{"id":21493,"date":"2023-12-11T19:37:57","date_gmt":"2023-12-12T01:37:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/customwordpresssites.com\/mjb\/?p=21493"},"modified":"2026-02-09T08:14:55","modified_gmt":"2026-02-09T14:14:55","slug":"christmas-at-greccio-the-incarnation-through-the-eyes-of-saint-francis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/customwordpresssites.com\/mjb\/2023\/12\/11\/christmas-at-greccio-the-incarnation-through-the-eyes-of-saint-francis\/","title":{"rendered":"Christmas at Greccio: The Incarnation through the Eyes of Saint Francis"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

by Jon M. Sweeney<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s set the scene, briefly. This took place toward the end of his life, when Francis of Assisi had already visited Bethlehem in the Holy Land, and had seen the Sultan in the Nile Delta; he had already witnessed his religious order \u201cmoving on\u201d past his initial inspiration and leadership (in ways that sometimes saddened him). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He\u2019d visited Rome in late November 1223, because Pope Honorius III (the Holy Father whom we usually neglect when telling the life of Saint Francis\u2014he reigned between Innocent III and Gregory IX) was prepared to give papal approval for the updated Franciscan Rule. This is the Rule of 1223 that still governs the friars today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What we are here today to talk about is what happened on Francis\u2019 way back from that trip to Rome (to which he was never to return), in December of 1223, stopping in the valley outside Rieti, at a village called Greccio. This is 90 kilometers directly south of Assisi, and similar to Assisi in that it was a hill-town of ancient origins with forests and mountains all around. Greccio is not usually on the pilgrim\u2019s or tourist\u2019s path today, but it is an important place in Franciscan history and life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There in Greccio Francis organizes a Midnight Mass, intending to make it a special moment, unlike a Midnight Mass anyone had experienced before. He asks a man named Giovanni, or John, for help with this project. Francis asks Giovanni\u2014who had left behind a soldiering career in order to become a Franciscan\u2014to help him construct and organize a Nativity creche. Giovanni likely still owned the land upon which this special Nativity was to be celebrated. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

On a hill, with woods behind it and valley below it, the scene would be recreated. There, a stable was built, outfitted with a rough feeding trough, hay, animals (an ox and an ass), and eventually then a young husband and wife, and the people of the town bearing witness to it all, holding torches and candles in the night. So it happened, that in Greccio, for the first time in history a live Nativity scene was created, populated, with human beings and animals, as a liturgical event. What we know as the creche had its origins in that evening in Greccio 800 years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What were Francis\u2019s motivations?<\/em><\/strong> \u201cIn that moving scene shines forth the simplicity of the Gospel: poverty is praised and humility presented to us in a positive way,\u201d he said. Also, Francis said, \u201cI wish to enact the memory of the Babe who was born in Bethlehem: to see as much as possible with my own eyes the discomfort of his infant needs.\u201d It is likely that Francis intended his live Nativity to be a devotional replacement for what was then most often a pilgrimage combined with the crusading movement, to visit Bethlehem in Palestine. He seems to have intended for Christians to find Bethlehem\u2014in all that it truly means\u2014in their own lives here and now. Like when Jesus taught his disciples not to be showy in their praying, but to go into a closet, or another room, to pray in secret; first century houses in Palestine were tiny, shared spaces; they didn\u2019t have multiple rooms! That \u201cother room\u201d is where you go inside yourself, to meet God who is there waiting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Francis wanted us to see and know God in a new way. We are both seeing and being seen by God in the manger. What do we see, there? Who sees us, and what does he look like?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Greccio was the site of one of those iconic moments in the life of Saint Francis. It was miraculous without being spectacular. It was one of what we might call Francis\u2019 \u201csoft\u201d miracles of ordinary life and joy. Greccio was, before this happened, a place familiar to the friars. But after this special Christmas Eve, it became a treasured place of sanctuary, retreat, and contemplation. It is for instance Greccio that Blessed John of Parma chose for his mandatory retreat of silence after being criticized for overseeing a chaotic time in the Order after Francis\u2019s death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The poverty of the first Nativity was central to Francis\u2019 vision. <\/em><\/strong>Summarizing Francis\u2019 sentiments, Bonaventure wrote \u201cChrist was poor at this birth, poor during the course of his life, and poor at his death.\u201d This poverty was so very important to Francis, and it was made real in what he caused to be created in Greccio. <\/em><\/strong>We think most often of Francis imitating Christ, ultimately, in the inexplicable event of the stigmata\u2014but we forget how often and insistently he set out to imitate him in the manger. Let me explain. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One early collection of stories about Francis, called\u00a0The Assisi Compilation<\/em>, records an anecdote that took place soon after the scene in Greccio. It was again Christmastime, perhaps the following year. The narrator tells us: \u201cIt happened that the brothers of that place on Christmas day itself prepared the table elaborately because of a visiting minister, covering it with lovely white tablecloths which they obtained for the occasion, and vessels of glass for drinking.