St. Botolph’s Parish, Sunday of Orthodoxy, 21 February 2010

You shall see greater things than these. (John 1.50)

Do you have a picture of a person you love? A person you admire or look up to: the one person who inspires you to be truly yourself. If you carry in your purse or your wallet the image of a loved one, maybe you take it out and talk to it. You kiss it, you handle it with  loving care. What if you lost it? It would devastate you. An image you can never replace.

A widow will talk to her husband whose picture hangs on the wall. She will reach up and touch his face. It isn’t flesh and blood, she knows it. To tell her so is cruel and pointless. So many years together, so many tears and smiles and secrets shared, have made the two one flesh. All she has now is the portrait – a window, a two-way glass, to speak with her husband and to hear his voice, sounding in her heart. Now, what would that woman feel if burglars broke into her house? Tore down her husband’s portrait, slashed it, cut it with knives, burned it – even urinated on the flames? Worse still: if a friend dropped by, telling her: ‘It’s only a picture, not really him’. Of course not! But, to desecrate the picture of the one you love is to desecrate that loved one. If your memories are enshrined in the portrait, to desecrate that portrait is worse than the damage to a photo, a piece of paper, or the paint on a wooden slab. To desecrate it is more than to desecrate your loved one; it is to desecrate your love.

This is the One we love, here in a holy icon. We reach up and touch his face. Only a few short years we lived together when our Lord Jesus Christ walked the earth; but so many

tears and smiles and secrets we shared have made us one flesh. We eat his Body and drink his Precious Blood but we can no longer see his face on earth. Only here, in paint, wood, and egg tempera – the portrait of our husband, the Divine Spouse of the Church; the portrait of our mother; and the portraits of all those, like us, that he loved even to the point of death. One day, twelve centuries ago, burglars broke into our home. Soldiers of the emperor, sworn to protect us. They tore down the image of our Bridegroom, slashed it, burned it – and, calling it an idol, they urinated on the flames. Women toppled ladders laid against church walls to tear down the icons. Elderly monks refused to turn over to a mob of madmen the icons of the One they loved. Refused, tied to a chair: beards set on fire, hands that lovingly crafted the image chopped off at the wrist; eyes that looked with

love on the face of Christ, gouged from the socket. A hundred years of torture and blood was the price we paid for our faith. The Patriarch Gérmanos, dying in exile; Nikíphoros, Methódios, imprisoned for preaching what the Holy Church has always taught: I do not worship wood, but pay respect to the One depicted on the wood: to the Living God, who for my sake became flesh and blood. Our invisible Enemy was relentless: monasteries were dissolved, holy relics trampled, prayers to the saints declared illegal. More martyrs fell defending the holy icons than fell to Nero or Decius or Diocletian, combined.

Then, on the first Sunday of Great and Holy Lent, in the year 842, the council of bishops restored to us the image of our Bridegroom. Taking up a holy icon in his hand, Patriarch Tarásios led our Orthodox faithful through the streets into the Cathedral of Agiá Sophía, the Holy Wisdom. A new young emperor, Michael, and his widowed mother, Theodora, decreed: henceforth, to the end of time, on the first Sunday of Lent, all Orthodox people would take up icons in procession. The priest would read out the Synódikon, the decree of the council, casting out of the Church by anathema all those who reject the image of our Beloved. The feast was to be called hê Kyriakí tês Orthodoxías – the Sunday of the true worship, the Sunday of Orthodoxy.

But, Father, what has this to do with us? No one breaks into our church and tears down the image of the Bridegroom. Really? One week ago, a strange woman with a sour face was prowling around, agitated, at the back of this church. She rebuffed the kind word of one of our worshippers. At the end of the Rite of Forgiveness, she asked to speak to me privately. Standing here, she denounced the venerable icons and said that our traditions make ‘the Blood of Jesus’ of no effect. I smelled that ancient heresy. ‘For two thousand years’, I replied, ‘we have received the Blood of Christ at the hands of his Apostles and their lawful successors, in the Church that Christ founded. May you receive his Precious Blood someday’. Her stiff upper lip quivered. She turned around and stormed out. Why was she here? To denounce the holy icons? To confess Christ in words and, like a madman, to deny him in images? To say: ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’ So I replied, as Philip to Nathanael, ‘Come and see’. She came at the start of the Great Fast in order to remind us: our enemy prowls around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour. But heresy turns and flees, as soon as we speak the True Faith.

