Luc Olivier Merson's Rest on the Flight into Egypt (1879) is one of my favorite images of Advent and Christmastide.
First, the scene is haunting and full of fatigue. Joseph is asleep on the desert floor. One imagines his mental and physical exhaustion fleeing danger and trying to take his wife and baby across deserts to a foreign land.
And what awaits them at journey's end? Will they find friends in Egypt? Work? And when will it be safe to go back home?
Then there's Mary and Jesus. Sitting on the Sphinx, in a striking juxtaposition and lending an exotic touch to the scene.
Jesus, the only source of light in the whole scene.
What I like about Rest on the Flight into Egypt is how it depicts, from the very beginning of his life, the homelessness of the Messiah. God is a refugee, an immigrant, a stranger in a strange land, a person of exile.
I've always felt that Rest on the Flight into Egypt is metaphor for the life of the church. We should live as a people of exile, as strangers among the nations. All we carry across the wastelands of this earth is the Christ Child. We have nothing else to offer.
That the church should model its life after Israel in the Exile seems so clear to me. Because that then makes us take the Old Testament prophetic imagination (a la von Rad and Brueggemann) more seriously.
The church is to embrace a "cosmopolitan homelessness" (Yoder, Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited) and accept "dispersion" among the nations as a part of its "mission" (Willimon and Hauerwas, Resident Aliens). The church is to embrace "galut as calling." Galut is a Hebrew word for the situation of living in a state of exile or homelessness. I think Rest on the Flight into Egypt vividly captures the experience of galut.
Yoder illustrates "galut as calling" by pointing to biblical models in the Old Testament -- Joseph, Daniel and Esther. Joseph, Daniel and Esther each lived as exiles, as resident aliens. Each labored alongside the people of a nation to which they did not belong, each working elbow to elbow "seeking the welfare of the city" (Jeremiah 29.7).
I think Advent and Christmas intend to reorient us, too. Because to that list we should add the Holy Family itself -- and most especially Jesus.