Sermons from St Faith's
Images
Revd Sue Lucas, Sunday,
February 8th, 2015
What's your favourite thing in this building? I
think mine is probably the reredos. When I come
over for evening prayer at the moment, I think
it is at its best in the soft light of late
afternoon sun, or by candlelight, as it was at
the Christingle. It seems to be alive,
three dimensional, almost, and it at once both
draws the eye and is a wonderful devotional
object.
So it is appropriate that, in 10 days time,
we’ll deprive ourselves of it as part of our
Lenten discipline, looking instead on the stark
image of the crucified one that has no beauty
that we should desire him.
The debate about images in our faith goes back a
long way. The bitter debate with the
iconoclasts in Eastern Christianity was played
out – with violence, sometimes, in the 7th and
8th centuries – until the Second Council of
Nicaea declared it legitimate, in an
incarnational faith, to show the divine in the
material.
It is a debate that has broken out with bitter
violence again in our own time – both our
sisters and brothers in Judaism and our sisters
and brothers in Islam eschew the making of
images of the divine, most recently, and
horrifically tragically, in the murders of the
Charlie Hebdo cartoonists.
Yet perhaps the greatest tragedy is that, for
Christians, this is in some sense a none-debate;
for, in the person of Christ, we both insist
that he is the living and material, flesh and
blood image of the living God, and the one who
unmakes all images of the divine, the word made
flesh that re-describes the world, that
unsettles all we think we know of God.
For the right instinct in the eschewing of
images is that images of the sacred all too
easily become sacred images – set, as the Old
Testament sometimes puts it, in silver and gold,
or in stone – weighty, oppressive creations of
our own that keep us bound, and limit God to our
own small concerns. We have a penchant for
making God in our own image – even, perhaps, in
the image of our own churches.
Yet, none of these images can withstand the
image of the living God, the crucified, risen
and ascended Lord; for all the glory of our
reredos, for all the beauty of orthodox icons,
what we see in them is divinity unmade, made
vulnerable, is, indeed word made flesh. We
see, perhaps, something of the same in our own
Crosby Gormley iron men, a reflection of our
mortality as they gaze in contemplation out to
sea… and crumble to rust.
And here is our freedom; for the orthodox
teaching on icons, since that 8th century
ecumenical council, is that they are windows on
the divine, a way, if you like, of seeing
through the material, to the infinite love
beyond.
So when we look on the image of the living a
God, word made flesh, crucified one, we gaze on
the image that unmakes all images, that sets us
free from the dearest idols we make for
ourselves, and to undertake the patient work of
resurrection – of imagining the world anew, not
from our own puny perspective, but from the
perspective of the God who, out of relentless
love, gave his son, in flesh and blood, that we
might have life in all its fullness.
Amen.
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