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’.