The Nativity scene that includes a keffiyeh that was unveiled on the Paul VI Corridor within the Vatican on December 7 was designed by Palestinian artists Johny Andonia and Faten Nastas Mitwasi of Bethlehem. (© Vatican Media)
On December 7, Pope Francis attended the opening of Nativity of Bethlehem 2024, a nativity scene exhibition in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. One scene featured olive wooden sculptures of Mary, Jesus, and Joseph designed by Johny Andonia and Faten Nastas Mitwasi, two Palestinian artists from Bethlehem. Nestled between a genuflecting Mary and standing Joseph was Jesus swaddled in a keffiyeh, a black-and-white scarf symbolizing Palestinian heritage and resilience. He lay under a round mother-of-pearl starburst symbolizing the Star of Bethlehem, inscribed with the phrases “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill to all people” in Latin and Arabic.
To decry the nativity scene, nevertheless, is to disclaim the centuries-long historical past of artists depicting the Holy Household in Bethlehem — positioned within the Israeli-occupied West Financial institution in Palestine — as marginalized, forcibly eliminated, and diasporic peoples.
The placement of Jesus’s beginning and the individuals current grew to become deeply significant in early Christian work by Byzantine artists depicting child Jesus with a donkey and ox below a “turugium,” or tiled roof construction contained in the Cave of the Nativity in Bethlehem, corresponding to Duccio di Buonisegna’s “The Nativity with the Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel” (1308–11).
Nevertheless, Renaissance and Baroque artists started to situate Jesus’s beginning amongst Greco-Roman ruins — the identical ruins, scholar Andrew Hui explains, of spiritual and political techniques into which Jesus was born and would doctrinally overturn.
Equally, the ethnicities of the Magis, the three kings who comply with the Star of Bethlehem to adore Jesus and produce three items, and the clothes and conduct of shepherds mirrored Christianity’s rising ubiquity via colonialism and compelled conversion. And during the last century, artists have typically used each the Magis and the shepherds as instruments to reimagine the nativity in occasions of warfare, bigotry, and genocide.
Throughout World Battle I, artists reimagined the nativity within the contexts of nationalism and large-scale destruction — troopers as shepherds in army uniform and Jesus, Mary, and Joseph taking shelter in bombed-out stables or trenches. German artist Sella Hasse’s linocut “Kriegsweihnacht” (1914) reimagines the Nativity as a scene of mourning, explains Claudia Siebrecht in her 2013 e-book The Aesthetics of Loss: German Ladies’s Artwork of the First World Battle. A Medieval knight bows his head to Mary’s left, because the bare our bodies of useless troopers rise to an afterlife behind them.
World Battle II likewise noticed displaced artists, together with Polish artist Stanisław Przespolewski, reimagining Jesus, Mary, and Joseph of their conventional people costumes. Przespolewski crafted his 1943 Nativity scene with a Mary clothed in Polish people patterns and a winged hussar, a Sixteenth-century Polish soldier clad in armor, defending the household. A recent World Battle II Polish soldier additionally stands with a rifle on the prepared on the outskirts of the manger.
In 1968, a bunch of American artists led by Joey Skaggs constructed a Vietnamese Nativity scene in Central Park, with a Vietnamese Mary, Joseph, and child Jesus in a manger coated with bamboo shades and a close-by paper pig adorned with a police hat, gun, and badge. Whereas dressed as American troopers, they tried to burn the pig to the bottom in protest of the warfare. Skaggs and a number of other different protesters had been ticketed for the “Vietnamese Christmas Nativity Burning.” Skaggs informed the New York Instances, “I want to make it clear that it’s not a beautiful Christmas in Vietnam.”
Banksy, “The Scar of Bethlehem” (2019) (photograph courtesy Bisher Qassis)
Politically and socially potent nativity scenes have solely multiplied during the last decade. In 2019, Banksy unveiled a crèche in Bethlehem depicting the Holy Household beside Israel’s West Financial institution separation barrier, pierced by a star-shaped bullet gap. The piece was titled “Scar of Bethlehem.” California’s Claremont United Methodist Church staged steel cages containing statues of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph that very same yr, whom the pastor mentioned characterize “the thousands of nameless families separated” in United States Border Patrol detention facilities. Artist Kelly Latimore’s “Tent City Nativity” (2022) depicts Jesus, Mary, and Joseph inside an unhoused tent neighborhood, barred from the bustling metropolis behind them by a steel fence.
Final Christmas, the Vatican displayed greater than 100 crèches, together with a scene by a Ukrainian artist with bomb shrapnel embedded within the statue.
The 2023 nativity scene on the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church of Bethlehem (pictures by Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac and used with permission)
Very like the lengthy historical past of nativity scenes themselves, Pope Francis’s latest plea for an finish to the warfare on Gaza is neither new nor stunning. Simply final month, he referred to as for an investigation into the Israeli army’s bombardment during the last yr, telling creator Hernán Reyes Alcaide that “according to some experts, what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide.”
What’s highly effective is the Pope’s seen interplay with the nativity, seen praying in entrance of the swaddled Jesus and sharing a message of peace. It calls to thoughts the nativity scene on the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem final yr: Jesus wrapped in a keffiyeh, his cradle a pile of particles. St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Washington, DC, unveiled an analogous show this yr. “This is beyond symbolism,” wrote the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church pastor Munther Isaac on December 8, as Gazans mark a second vacation below the Israeli army’s unabated siege. “Once again, we find ourselves reflecting on the meaning of Christmas through the image of Christ in the Rubble.”
