John of Damascus
Dean Gary Hall
Seabury-Western
December 4, 2007
When I left Pasadena, California for Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania in 2001, my staff colleagues bade me goodbye with a series of labyrinth-themed gifts: a labyrinth keychain, a labyrinth t-shirt, even a labyrinth mousepad. They gave me these things because whenever the subject of the labyrinth came up, I was famous for going into my labyrinth rant. I’m sorry to have to say this, and I don’t mean to rain on anybody’s spiritual parade, but I have never been able to “get” the labyrinth. When you watch people doing it they walk with the zombie-like gait featured in Night of the Living Dead. And what does it get you, anyway? I live my life like a rat in a maze. Why would I do that in my free time? Maybe if there was an aerobic effect you could get. Call me back when they develop a labyrinth stairmaster model.
Now the labyrinth
is one of many late 20th century church fads (like the Meiers Briggs test and
family systems psychology) which will one day go the way of the feel wheel and
transactional analysis, but such is not the case with the more venerable object
of Christian devotion, the ikon. And I have to confess that I don’t
get the ikon, either. But it isn’t because I haven’t tried. I’ve
read books on ikons. I worked for many years with a spiritual director
who was somewhat of an expert on ikons. (Maybe my intransigence killed
him.) I even made a point, last Christmas, of going to the big Getty “Icons
of Sinai” exhibit in Los Angeles. I still don’t get them. Like
the labyrinth, I know ikons work for many people, but they do nothing for me. All
I get after hours of gazing at an ikon is a headache.
Now I raise
my personal affliction with IDD–Ikon Deficit Disorder–at the start
because today is the day on which we in the church remember John of Damascus,
the 8th century Christian saint who rescued the ikon from the iconoclasts and
made it o.k. for us to venerate if not worship images of created beings. There
was, of course, more at stake in the iconoclastic controversy than a simple ascetical
practice: the Byzantine emperor’s edict against images seemed to rest on
Monophysite and Manichaean presumptions about God’s nature, and John of
Damascus rightly observed that forbidding the representation of Christ in visual
images is tantamount to a rejection of the Incarnation. A purely gaseous God
would never become incarnate in the evil flesh of human beings. John saw
that the very fleshly embodied nature of Christ is what makes his representation
in a visual image possible and thus a good thing.
I have no
quarrel with that. I just don’t get it when I look at it. Just
as when I look at a labyrinth and see a maze, when I look at an ikon I see a
picture that could have been painted much better by somebody else. Show
me a Cezanne still life or a Chardin genre painting and the divine life of the
world represented seems to jump right out and pull me in. But the ikon,
I’m afraid, leaves me cold.
Now I tell
you this in the hopes that if you do not find it pathetic you might just find
it liberating. I can’t tell you how many times I have sat with people as
a parish priest and have them confess to me, after they’ve gotten up the
courage to say it, that nothing happens to them when they come to the altar rail. And
this in itself is something of a miracle. Week after week they come, make
their way through the liturgy looking for some kind of transcendent moment, and
then make their way to the communion table only to be handed some physical stuff
that doesn’t seem to them like it’s been transubstantiated at all. The
miracle isn’t that nothing happens. It’s that they keep coming
back.
And that’s
all a way into thinking about what Jesus says to us in the 5th chapter of John’s
Gospel this morning: "Very truly, I tell you, anyone who hears my word and
believes him who sent me has eternal life, and does not come under judgment,
but has passed from death to life.” [John 5.24] Now part of why I
like this passage is that it’s based in an experience of God in hearing
rather than sight or touch, and as a word-oriented person that gives me hope. But
there’s more to it than that.
Right before
this passage, Jesus has been talking in a fairly oblique way about how the father
raises the dead and gives them life and in the same way the son gives life to
anyone he chooses. By the time he gets to our passage, Jesus seems to be
saying something both obvious and obscure. A person who hears and believes
Jesus’s words has eternal life and has passed from death to life. In
other words, by whatever means God does God’s work in us, when we respond
to that work and take it into ourselves–through our eyes, our legs, our
ears–then we are living in the resurrection now. When Jesus says
that we won’t come under judgment it doesn’t mean that we are somehow
perfectly spotless and pure. It means that we have already stepped into
the risen life that God offers us in the community of people who travel with
and for Jesus and his cause in the world.
We turn to
spiritual practices–movement, images, rituals, words–because we see
them as bridges to something and some One outside ourselves. A good deal
of the way God comes at us, of course, is from outside ourselves. But the
logic of Jesus’s words from John 5 points us not outward but within. That
transcendent thing we seek is not to be found only at the altar rail or on the
path or in the visual image or even in the living word. That transcendent
thing is alive and at work in you and me now, and what we respond to in those
outer representations is merely the prompting of that resurrected part of us
that projects itself out and which we read back with the colors of our own spirits.
Paul knew what he was talking about when he said that “we have died and
our life is hid with Christ in God.” [Colossians 3.3] We see and
hear and feel fleeting glimpses of it. But the thing itself is alive and
at work within us now.
This is Advent,
and at the start of the church year we always want to think that we are starting
this liturgical journey all over again. We are, of course, but this year let
it be so with a difference. We have, with Jesus, passed from death to life. Let
us live not in search of life but in possession of it. As we come to know and
claim the resurrection that is at work in each one of us, may we have grace to
make that life available to each other and the world as well. Amen.