Beloved in Christ: heresy is no light matter. The early monks of the Egyptian desert once tested Abba Agathon, a holy father known to be patient. ‘Are you Agathon the fornicator?’ ‘Yes,’ said Abba Agathon sadly, bowing his head. ‘Are you Agathon the proud?’ ‘I am,’ replied Agathon. ‘Are you Agathon, who talks nonsense?’ ‘Yes, I am’, he replied. ‘Are you Agathon the heretic?’ ‘I am not a heretic’, he said firmly. ‘But, Abba,’ the monks asked later, ‘why did you let us call you a fornicator, a proud man, a fool, but not a heretic?’ ‘I am a sinner and your words remind me – but to be a heretic is to separate yourself from God’. This Sunday of true worship, we unite ourselves to God. We say: you are the Bridegroom, whose image we honour in procession. With every step, he trample every lie and false doctrine and come nearer to the Orthodox faith. Taking up the holy icons, we declare: ‘You are the Son of God Incarnate, you are the King of Israel’. Then, the One we love looks through that two-way glass. He says to us, if we have ears to hear: ‘You shall see greater things than these. The miracle of the holy icons: what those who mock the faith of Christians can never see. A baby born in a cave, the God before eternity; a man baptised in a river, God before the ages; our God, fully man so he can die and fully God, so he can trample down death by death.’ In holy icons we hold in our hands, we touch, we kiss – we see the heavens open without stop, without pause until the end of the world. And, carrying our prayers, the eyes of true faith see the angels ascending and descending upon the Son of Man’.

St. Botolph’s Parish, Sunday of the Last Judgment, 7 February 2010

“As you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me” (Mt 25.45)

Look in a mirror. What do you see? Yourself? Only an image of yourself. A soiled mirror may show you only a bare outline of your face. A warped mirror, a distorting mirror – the kind you find in a carnival – shows you the distorted face of a monster: the bulging eyes, the wide mouth. Your face, stretched and compressed all out of proportion. Only a clean mirror shows you your real face. Now imagine you saw that grotesque, distorted shape, not in a carnival mirror but in an ordinary looking-glass. That image is you. You want to scream, to run away as fast as you can. But the mirror has done nothing to you: it only shows you as you really are. ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall…’ Fairy tales are full of mirrors: a magic mirror that talks, a mirror that invites you ‘through the looking-glass’ into the place where everything is topsy-turvy. Everything unexpected, turned inside-out. A mirror has a strange power to hold us captive. If you like what you see, you stare into the mirror for hours. But if there’s something there you don’t want to see, you hate a mirror. You avoid it, you run away. You throw a sheet over it – in case you caught the slightest glimpse of yourself, out of the corner of your eye. If you’re frightened enough, you smash the mirror with a bottle. But, no matter how many pieces go flying, each piece tells the truth. The mirror has done nothing to you. It only shows you the truth.

The truth! That’s what most of us fear. We walk around in a fog, a dense fog of half-lies: not the lies we tell our neighbours, but the lies that we ourselves half-believe. In French, we call it la mauvaise foi, ‘bad faith’. Deep inside, you know it’s a lie – but you believe it, anyway. You all but convince yourself. So, living in a fog of half-lies, you live in constant fear. A liar only conceals the truth; the half-liar forgets where he put it. What if the truth comes out? What if I pass by the mirror and glimpse my own face – my real face? In our terrible fear of the mirror, we construct a way of life. We stuff our bodies with heavy food and drink; we stuff our heads with chatter: ‘avoid the negative, accentuate the positive’, anything to help you run, run, run, far away from the mirror that shows us the truth about who we are. It’s hard work living with bad faith. An alcoholic lives with it all the time. Bad memories burn up your body and your soul. You try to drown the fire with another shot – but, with every shot, the fire burns worse. Some fires, you can’t douse with a shot of gin. But liquor isn’t the only bottle used to smash the mirror. Women in the Downtown East Side of Vancouver, where my wife used to work, sell their diseased bodies to pay for the next fix; they crawl on all fours in the alleys, scrounging for an infected hypodermic needle. In this very city parish, I’ve seen homeless men stinking of vomit. I’ve taken a man’s soiled hand in mine when he was hungry for more than food. If you’re like most of us, you want to look away, don’t you? Snap out at them, when they scream out? Imprison them in an institution, abandon them to the hands of some burnt-out, abusive nurse. When they cry ‘I’m hungry, thirsty’, you shout: ‘Pull yourself together! Don’t make a scene!’ But has it ever occurred to you: that soiled, drunken face is a mirror of your own. A mirror of what we all are, stripped of our gloss – a mirror of broken humanity. If you run away from it, throw a sheet over it and pretend it isn’t there, maybe it’s because you don’t want to see the truth about yourself reflected in that face. You don’t want the sun to come out and burn away the fog.

