On the Triumph of Orthodoxy

Glory to God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Today, on the first Sunday of Lent, we commemorate the Triumph of Orthodoxy. On this day we’ve brought our icons to church and we’ll carry them in procession to celebrate the day when icons were restored to the Christian Church after followers of a heresy had banned all icons. But even though the icons are highly visible, the Triumph of Orthodoxy does not only mean we can have icons.

Teachers at the time of Christ emphasized that God is not part of creation; God is not like anything in the created universe, and we cannot know or approach him. (Or it. Whatever.) The god of the philosophers was alien and remote – and because they had no warning that the Almighty was about to enter the human race and become one of us, they taught that their far-away, perfect deity was certainly not in any way associated with this gross, physical body and flesh. To them, spirit was good, matter was bad ­– and man was a divine spirit trapped in this lowly, material world, imprisoned in the flesh. So to them salvation meant salvation from life in the body. We still hear that idea today, when people say someone who has died has simply “gone to heaven” to be like the angels.

One of the challenges we face, as Orthodox Christians in post-Christian America, is to bear witness that there is no God but the Holy Trinity, and that Christ our God has come in the flesh. Nobody invites me any more to give an opening prayer at community events, because the only God I can pray to is the Lord Jesus Christ, together with his Father who is without beginning, and his all-holy, good, and life-creating Spirit. Civil religion likes to have a generic, faceless, nonsectarian god we can invoke for meetings or events. That unreal, nameless, imaginary god is a figment of the ecumenist heresy called Judeo-Christianity. 

Instead of this generic deity, Apostle John tells us: “Every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God, and this is the spirit of the Antichrist. Who is a liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Messiah? He who denies the Father and the Son is antichrist” (1 John 4:3; 2:22).

To this day, the Jews are scandalized by the testimony of the apostles, that Jesus is the Messiah, that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was nailed to a cross. So Saint Paul writes that “to the Jews, Christ crucified is a stumbling block; and to the Greeks, Christ crucified is foolishness” (1 Corinthians 1:23).

The first Christians proclaimed that this material, fully physical human being, Jesus, was God from before the ages and yet became a child in the flesh – and he actually died. And what’s more, not only did he rise bodily from the dead and right now still has a material body – He promises to raise us up for eternity in bodies, too. Salvation doesn’t lie in an escape from matter. Nobody is going to spend eternity floating around in the clouds with a harp and wings. Biblical Christians expect to live eternally, in resurrected bodies, together with the Lord in a new earth in the age to come.

Here’s why that matters today: The iconoclasts, or image-breakers, asserted that since “God is spirit” (John 4:24), then He cannot be depicted by means of matter. They reasoned that an icon can only show the humanity of Christ, and not his invisible divine nature, so they claimed icons of Christ improperly divide Jesus the man from Christ our God. And, being scandalized by Christian veneration of icons, the iconoclasts called this honor the same as worship of pagan idols. They gained the ear of the emperor, who arranged to have the Archbishop of Constantinople replaced by someone sympathetic to their ideas, and began persecuting the Orthodox who venerated images – even putting them to death.

Now, many of us came from a tradition that was suspicious of icons and the images. We weren’t used to seeing people bow or kiss a cross or a picture of Jesus. Isn’t that worship?

In a word: No.

From the Jews, we inherited the practice of kissing things in devotion. Pious Jews kiss a prayer shawl while they put it on, kiss the Torah scroll before it is read, kiss prayer books, and so on. I kiss anything I place on the altar table and anything I remove from it. We bow to honor holy things, including one another, and our elders and heroes of the faith, including the ones depicted in icons. We sing the praises of God, his creation, and all the men and women of faith you see on these walls. Bowing, kissing, and praising people and things are not worship. But it can look that way because our culture does not worship anything or anyone.

Worship is offering up a sacrifice. In the church, we bring into the temple offerings of bread, wine, oil, candles, tithes, food to share with one another and with the poor. And out of these offerings, we offer up the bread and wine as a thanksgiving offering to God, a sacrifice of praise. And in return, he offers us the life giving resurrected body and blood of Christ.

Every time I cense the church, the prayer is, “incense we offer as an odor of spiritual sacrifice. Receiving it on thy most heavenly altar sent down on us in return the grace of thy most-Holy Spirit.” That’s an offering of worship. The incense that I use when I sense the icons is not offered to the Saints, it is offered to God alone.

In the Church, you’ll see honor and praise given to people living and departed, but you will never see a sacrifice of worship offered to anyone but the living God.

Today’s feast comes from the council that restored icons to the Church. In answering the objections to icons, the holy Fathers remind us that God has become human; “He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross” (Philippians 2:8). The God who is spirit saves us by participating fully in our material nature – uniting our mature of matter to Himself in His triumph over death, in His ascension back to His own divine glory. Saint Gregory the Theologian famously says, “That which was not assumed is not healed; but that which is united to God is saved.”

The reason Christ can be depicted by means of matter – in paint on wood, in mosaics in stone, on metal bells and vessels – is precisely because ever since Gabriel’s annunciation, “Hail, full of grace,” God the Word has a body. He saves us by shedding real blood Cross of wood, with metal nails. He heals and sanctifies us with water, oil, the wonderworking relics of the saints, and above all with His own Body and Blood. Jesus Christ is the God who gets His hands dirty (John 9:1-7).

God is Spirit, as the Gospel says; and by nature, God is not subject to time or change or suffering. But in his incarnation, Christ the God-man is no stranger to pain or tribulation. In him the human and divine natures are united “without mingling, change, division, or separation,” as the Fathers have said. In the light of this divine Mystery, no Orthodox Christian is tempted to worship the wood or paint of an icon: Saint Basil wrote that when we venerate Christ or the saints in an icon, the honor we show passes on to the one the image represents.

In a more modern metaphor, how often do we see a person today looking at a rectangle of plastic in his hand and talking to his mother? You know I don’t believe that the mobile phone is my mother. I’m not talking to the phone, I’m talking to my mother. If you see me with my phone, saying “I love you, Mom” it’s because I am talking to my mother. When you see me in front of an icon of Christ, saying, “Lord, have mercy,” you may be sure that I know I am talking to Jesus Christ and not to a square of wood.

In a few weeks, we will celebrate the resurrection in the body of the living God. Saint John calls him, “that which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled” (1 John 1:1) This God saves the world by becoming material; Jesus is made of matter, the same as any of these icons. And that is why it is fitting today to depict him, and his mother and all the saints, using matter. It is a testimony that we do not serve a God who is far from our prayers, watching us from a distance; Saint Paul says, “We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.” (Hebrews 4:15-16).

To the glory of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.