One of the most celebrated paintings of the Northern Renaissance was Jan van Eyck’s Annunciation. You can see it here framed on an easel. It depicts the moment when the angel of the Lord appeared to Mary to announce that she was pregnant with a child given by the Holy Spirit. It is suspected that this painting was part of a triptych, with the other two panels now lost. Those other two panels may have depicted the Nativity or the Adoration of the Magi and the Visitation or the Presentation in the Temple. It is thought that the triptych resided in the chapel of a monastery in Dijon, the capital of Burgundy at that time. Van Eyck served as court painter to Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy.

There are a lot of interesting elements to this painting that I would like to draw your attention to. There are several elements that were standard for depictions of this particular subject: the dove, the lilies, the Bible opened to Isaiah 7:14. But if you look closely at the murals on the wall in the background and at the floor tiles, you will see scenes from both the Old and New Testaments depicted there. Van Eyck was also the first artist to depict this scene with a church. It is thought that van Eyck was connecting the story from the gospel of Luke to the Golden Mass, which was an early morning service on the Wednesday after the 3rd Sunday of Advent that was focused on Mary and progressed from darkness to light. This painting is both interesting and beautiful in the way it depicts the story of Mary and the angel of the Lord.

Several poems have been written about this painting. I’d like to share one of them with you tonight.

“The Annunciation” by Pimone Triplett

Starts with a stream of gold that’s ridden

      by a relentlessly linear dove,

ready to pierce a young girl’s head.

            Then, her face, her gaze looking up, out

past the easel and later, past the frame,

      eyes raised as if to ask a question. Take

the virgin robe, for instance, which van Eyck has made

      to fall luxuriously as a second chance

across the old storyline etched below her.

            And, further down, the church’s intricately

strict apse, each floorboard, painstaked as lace, showing here,

      David’s lesson in beheading, there Samson’s

tearing down the temple—that history

            interrupted by her silken, layered folds:

each blue built up from perfecting the oil.

            His favorite signature, “As best I can”

or “As I was able, but not just as I wished.”

      Imagine the endless effort: a man

in the distance, deep in the could have been,

      who sat before the easel, hours, perhaps,

past his patience for lasting regrets,

            flat refusals—the quick-drying water-based

attempts flung around a room.

      And how, alone with pigment barrels, chamber pots,

the canvasses stretched, the fire exhumed,

      he poured a stream of oil back and forth,

watching it catch the light, change a wooden bowl.

            For the sake of making the mundane

seem to marry the mysterious,

      her eyes raised—lacquered, slippery wells, caught—

her startled acceptance. Since it’s her choosing

      to be chosen that mattered, largest figure

in the frame, the virgin form layered

            with gold light, blue, her pale hands open

for the god imagined sick with thin horizon,

      and ready to enter thickness now, the body’s

blood, gristle, vertebrae, whorled fingerprint.

      The oil spread back and forth. His wrist stiffened.

“As I was able, but not just as I wished.”

            So, out to pay the right kind of attention

to detail, as if, in the lengthening

      carelessness of cracked roads leading away

from his town, beneath a matted pulp

      of the year’s leaves, he wished he could hear

silence taking shape: a weed, say, starting

            to split the surface, part vegetal

altar and example of dumb, green change.

      Or, say, through the window, a flock of geese

receding, advancing, by turns, as the sky’s gray

      sometimes meets the double strength gray of sea,

he might have looked between the shapes,

            their invisible lines blooded, some racing ahead,

others falling behind, each filling in, quickly,

      empty spaces where the wings once beat.

And still, she looks up, asking to be entered.

      So that if she turned away from shadows, wood panels,

chamber pots, winter coats lined against the wall,

            he might have looked so far into the difficult

that he finally could believe: behind her gaze,

      beneath her brow, under the layers of

shell, salt, finally skin-white, lay the mind

      of a mother giving birth to a father

and a son, the flesh—a color, an instant, spared.

As we celebrate the birth of Jesus, we remember Mary’s excitement at the announcement of the child that would be born in her. We remember her words, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” I love the line from Pimone Triplett’s poem that says, “It’s her choosing to be chosen that mattered.” We, too, have the opportunity to choose to be chosen. God has already given us a calling and a purpose. But it is up to us to choose that path…to choose to love…to choose the way of peace…to choose joy…to choose to live in hope. On this Christmas Eve, may we find ourselves in the Christmas story and may we choose to be chosen.