The First Sunday of Great Lent: The Sunday of Orthodoxy

Categories: hymns, feast-days, church-history

Date: 20 February 2010 10:09:14

Apolytikion: We venerate Your most pure image, O Good One, and ask forgiveness of our transgressions, O Christ God. Of Your own will You were pleased to ascend the Cross in the flesh to deliver Your creatures from bondage to the enemy. Therefore with thanksgiving we cry aloud to You: You have filled all with joy, O our Saviour, by coming to save the world. Kontakion: No one could describe the Word of the Father; but when He took flesh from you, O Theotokos, He accepted to be described, and restored the fallen image to its former beauty. We confess and proclaim our salvation in word and images. Today is the First Sunday of Great Lent: The Sunday of Orthodoxy. As the hymns above make reference, this day celebrates the the First Sunday of Great Lent in 843 where, after a century of particular controversy over their place and acceptability, the holy icons were restored to worship. The veneration of and the acceptability, in fact more than that the Orthodox would say I believe, the necessity of images of Christ and the Saints in our worship is thus celebrated each first Sunday of Great Lent with this Sunday of Orthodoxy. Tomorrow, as I have done in years past, I will take two icons, one of my patron and name Saint St John Climacus [St John of the Ladder] and one of the icon of the Ladder of Divine Ascent [the icon related to the book, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, St John Climacus wrote], and, with the icons fellow parishioners have brought, or the icons they take off the walls, we will process around the Church while prayers are offered. A joyful celebration of the faith at the start of Great Lent: and rather good fun in my view too -- processions are wondrous. I did write above Orthodox would say the icons are necessary to worship; my knowledge in this area is somewhat wanting, so I cannot make a full explanation, for which I ask your forgiveness. In Orthodox thought, perhaps best described by St John of Damascus [c. 676 - December 5, 749] who wrote extensively in support of icons, as God took on human flesh in Jesus Christ, our Saviour, depictions of Christ or the Saints was not only not a problem, but something necessary: for to deny the possibility of depicting Christ using matter was to deny the Incarnation, where God took on matter and became fully human and fully divine. A book containing treatises by St John of Damascus is on my to-buy list, On the Divine Images; in that is quoted one of his most well-known arguments:

Of old, God the incorporeal and formless was never depicted, but now that God has been seen in the flesh and has associated with human kind, I depict what I have seen of God. I do not venerate matter, I venerate the fashioner of matter, who became matter for my sake and accepted to dwell in matter and through matter worked my salvation, and I will not cease from reverencing matter, through which my salvation was worked. St. John of Damascus, Three treatises on the divine images, tr. Andrew Louth, SVS Press, 2003, p.29

St John, as do all Orthodox, make a distinction between the reverence paid to holy things, be they icons, the Gospel Book, tombs and relics, the Body and Blood of our Lord in the Sacrament, or any other holy item, and the worship that is due to God alone: "I do not reverence it as God - far from it..."; there is a distinction. The veneration paid to the icon does pass to the depicted, for in Orthodox thought the Saints are alive in Christ, and in reverencing the Saints, we reverence and worship God, for He is the Creator of all -- we are all made in His image, we are His icons: in acknowledging the holiness and example for us of the Saints who have gone before us, we honour God from Whom they received the Grace to be Saints. I'm getting beyond my knowledge, so I'll stop here and wish you all, whether in Eastern Churches or Western, for our Calendars align this year, a most blessed First Sunday of Lent.