Diocese of Chichester

We have seen his glory (Jn 1.14)

He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being (Heb 1.3)

‘You don’t look, Dorothy, you just gawp.’

‘I’m not gawping, Bert, I’m taking in the atmosphere.’

Dorothy and Bert were companions in old age, long after Bert’s beloved wife had died and his two boys had grown up and left home. They never married but they bickered as though they’d been married all their lives. Bert played the organ badly, and Dorothy was the kindly but disorganised Sunday school teacher at the church I attended as a boy.

They saw the same thing but saw it differently.

Dorothy and Bert remind us that today we are about seeing salvation – a phrase that became familiar after a ground-breaking exhibition in the National Gallery, curated by Neil McGregor. The exhibition invited us to see that there are many routes into the expression of faith that might be held within a work of art.

Of course, artists across the whole of Christian history have wanted us to see their skills in technique, structure, colour, theological imagination and subversive innovation. But these things are only the scaffolding of sacred art which invites to see the work of God in some particular moment of its mysterious and sublime revealing.

And here in Sussex we can claim to have nurtured a significant exponent of the engineering of art as a science. John Peckham was born in 1240, just before the time of St Richard of Chichester. He was educated in the Cluniac monastery at Lewes, prior to going to Merton College, Oxford. A small detail in his life is that he was the first Franciscan to become Archbishop of Canterbury.

A more important detail is that he was an early scientist, studying geometry and mathematics, noting the influence of Arabic research on calculus. In the Franciscan movement, this early exploration of optics, the science of light, was known as ‘perspective’.

Vision was understood as a to and frow movement, with rays projected out of the eyes onto what you can see, and rays of light coming from an illuminated source or object that enter the eye, so that you can see it.

So when, for example, we look at the crib, the early Franciscans understood that something happens like taking a photograph. In 21st century technology, the photograph is recorded on your cell phone: in 13th century devotion it is recorded in your eye, and so in your mind and in your heart.

This way of seeing is captured with exquisite serenity in the 13th century fresco of the Virgin Mary and the Christ child in the Bishop’s Chapel here in Chichester. The child stands on his mother’s knees, embracing her. She looks down at him with tender gentleness; he looks up at her with love. Their eyes meet and something travels between them, alerting Mother and Child to the bond that unites them to each other.

But more than that, in the 13th century it was believed that when we gaze, whether we look or gawp, at this fresco, our eyes are similarly linked with both Mary and Jesus in their embrace, and the imprint of the union to between earth and heaven, time and eternity, humanity and Godhead which the fresco depicts, is also fixed in us.

This science of sacred art makes perfect sense of the words from the letter to the Hebrews that describe the relationship between God the Father and God the Son, as the Father looks with love upon the incarnate Son, who ‘is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being’. And here is the invitation to us.

When we look with faith, in the spirit of devotion, wonder and awe, upon the representation of the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ, that we see in the crib, or more existentially in the bread and wine of the Eucharist which are his body and blood, then we begin to forge a bond, to fix an image in our eye, our mind, our heart, that allows the exact imprint of God’s very being to be deepened in us.

Here is the truly shocking reality that we celebrate today: that since God has become one with us in Jesus Christ, we shall also become one with him, the exact imprint of the divine nature – not merely citizens of heaven, but those who are its heirs, constituting the family of God’s beloved sons and daughters.

Across the centuries, our understanding of how the eye works might have progressed in many ways: but we might also have lost something important in the journey: our sense of perspective.

The Dominicans who painted the fresco in the Bishop’s Chapel here in Chichester understood and valued the perspective that we have lost. They knew that time reflecting on a representation of the mystery of our salvation would teach us how to get things back into perspective: the divine perspective of loving creation by God, restoration by Jesus Christ when we damage ourselves by sin, and the routine inhaling of the life of God through the breath of the Holy Spirit.

Similarly, I hope and pray that you will not allow this Christmas to pass without going prayerfully to the crib, and, ‘veiled in flesh, the Godhead see’. See, as well, yourself, in the child of Bethlehem, loved by the Father, embraced by Mary, our mother too, and safe under Joseph’s kindly protection.

This is the recovery of our lost sense of perspective, as it was summed up by St Ambrose in the 4th century: He was wrapped in swaddling clothes that you might be freed from the bonds of death. He was in the manger, that you might be at the altar. He was on earth, that you might be in heaven.