\u201d When Francis arrives to eat the meal, and sees the table set so finely, he quietly leaves and dons the \u201cthe hat of a poor man,\u201d it says, and carries a staff down to the road, where he begins to beg for his bread, as a friar is supposed to do. A little while later he knocks on the door, like a pilgrim might do, and shows the friars who answer it what he has to eat. He was, of course, making a point. Taking on flesh, in such poor circumstances, the holy Child from his first hour had nothing, was identified with the poorest of the poor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Francis found many ways to identify with the Christ of the manger. I know this may seem odd to us, today\u2014to hold up as exemplary what I am about to hold up\u2014but just consider for a moment: Those iconic occasions when Francis stripped himself naked, was happy to be naked as he was the moment he was born. There was the time when his religious life began, in front of all the people of Assisi, in the bishop\u2019s piazza, his father confronting him, demanding an apology for insolence, and Francis responds how? By removing his father\u2019s clothes, laying them at his dad\u2019s feet, and saying, \u201cMy only father now is in heaven.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was also the occasion a couple years later when he was too severe in ordering a friar-friend to go and preach in town, and so Francis finds him and begins to preach himself, but removing all his clothes, to do so in total humility. And at the end of his life, wanting to die in the way he was born, he removed his clothes to feel the dirt of the ground on his skin. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Remember that Jesus was stripped naked on the cross. He was also born naked\u2014as were we. And the swaddling clothes of the Gospel account were viewed by Francis as a bookend to the tiny strip of clothing that Christ had on, the night of his humiliating death. So you can see why nakedness was somehow religious to Francis, and how Jesus in the manger was poor and suffering and naked, not cute and chubby and sentimental, as we tend to make him, or see him, in our creches today. Francis wants you to see the poverty of the Child, who came to be mixed up with the poverty of others, in that manger.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Clare of Assisi, in the Rule she wrote for herself and her Sisters, said: \u201cOut of love of the most holy and beloved Child wrapped in poor swaddling clothes and placed in a manger and of his most holy mother, I admonish, beg, and encourage my sisters to wear poor garments.\u201d To wear rough-hewn clothes, then as now, was to live counter-culturally, and for Francis and Clare it was to do so in imitation of the king born in a stable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Clare\u2019s first letter to Agnes (a Bohemian princess who\u2019d become a Poor Clare nun), Clare held up nakedness, just as Francis had done, saying to Agnes \u201cOne clothed cannot fight another naked, because she who has something to be caught hold of is more easily thrown to the ground.\u201d In other words, one can only fight evil when one is stripped of all attachments and comforts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A word about the ass and the ox. <\/em><\/strong>I want you to catch how special it was\u2014and remains\u2014that Francis raised up an ass and an ox as central to the story of the Nativity. We have trouble seeing this today, because we are so accustomed to what Francis created in what then became our ubiquitous creche scene. Of course, there\u2019s an ass and an ox. I enjoyed, as a child, putting those figurines in place in the box with hay. And since those animals aren\u2019t so easy to costume and act, our schools sometimes replace them with other, more far-fetched alternatives. There are the Nativity kangaroos in Australia, Nativity panda bears in China, and according to one of my favorite Christmas season movies, the Nativity play lobster in England. But\u2014this is my point\u2014preachers and theologians took little notice of the ass and the ox, of those sorts of earthy details at all, before St. Francis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Saint Augustine, for instance, preached sermons on the feast of the Nativity, and on the birth of Our Lord, and never mentioned an ass or an ox. Why would he? They don\u2019t appear in the Gospel reading. Why would they be anything other than incidental details? The thirteen sermons we have from Augustine, preached upon the occasion of this feast over the years, were very eloquently about the Virgin, about the Child, about God entering the world, the simplicity of the manger in contrast to the king who wanted to kill him and the kings from the East who came to pay respect to him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I love Augustine\u2019s sermons. They are beautiful. This is a paragraph that begins one of them:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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That day is called the birthday of the Lord on which the Wisdom of God manifested himself as a speechless child and the Word of God wordlessly uttered the sound of a human voice. His divinity, although hidden, was revealed by heavenly witness to the magi and was announced to the shepherds by angelic voices. With yearly ceremony, therefore, we celebrate this day which saw the fulfillment of the prophecy: \u201cTruth is sprung out of the earth: and justice hath looked down from heaven.\u201d (Ps. 84:12)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Augustine\u2014like most preachers today\u2014wants to celebrate the coming of our salvation and redemption. The Nativity tells that BIG STORY. There\u2019s nothing about the animals who were there that day. Those insignificant animals. