Likeness
Exodus 20:1-20
October 2, 2011
Our earliest Christian lessons taught us that we should not worship graven images or even possess one. One of the most beautiful short poems in English literature is by Christopher Marlowe (d. 1593):
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.
Her lips suck forth my soul: see where it flies!
Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.
Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips,
And all is dross that is not Helena.
I will be Paris, and for love of thee,
Instead of Troy, shall Wittenberg be sack’d;
And I will combat with weak Menelaus,
And wear thy colours on my plumed crest;
Yea, I will wound Achilles in the heel,
And then return to Helen for a kiss.
O, thou art fairer than the evening air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars;
Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter
When he appear’d to hapless Semele;
More lovely than the monarch of the sky
In wanton Arethusa’s azur’d arms;
And none but thou shalt be my paramour!
Helen of Troy was not the face of a goddess and perhaps precisely the kind of false image, a poor likeness, by which human beings find their souls sucked out. We keep running after the wrong god. However, if you and I cannot see God, what do we see when we come to the Lord’s Table? I am no iconoclast; I do believe in icons and across the Table we have seen them and they are us.
When we gather for communion, and eat and drink with Christians around the world, some at this very moment and most others in different time zones, what is the table talk we engage in? We know intellectually, imaginatively, that we are eating with millions of others, but all our physical eyes see are the less than 200 people in this room.
How boring would we be if we only talked about the Ten Commandments? Or would such a conversation be the most exciting conversation in a long time? The second commandment about not making false images has a tortuous past in religious history, not only in Jewish and Christian understanding, but in Islam as well. Nobody really draws a portrait of the face of God, but in a way everybody should. Yet, just what would the real God look like? Would it be human at all? The face of Jesus, many would suggest is that of God, but we still only guess what he looked like.
The commandment can be read that one should not even paint an image of a human being, so for a long time there were problems with the depiction of a saint. These became known as icons, literally ‘a picture,’ the most stunning instances of church art. The idea is that the image icons project is an imaginative window into heaven, like our imagination of those to be gathered world-wide around our communion table. Some, maybe many, people did not look through the paintings, but became stuck on the cover and treated the icon of Mary, for example, as an actual manifestation of divinity. In other words, common practice rendered icons to the status of idols and church authorities periodically forbade the practice of kissing an icon and carrying it around the church or community. There were two periods of history, one for 47 years in the mid-700’s and a 28 year stint during the early 800’s when icons were officially banned and supposed to be burned. The people hid their graven images.
We too easily forget that we are the images of God, and we are best revered not in a painting or photograph, but in the flesh. Across the Table we are One Body of Christ, so we have become the icons of Christ. We are not the best icons, for none of us is as complete and as consistent as Christ, but together we become the Body of Christ in which our individual weaknesses become strengths in the whole body.
You and I are not graven images, we are icons through whom we see glimpses of God and of the saints shining through us at odd moments. Some of our paint is smudged and our outlines are not as sharp as we think they should be, but this is how we see God, through one another. Let us eat together and talk about what plans God has for our next journey.
Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan