiently shocked?

Perhaps Ernst’s painting goes overboard, especially with its depiction of Jesus’s rosy buttocks and tumbling halo. The integrity of Mary’s halo, however, might prompt us to consider the formative influences her disciplinary intervention may have had on the growing boy, negatively as well as positively. Indeed, the verses immediately following Mary’s question, ‘why have you treated us so (Luke 2:48)?’, highlight the significance of her rebuke—Jesus ‘was obedient to them’ and ‘increased in wisdom and in stature, and in favour with God and man’(2:51–52).

References

Spies, Werner. 2005. Max Ernst: A Retrospective (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art)

The Latin script on the book Mary holds in Simone Martini’s Christ Discovered in the Temple (1342) indicates, if it is not already apparent, that this painting depicts Mary’s question to the twelve-year-old Jesus in Luke 2:48: ‘Son, why have you treated us so? Behold, your father and I have been looking for you anxiously’. In the original Greek text, Mary’s words take on a more stern, admonishing tone. She does not address the adolescent Jesus as the young man he is, but uses a more juvenile descriptor that puts him firmly in his subordinate place—‘child/son’ (teknon). Moreover, her rebuke seems to express less concern for Jesus than for what he has put them through (Edwards 2015: 95).

Simone’s painting, however, may present us with a different interpretation again. Here Mary’s outstretched hand suggests that she is pleading with the apparently obstinate, ill-tempered Christ. Joseph, grasping Jesus’s shoulder, looks down at him and gestures towards his wife, as if prompting Jesus to listen to his mother. Mary’s supplicant posture is further highlighted by her sitting on a low bench, looking up at Jesus from a position of humility. Her furrowed brow and pursed lips could imply anger, but her body language seems to cast this expression in the realm of maternal fear or worry.

Regardless of how we interpret Mary’s tone and demeanour when questioning Jesus in Luke 2:48, what becomes clear from their interaction is that parent–child relations are not always smooth or easy, even between the Virgin Mother and the Christ Child. The feminist theologian Els Maeckelberghe may be right when she states that if women ‘attribute any place at all to Mary, they see her above all as “that woman with a difficult son”’ (Maeckelberghe 1989: 125). Simone’s painting brings these suggested parent–child tensions in Luke’s passage to the fore.

References

Edwards, James R. 2015. The Gospel According to Luke, The Pillar New Testament Commentary, ed. by D. A. Carson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans)

Maeckelberghe, Els. 1989. ‘“Mary”: Maternal Friend or Virgin Mother?’, in Motherhood: Experience, Institution, Theology, ed. by Anne E. Carr and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (Edinburgh: T&T Clark), pp. 120–27

Carl Bloch’s Jesus is Found in the Temple depicts the very moment Mary and Joseph lay eyes on their son after searching Jerusalem for three days after the flurry of Passover activities. Aspects of this moment might resonate with parents who have lost their child in a crowd, only to find him or her in the last place they thought to look. For Mary and Joseph, however, discovering Jesus in the Temple courts, conversing with the teachers of the law, was particularly unexpected.

The text describes Mary and Joseph’s reaction at finding their son with one word, ‘astonished’ (Luke 2:48; ekplēssō). Within this context, the word could connote a variety of heightened, perhaps even conflicting, emotions and responses—responses which Bloch keeps mostly hidden in his painting. He depicts Mary and Joseph with their backs to the viewer, inviting us to imaginatively ‘complete’ the expressions on their faces.

Such invitation is hardly surprising. This scene was one of twenty-three meditative paintings of the life of Christ that Bloch created between 1865 and 1879 for the king’s oratory in Frederiksborg Castle, Denmark. To encourage meditative reflection, Bloch included seemingly random children in these paintings, likely modelled after his own children, often peering out at the viewer or directing the viewer’s gaze to specific elements in the scene (Pheysey & Holzapfel 2010: 73). 

Jesus is Found in the Temple is an outstanding example of this iconographic trope. The most conspicuous figure in the painting is the young boy sitting on a lower step of the Temple, holding a string attached to the caged dove, his sacrificial-offering-in-waiting. He looks curiously, perhaps even in a startled way, at the couple. We might use this boy’s reaction to guide our own reflections as we meditate on the possible thoughts and emotions Mary and Joseph were experiencing in this moment of discovery.

References

Pheysey, Dawn C. and Richard Neitzel Holzapfel. 2010. The Masters Hand: The Art of Carl Heinrich Bloch (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book)