A sermon by Tobias Stanislas Haller, BSG
Ascension & Holy Trinity West Park/Highland • September 17 2000
Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth." Genesis 1:26
Father Carl invited me some time ago to join you here at Ascension West Park once again, and it is a great pleasure to be here and share this quiet evening time with you. Father Carl has asked me to speak on the subject of icons and iconography, and I will begin with a very brief capsule history of the tradition. Volumes have been written on this subject, and I can only summarize a few of the most important points before moving on to the theological significance icons play in the life of the church.
The tradition -- and tradition is key to understanding anything about icons -- tells us that the first icon was "made without hands." It was a miraculous handkerchief sent to the King of Edessa, that showed the face of Christ, much like the Shroud of Turin or Veronica's veil, which are more familiar to us in the west.
The creation of icons by hand -- and the tradition tells us that icons are written not painted, emphasizing their documentary quality as portrayals of the Word -- began very early, and grew out of the tradition of memorial art and tomb painting. If you've seen the early Roman paintings from Pompeii, or the funerary paintings from the catacombs, you will see an immediate similarity in the style.
The figures in an icon look out at you, relatively impassive. Unlike western religious art, which came to portray or evoke the emotions, the icon was meant to portray the person him or herself, face to face with you the viewer, as if you were conversing through a window into heaven. Even when iconographers portrayed scenes from the life of Christ or the saints, the figures were not primarily realistic, but transfigured and illuminated by an inner light.
Another difference between the icon tradition and western art has to do with originality. The iconographer does not see him or herself as a creative artist making something new, so much as a performing artist carrying forward a tradition. The written icon is much like the performance of a piece of music someone else wrote, perhaps long ago, but which makes that past reality come to life in the present. Each icon is an instance, not of the artist's individual creativity, but of his or her communal fidelity.
Occasional innovations do come along, even within the fairly rigid rules laid down by the orthodox church, so that one can see different "schools" of icons. The durability of the tradition, however, is such that once one becomes familiar with them, one can immediately recognize, even without the traditional labels bearing the saint's name, that this is an icon of John the Baptist, that one Saint John the Divine. And given the antiquity of the tradition, one begins to wonder if, after all, these icons may not preserve a fairly accurate record of what the saints, and Jesus Christ himself, may have looked like.
While the tradition has dominated in the East, in the West, where icon writing has experienced a rebirth, the relative freedom of the artist has made its contributions, and new schools of icon writing are emerging, and new saints being portrayed. The important thing about icons is that they are not simply meant to be admired as artistic creations. An icon is far more than that.
And it is to the theological significance of icons that I now wish to turn. And I begin by unpacking the meaning of the word icon. For the Greek word icon does not just apply to a painted panel of a saint. It is the word used for any image.
Most importantly, it is the word used in the Greek Bible, with which Jesus, his disciples, and the citizens
of a by then thoroughly Hellenized -- and largely Romanized -- Palestine would have been familiar, in the passage
I just quoted about humankind being made in God's image. What the first chapter of Genesis tells us is
that God, the supreme artist if you will, as the crown and finishing touch of his masterpiece of creation, signed
the painting by placing into it a visible reminder of whose work this was. When you want to find out who painted
a painting, you usually look down into the lower corner to find the artist's name. But God, when signing the
creation, put the signature right in the middle, in the person of humanity,
having dominion over all the other creatures. Human beings are the signature, the sign, the image
of God; and what Genesis teaches us is that when you look at a person you see the closest thing to God that you
can see.
People have always wanted to see God, missing the point that God had left photographs and autographs everywhere around us. As the greatest American poet, Walt Whitman, wrote
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four,
and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God,
and in my own face in the glass;
I find letters from God dropped in the street,
and every one is signed by God's name,
And I leave them where they are,
for I know that others will punctually come forever and ever.
This message is much the same as the message Christ conveyed to his disciple Philip when he asked Jesus to "show us the Father." Jesus said to him, "Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, 'Show us the Father'?" John 14:9 The divine image Philip and all of us look for was there all along, waiting to be seen.
And to be more than seen. There is more to our religion than simply seeing, even more than seeing and believing! The vision is meant to lead us to action, our faith is meant to be put into practice, as we love God, and love our neighbors as ourselves.
