Sunday of Orthodoxy

John 1: 43-51

We have found him, says Philip, we have found him whom Moses in the law and the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph. We have found him. Clearly, they had been looking. Not only Philip and Nathanael, but generations had been looking for and awaiting the savior of Israel, the Messiah, the anointed one. When Nathanael is skeptical, Philip responds, come and see. See. See that God has visited his people.

See that God has come in the flesh. Philip and Nathanael may not have understood the fullness of this revelation just yet, because this is at the very beginnning of the narrative, before the miracles, before the transfiguration— when the disciples behold Christ in his divine glory— before the passion, the Cross, the Resurrection, and the ascension into heaven. The first stage towards understanding the fullness, the revelation given to the human race with the coming of Christ, involves first some simple steps. Come and See.

For us to understand the profound impact of God coming to his creation in the flesh— the one Moses spoke of in the law, of whom the prophets wrote— we must revisit our origin story. How we understand our origins, how we understand God’s plan for us, reveals to us what Christ accomplishes for us. In this season of Lent, we are in fact encouraged to revisit this story; during the weekdays of Great Lent, we read from Genesis (whereas the rest of the year we have a daily Epistle and Gospel reading, but in Lent it is a reading from the prophet Isaiah, Genesis, and the book of Proverbs). What do we learn about our origins in Genesis? First of all, that we were created good— indeed all of creation is good, as we hear in the first chapter of Genesis— “and God saw that it was good.” When God created the first humans, there is something special about their fashioning, different from the rest of creation: humans are made in the image and likeness of God. The image and likeness of God. This is exceptional. We share much in common with animals, of course; like animals, we have appetites and desires, we may even share with them in our ability to reason. Yet what sets the human apart is the higher part of the soul, sometimes called in Biblical language the “heart” or at other times the “intellect,” in Greek the nous, the part of our soul that yearns after God, that contemplates the divine, that seeks after meaning. Being made in the image of God means that we exercise our freedom and our will; we have appetites and desires, but we also have the freedom to choose, to exercise our will. This was the state of paradise, this union with God, with our first parents exercising the freedom to dwell in communion with God. But what happened? In the interpretation of the Fathers of the Church (and I should point out that the Fathers do not always agree, and there are divergences; what I am trying to convey is the general ‘mind’ of the Fathers)—Adam and Eve, while created in the image of God, were meant to grow into the likeness of God. To become like God not by nature but by grace, in other words, deification, or theosis. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil was not placed in paradise as a test; rather, they were not yet ready. When the serpent tempted them with eating the fruit, the serpent was offering a short cut— as he says, when you eat of it, you will be like gods. A quick path towards deification, but a path of pride and forgetfulness of God.

What happened next? Was the human race entirely cursed, cast off from God, condemned to destruction? Not entirely. The divine image was darkened, but not entirely destroyed. In our exile from paradise and communion with God, our will became weakend, more vulnerable to the devil’s influence. In the Orthodox tradition we talk about the ancestral curse much more than original sin, because in our fallenness we inherit a sickness, a weakness of our freedom and will, as we turn to creation rather than the Creator, and we are governed by our appetites and desires, rather than governing them. Why am I going through all of this? Why does this matter for our journey through Lent? How does this connect to today’s Gospel and the celebration of the restoration of icons?

Simply put, we need to have grasp of the narration of our Creation and our Fall to comprehend fully our Redemption. As Philip said, Come and See. See what? See the “image of the invisible God “ (as St. Paul says in the epistle to the colossians 1:15). We had been separated from God and given over to death and sin. Our nature was weakened at the fall, and the image of God in us had been darkened; Christ, the Word of God, true God of true God, took on our human nature at the incarnation, to heal our mortal and corruptible nature. God becoming man, becoming visible in the flesh, restores our union with God, leads us on the path toward deification by grace, so that we may attain to the image and likeness for which we were created. The mystery of salvation entails the whole story of what Christ did and said, from his incarnation, birth, baptism, transfiguration, passion, death on the Cross, resurrection, and ascension. Accordingly, salvation is more than a release from guilt. Yes, salvation does entail the loosening of the debt of sin that held us captive through Christ’s death on the Cross, but salvation is also the restoration to wholeness that is at the root of salvation— to be well, to be whole, to attain to health. Salvation is also the deification in Christ, whereby through grace we are able to attain deification, to grow in the image and likeness of God.

I have given you all of this background so we understand better the invitation in today’s Gospel to “come and see.” We also can grasp better why today we celebrate the restoration of the holy icons, with the celebration of the Triumph of Orthodoxy on this first Sunday of Great. Today’s celebration is not about artistic or aesthetic choices. Rather, the use of icons witnesses to the profound impact and world-changing alteration that comes about through the incarnation of Christ. Listen to the words of the kontakion, which we recently sang. It encapsulates everything I have been trying to say:

No one could describe the Word of the Father;

but when He took flesh from thee, O Theotokos, He accepted to be described,

and restored the fallen image to its former state by uniting it to divine beauty.

We confess and proclaim our salvation in words and images.

In the old law, there was a prohibition against graven images depicting God— but that changes with the incarnation. As the kontakion says, when He took flesh from the Theotokos, the Word of the father enabled himself to be described, literally to be depicted. Why does he do this? To restore the fallen image to its former state, we are told, by unititing it, the fallen image of God in humanity, to divine beauty. Divine beauty— icons are beautiful, they are carefully painted using traditional methods and following traditional types, because their beauty is utlimately to lead us to divine beauty. Consequently, we confess and proclaim this faith in Christ, our salvations, in words but also in images.

The world was created in beauty. Humanity was created in the image and likeness of God, but we tarnished that divine beauty. Lent is a time for us to strive towards restoring that original beauty, by drawing near to Christ, the word of the Father, so that by grace we might become partakers of the divine nature and be restored to the image and pursue the likeness of God.