When the Son of Man comes in his glory on the last Day and sits on his glorious throne, he will shine a million times more brightly than the sun. But we won’t see him. We’ll see his face, sure enough, but it won’t look like the familiar face of Jesus Christ in the icons. We will see a mirror. According to Saint Basil the Great, all that Christ does on the Day of Judgment is appear. No thunder. No lightning from the sky, no ball of fire hurled from some wrathful God. That’s Jupiter, not Jesus. All Christ will do is appear. But, in his face, we will see ourselves – just ‘as in a mirror’. As a mirror does nothing but reflect what is there, Christ will do nothing. But ‘the sheep’ will see one face, and ‘the goats’ another. We will see, in our own image reflected in his face, the faces of all the hungry we’ve fed, the thirsty we’ve given drink; the lonely strangers who found a home in our lives; the naked, we clothed; the sick and imprisoned, whose tears we dried when we showed mercy to them. As in a mirror, Saint Basil tells us, we will see all those in need that we helped: all of them, fixed forever in the features of our own face. If, once in our life, we took pity on someone who hungered for more than food, we will recognise that face in our own.

But if, in our fear of the truth, we’ve thrown a sheet over the mirror and smashed it into a million pieces, there will be no place left to hide. The sun will burn away the fog, simply by rising in the morning; the mirror will do nothing to us, but reveal the truth – the whole truth. In the loving face of Christ, we will see the image we dread. In his loving voice, we will hear a voice crying: ‘I was the woman in the alley who sold her body, who crawled on all fours. I was the drunkard with the dirty hands. I cried out, and you shouted at me; I reached out to you, and you pulled back your hand. I asked for bread, you gave me a stone’. Now, you can no longer look away. The faces of all those who needed you – the faces that you rejected – are eternally etched on your face. No thunder, no lighting, and no ball of fire from the sky. At the Last Judgment, the fire will be in us: the fire of hatred, or the fire of love. Christ our True God, who cannot lie, will say to us: ‘I loved you then, I love you now – but if you turned your face away from the mirror, you can turn no longer; if you hid from my love, you can hide no more’. On the terrible Day of Truth, no one will be able to hide. In the face of Christ, we will see our own face as we have never seen it before. Will it be the face of love – or a face that can never love again?

Beloved in Christ: always remember the words of Marley’s ghost in Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol – ‘I wear the chain I forged in life. I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it’. God judges no one. God damns no one, not a single human being from the dawn of time till now. A mirror doesn’t judge you: the mirror only shows you the truth. The sun doesn’t judge the fog; but, when the sun rises, it burns away the fog. Your eternal destiny is in your hands. This very day, the Sunday of the Last Judgment, someone will need your love. Someone will reach out a hand to you: perhaps a hand bruised and soiled. A hand seeking your love. Will you take that hand in yours or not? Don’t get me wrong: God will not love you less if you pull away. But this is the logic of love: every cruel act binds us; every kind act sets us free. Every cruel act warps and distorts our features; every loving act shapes in our face the features of Jesus Christ. On the great and terrible last day, the Day of Judgment, no one will ask: ‘Did you keep all the commandments, say the prayers, observe the fasts?’ No Judge will even ask us: ‘Did you love – or did you hate?’ Instead, we will read the answer in the face of Christ himself – in our real face – as in a mirror.