God has given us each other as signs of his presence; and God through Christ has told us that how we treat each other, what we do for the least of those among us, is what we have done for him. Matt. 25 As John the beloved disciple put it very sharply, Those who say, "I love God," and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.1 John 4:20
Finally, Jesus brings this point home in another way, using the word icon as he addressed the crowds in cosmopolitan Jerusalem, in the matter of taxation. I must note that the translators of the New Revised Standard Version have unaccountably at this point chosen to translate the Greek ikon with the English word head in this verse, thereby losing the connection with the passage from Genesis. But icon is the word that Jesus uses when he asks about the coin, "Whose image is this?" And when the people tell him it is the emperor, he says, "Then give the emperor what belongs to the emperor, and to God that which belongs to God."Mark 12:17 And the people standing there would have heard the allusion to Genesis, and would have remembered where God's image is to be found. Where is that? Impressed on every human being, stamped in flesh and blood, dust transformed by God's breath into God's image: God's icon.
So the simple four-letter word icon carries a lot of weight! In the orthodox tradition, an icon is not simply a religious picture intended to remind you of some saint or other. Any more than the Eucharist is simply a memorial celebration for our dear departed friend and teacher Jesus. For just as the Eucharist makes Christ present to us in a very real way, in bread and wine and in our hearts as sisters and brothers gathered in his name, where he has promised he would be in our midst; so too the icon does not simply provoke a memory, but invokes a presence, for the icon is a window into heaven.
And it may seem strange to us that a panel of wood, coated with glue and plaster, painted in layers of pigment suspended in the yolk of an egg, it may seem strange to us that such a physical thing could become a spiritual window to heaven, a means to participate in the saintly or divine presence, to stand, as it were, face to face with one who stands on the other side of time and space, in the timeless everywhereness of eternity. But sisters and brothers, it is no stranger to believe that an icon mediates the presence of heaven than that bread and wine can communicate the real presence of the Body and Blood of Christ.
It is no stranger to believe that an icon confronts us with a window into heaven, than to believe that when you look at me, or Carl, or Patti, or their bounding, bouncing children, or each other, or yourself in the mirror, or the homeless man who comes by asking for a handout, or the pope or the bishop of New York, or a prostitute barely glimpsed lingering in the shadows at 2 am, or the senator before the microphones, or the policeman on the corner, or the window washer appearing unexpectedly outside the office window like a visitation, or any of the millions and millions of others who walk this earth -- that when you look at another human being you are seeing God's image in flesh and blood.
It is hard sometimes to remind ourselves of this truth. God looks so little like God sometimes.
But just as the icon made with wood and paint can suffer damage and disfiguration, chipped and peeling, stained with the soot from countless candles, so too the image of God in humanity can suffer and be disfigured, so much so that it reaches the point at which we might be tempted to say, How can this, so degraded, so debased, so barely recognizable as even human any more, be the image of God?
Yet even as we say those words, we are reminded of the One of whom they were once said.
There were many who were astonished at him-- so marred was his appearance, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of mortals--so he shall startle many nations; kings shall shut their mouths because of him; for that which had not been told them they shall see, and that which they had not heard they shall contemplate. …He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces he was despised, and we held him of no account. Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed. Isaiah 52:13-15,53:2b-5
The icon sums up all of the difficulties the rational or agnostic mind has with the doctrine of the Incarnation, that the Word became flesh. The icon sums up all the difficulty that empiricists and rationalists have with the notion of a sacrament. But we, as Christians, believe that God walked among us in person, and in persons still makes his presence known, challenging us to love God in and through our neighbors. We members of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church understand the reality of God made present to us in physical things like bread and wine, like a panel prayerfully transformed into an image, an icon as a window into heaven.
As poets from the Psalmist to Walt Whitman have said, and as the saints have taught, we live in a world so full of God that we cannot escape God's presence. Icons are just one more way to participate in that presence; to remind us what God looks like, so that when we meet our sisters and brothers in the street, we may treat them as they deserve.
One of the old orthodox fathers said, "Before every human being there go ten thousand thousand angels, crying, Make way for the image of God!"
It is of this truth that icons seek to remind us. May we always so honor and venerate God's presence among us, to whom alone be glory. +++