A black and white Christmas

The French artist Jean-Francois Millet is best known for his evocative paintings of peasant life in France; ‘The Gleaners’ is perhaps his most famous work.  The Barbizon school which he co-founded sought greater realism in art; taking scenes from nature as their subjects, and introducing loose brushwork and bright colours, they were the forerunners of Impressionism.

Millet’s ‘The Flight into Egypt’ is in quite a different vein; the scene in this pencil drawing is brooding and opaque.  The couple trudging silently through the darkness would be entirely anonymous but for Millet’s title and the strange glow emanating from the bundle which the man is carrying.  This is Joseph, Mary and the infant Jesus – fleeing by night the murderous threat they faced in Bethlehem.  Alone and fearful, without any human support or help, they hope to find refuge in a strange land.

Although Millet drew this 150 years ago, it symbolises the black-and-white Christmas that countless people are facing this year.  Two million Syrian refugees are struggling to survive as winter storms are buffeting their camps.  In the Central African Republic, 700,000 people have fled their villages in the last few weeks due to sectarian violence, and thousands of Filipinos are still wrestling with the devastating consequences of typhoon Haiyan.

Here in Britain half a million people will spend Christmas alone, and for most it’s not by choice.  They may be warm and dry physically, but they’re lonely and lacking support: their poverty is relational.  Thousands of parents whose marriage has failed will be prevented from seeing their children next week due to court orders; they too face a black-and-white Christmas.

The couple in Millet’s picture would have been anonymous to any who saw them, yet their lives were immensely significant.  Like the shadowed faces of Mary and Joseph, the faces of the people who are physically and relationally poor this Christmas are invisible to us; they are ‘just statistics’.

But the birth of Christ shows that each and every one of them is immensely significant.  Will you let the light of Christmas change the way you see them?


Friday Five is an initiative of the Jubilee Centre in collaboration with Relational Research (formerly Relationships Global)