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact, it\u2019s from apocryphal sources that Francis got the ox and the ass. The animals are not identified in the Gospel of Luke, to which we usually turn for the Nativity, but they are offered in the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, which experts seem to agree was composed in the seventh century from much earlier sources and widely accepted as filling in the missing details regarding Jesus\u2019 first twelve years. Those storytellers\u2014they were composing Midrash, really\u2014seem to have been inspired to try and make sense out of a line from the prophet Isaiah 1:3 that says, \u201cThe ox knows its owner, and the ass its master\u2019s trough.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The animals are also there in Giotto\u2019s fresco on the wall of the upper church in the San Francesco Basilica in Assisi, where the most memorable scenes from Francis\u2019s life were immortalized in the decades after his death. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think Francis loved the animal details. There are many symbolic interpretations of the meaning of the ox and ass at the manger scene. Two of my favorites, that seem to speak to the interests of Saint Francis, are that these working animals beside the Child would have breathed on him, keeping him warm that first night. Notice how, in many of our creches, the ox and ass are positioned immediately above the Christ child, their noses and mouths almost touching his body. In that fresco in Assisi–#13 of 28 on the wall of the Upper Church\u2014they are snug, up close, like special guests. Also, the animals would have been there to feed in the trough that the manger was, and as such they stand in creaturely for us, viscerally demonstrating the passage in St. John\u2019s Gospel which says Christ is the bread of life and offers eternal life to those who feed on him.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There were of course many other animals in Francis\u2019s life. <\/em><\/strong>I think of the Wolf of Gubbio, another animal essential to his story. After Francis brokered a deal between the people of Gubbio and this hungry creature, the wolf became tame, as he was cared for by the people of the village, and artists since then have often depicted Brother Wolf with a halo circling his head. The wolf\u2014a creature like the ox and the ass\u2014became a saint. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This was an innovation of Francis as well. The animal world was, until Francis\u2019s time, most often considered mysterious, at best, or sinister, at worst. Human beings who suffered from mental illness were thought to be animal-like; to be declared mad (which was quickly assumed if you stepped outside the norms of society) meant that you were more animal than human. He has become a beast!<\/em> people would say. Even after Saint Francis, with the Enlightenment, and then in the mannered ways of Victorian culture, these attitudes remained. They did not have the understanding then, that we do now, of human beings as human-animals, of our kinship and essential connections with non-human animals. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And there were many others. Sheep and lambs he often rescued from certain death, begging their handlers, who were carrying them to market, to give them to him. \u201cWhy do you harm my brother?\u201d he pleaded at least once with a local man. In fact, when he assisted as a deacon at that first Greccio Nativity Mass, chanting the Gospel reading, we are told he had trouble uttering the word \u201cBethlehem\u201d without sounding like a bleating lamb, his voice was so full of emotion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Consider also the birds. This is of course the saint who preached to birds. It happened for the first time in the Valley of Spoleto as he was walking along, probably discouraged because very few of his fellow human-animals had much interest in his \u201cpreaching.\u201d It was then that he noticed a lot of birds gathered along the roadside in the trees. I find it interesting, first of all, that he noticed this. Next, the text (from Thomas of Celano) tells us three of the species of these birds. They weren\u2019t simply birds; they were doves, crows, and magpies. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It also says that, as Francis rushed to meet them, he greeted them \u201cin his usual way.\u201d This means that he said to them, \u201cMay the Lord give you peace\u201d\u2014a greeting that became a trademark for Francis, and that shows how the saint regarded these creatures as having similarities with his human siblings. The story of this preaching to the birds then concludes with the statement that \u201cFrom that day on, he carefully exhorted all birds, all animals, all reptiles, and also insensible creatures, to praise and love the Creator.\u201d[1]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, this is the same man who cared for bees in wintertime, setting out honey and wine for them. For whom, one of his first dramatic acts\u2014and his life was full of dramatic acts\u2014was purchasing a pair of doves in the marketplace only to then toss them into the air, setting them free. Francis would ask his brothers, if they had to cut down a tree, not to cut the whole tree, but to simply remove branches, so that the trunk may continue to thrive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He would go out into the road and lift earthworms from the pavement after a rain, placing them back into the grass. He held crickets in his hands, thanking them for singing as they were made to sing, knowing that it must be praises to God their creator. He asked his fellow friars to consider walking reverently over rocks. Who did such things, then, or now?! There was no seminary or monastery, then (or now) that taught a person to care for worms, consider the birds as siblings, and walk reverently over rocks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Francis\u2019 life was full of drama<\/em><\/strong>. You have to see this, to understand him. Visual details are what captured Francis\u2019 attention, and then became central to the Franciscan understanding and celebration of the Nativity:<\/p>\n\n\n\n