Window 19

On the north side, the window to the left of the seated figure of Jesus pictures the Gospel from Luke 7:11-17.  At top another Chi Rho is surrounded by stalks of wheat.  A water fountain in the center refreshes the drinking birds. From a pallet at the window’s bottom a shock of wheat sprouts from the skull and bones of a dead person.

The window tells how Jesus, the Lord Christ who is the Resurrection and Life (wheat stalks around Chi Rho) met a funeral procession at the gate of a town called Nain or “Beautiful.”  What he saw there was not beautiful: a dead person, the only son of his widowed mother.  His death is represented by the skull and bones on the pallet.  In pity, Jesus raised the young man to life and restored him to his mother.  The shock of wheat springing from the pallet brings to mind the words of Jesus that if a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it produces a new life of many seeds.

The birds drinking at the fountain represent people drinking from the water of life.  As Jesus told the woman of Samaria at the well, the water he gives becomes a spring of water welling up to everlasting life.  The youth of Nain was given a drink of this water.