Moses made a bronze serpent, and set it on a pole; and if a serpent bit any man, he would look at the bronze serpent and live.
+ In the name of the Father …
On the edge of Kent, there is a Roman villa in a relatively good state of preservation. You may know it; it is at Lullingstone, just off Junction 3 of the M25. And if you don’t know it, you should pay it a visit.
It is not the only Roman Villa of which the foundations, some of the walls, mosaics and other decorations are so well preserved – but it does have something of very particular interest to us today as we gather to celebrate the Eucharist and bless the splendid icon of St Giles behind me.
And it is a great pleasure for me to be here this evening to see this new icon of St Giles, and the other remarkable and successful pieces of re-ordering that have been undertaken here in the last couple of years in memory of and thankfulness for the life and Faith and service of Derek Savage, former organist of this church and faithful worshipper here of many years.
And I thank Fr Ross for inviting me to preside and preach this evening and bless this new icon. It is good to be here again, to see so many familiar faces and to be able to catch up with all your news.
That the new icon of St Giles depicts my name saint and the co-patron of this church gives it a particular significance, as does the fact that it and the other reordering we see about us in the repositioned font and restoration of the Tabernacle to the main body of the church is a memorial to the Faith, life, work and witness of a good and faithful servant of the Lord.
This evening, an icon very much in the eastern Orthodox style will be blessed. The Roman villa at Lullingstone is remarkable not for an icon of a saint. But it is remarkable for a set of images painted into the plaster, the originals of which are now in the British Museum, depicting a row of figures in roman dress – in fact not at all unlike the vestments in which I stand here – standing with their hands like this, in what is called the orans position – the position of prayer particularly adopted from very early on – those paintings come from the 4th Century – by Christians.
They are evidence in visual form of Christian worship in this country for many hundreds of years – any doubt that they are Christian would be scotched by the large Chi–Rho (the symbol that combines the ‘X’ and a ‘P’ that are the initial Greek letters of ‘Christ’) that is also painted into the plaster.
And because they came from the walls of a domestic chapel in that Roman villa, they are evidence of the place of images in Christian worship – an inheritance that goes back as much as four thousand years, to Moses and the image of the serpent that he held up in the desert so that anyone who gazed on it would be cured of snakebite, the account of which he have heard proclaimed in today’s first reading.
It is perhaps, on the face of it, one of the odder accounts presented to us by Holy Scripture.
Moses – who has been told not to make graven images and bow down to them, and who gets rather cross, to say the least, when the Israelites make an image of a golden calf, makes – at God’s command – a golden image of a serpent, generally speaking not an image of something godly, and it becomes a miraculous cure for snakebite.
What we are presented with here is not only something that is directly applicable to today’s celebration of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross – as the Gospel makes clear, but also something that is applicable to tonight’s blessing of the icon of St Giles.
Because what he have in the account of Moses and the golden serpent in the Book of Numbers is prima facie evidence that iconography – pictures and images that are in fact rather more than pictures or images – are very much part of the way that God chooses to work in the world to draw his human creatures – us – to Himself, and how he chooses to reach into this world of His Creation and be close to us.
Three-dimensional images – statues – such as that of Our Lady over on the south side of the church are very much in the western tradition of the Christian use of images in churches. Two-dimensional images – pictures or icons – such as St Giles behind me are very much part of the eastern tradition of the Christian use of images in churches.
These two foms of religious art occupy in their respective traditions roughly the same niche as focuses of devotion – but the Eastern tradition of icons has something particular to say to us this evening, both because of this icon but also because of the crucifix as the image of Christ on the Cross and its triumph.
And that is that an icon is not simply an image of the person that enables you to think about their saintly example or to be something to which you can address a request for prayer as if that saint were present.
An icon is not something you simply look at, but it is somehow a window that you are invited to look through and be drawn into a closer contact and relationship with the saint it depicts and indeed the whole company of saints around God’s throne in heaven.
Icons such as this one behind me do not simply depict the saint – they draw us towards that saint, towards the heavenly company and towards God Himself.
The Orthodox churches in which we find many icons such as this are not just splendidly decorated buildings – they are intended as a foretaste and depiction in this world of the glories of heaven and the company of the saints in the next.
But that surely should be the case of any church – western or eastern. The medieaval cathedrals that soared above the far simpler buildings around them and which were flooded through stained glass with a variety of coloured light that would have been extraordinary in a world of browns, blacks and greens had much the same purpose.
Ignore the modern secular historians who tell us that such buildings were principally built by such and such a king or bishop as a display of personal wealth – they were a foretaste of heaven. They were, if you like, three-dimensional icons in stone and glass, and were incidentally often lavishly painted, although little of that decoration usually survives.
God uses images in His Church to draw us to Him through the senses with which He has imbued us.
And the image that does that par excellence is the image and truth that we celebrate in this Mass of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross – the crucifix.
On the face of it, it is a depiction – two- or three-dimensional – of a man in his early thirties who has been tortured to death. He is bruised; He is bloody; He is dead. And if there were no more to it than that, there would be little point at all in the image of the crucifix.
But of course there is more to it than that … the crucifix –in fact the very event of the crucifixion itself – is a three-dimensional icon in blood, wood and nails by which Christ draws us to Himself and demonstrates God’s love for us in the suffering of His Son.
St Paul tells us that the cross is an obstacle for some and foolishness to others. It was true then and it is true now.
But only because some people are stubborn and will not allow themselves to be drawn to Christ by the icon of the cross that is a window through which we observe the love of God.
They are perhaps scared to allow what the Cross tells us that they are loved unconditionally by the One who made them – they only have to accept the truth of God’s love so beautifully expressed by St Paul in his letter to the Philippians in today’s second reading.
They are perhaps scared to allow that what seems folly to human reasoning – earthly death that gives eternal life – is in fact so decisive an act by God that all history as we understand it, before and after, turns on it.
In yesterday’s Gospel, even St Peter, having been told by Jesus that He is to suffer rejection and be put to death before rising again, cannot accept that message as it is presented to him – he tries, in the manner of a well-meaning friend – to persuade, tempt, Jesus towards an easier path – and he is roundly rebuked.
So we should not be harsh in our judgement of those who continue now to reject it, but pray for their souls.
The statue of Our Lady in the south aisle; the image of St Giles behind me – the image indeed of any saint; the crucifix that hangs just above my head in this pulpit, even the cross traced from head to chest and shoulder to shoulder of the believer – all of them are icons, windows through which Christ draws us to Himself and His Father’s love for us.
+ May God bless us, may the Virgin Mary intercede for us, and may St Giles and all the saints pray for us. AMEN.
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