Sermon Archive

No Graven Images

Fr. Mead | Festal Evensong
Sunday, February 10, 2013 @ 04:00 pm
The Fifth Sunday After The Epiphany

The Fifth Sunday After The Epiphany

Set us free, O God, from the bondage of our sins, and give us,we beseech thee, the liberty of that abundant life which thou hast manifested to us in thy Son our Savior Jesus Christ; who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

reading found matching title 'Exodus 20:3-5' with ID: 310492
The reading_id [310492] is already in the array.
No update needed.

Scripture citation(s): Exodus 20:3-5

This sermon currently has the following sermon_bbooks:
Array
(
    [0] => 60704
)
book: [60704] (reading_id: 310492)
bbook_id: 60704
The bbook_id [60704] is already in the array.
No update needed for sermon_bbooks.

In the Name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. Amen.

In the first two sermons in this series, we heard truly that God, in giving us the Ten Words of Life (The Commandments), gives us Good News. He is speaking to us. He is putting us on the level by showing what a living relationship with him means in terms of our thoughts, words, and deeds. Thou shalt have no other gods but Me. Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image, nor the likeness of any thing that is in the heaven above or in the earth beneath, or in the water under the earth; thou shalt not bow down to them, nor worship them. Or: You shall not make for yourself any idol.[1]

Saint Thomas Church is full of images: stained glass windows depicting mysteries of the faith and saints of the Church; statues of Christ, our Lady and the other heroes of the faith in the reredos behind the high altar; images of Christ crucified and of the angels. Visitors sometimes come in and ask innocently, Why does this church have all these graven images? Doesn’t the Bible prohibit them?

God will not have anything become between ourselves and Him. Holy Scripture prohibits, in a strong voice beginning with Moses and running through the prophets, idolatry. Idolatry is the replacement of God with something else, the work of human hands. “They have mouths, and speak not; eyes have they and see not. They have ears, and hear not; noses have they, and smell not. They have hands, and handle not; feet have they, and walk not; neither speak they through their throat. They make them are like unto them; and so are all such as put their trust in them. [2] Then why do we not hire a demolition crew to come in here, and smash and remove all the images? Why are we doing everything we can to restore our beautiful stained glass windows and to protect our statuary? Because we believe and love JESUS – and we want everything around us to promote the worship of Christ, our Lord and our God.

Let’s start with Moses himself. In the same Book of Exodus which gives us the Ten Commandments, there are also the commandments, in chapters 25 through 29, concerning the making of the ark of the covenant and tabernacle containing the Ten Commandments, the sanctuary curtains, the images of the cherubim over the ark, the priestly vestments including the sacred lots Urim and Thummim in the priest’s breastplate and the stones symbolizing the Twelve Tribes. There are the ceremonial instructions for sacrifice, changing of garments, and burning incense. These various symbols, that is, images, expressed God’s coming down from heaven, down to the top of Mount Sinai, down to speak with Moses and write the Ten Commandments, down to dwell with, converse with, and lead Israel from bondage in Egypt to life in the Promised Land. You shall be my people, and I shall be your God; you shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy. This is a relationship established by the living God – or re-established, since Adam and Eve disrupted that relationship by disobedience in the Garden of Eden.

That re-established relationship was fulfilled in the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Word-made-flesh who dwelt among us and whose glory the apostles saw and preached, bringing it to us. Ever since, the Church has made various symbols and images, icons, of the wonderful mysteries of Christ and of his servants the saints. Are these the graven images, the idols, prohibited by the Scriptures?

The Seventh Ecumenical Council of the Undivided Church, East and West, in 787,[3] upheld, against the violence of iconoclasts, the veneration of icons, images, and other symbols of the faith – precisely for the reason that Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, is the image, the icon, of the invisible God: “Have I been with you so long, that you do not know me?” said Jesus, when a disciple asked him to show his followers the Father. “He who has seen me,” said Jesus, “has seen the Father.”[4] We have images because God perfected his relationship with Man in the God-Man, his Son, Jesus Christ. Through JESUS we have boldness of access to God.

It is no accident that the iconoclastic controversy in the Christian Church took place at the same time as the rise of Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries AD. Islam is radically transcendent, anti-Trinitarian and non-Incarnational; and it prohibits even the images in Moses. The greatest theologian of the day, Saint John of Damascus, who defended the veneration of the icons, lived under Muslim rule.[5] John saw where iconoclasm leads: to the denial of God’s Son, his Incarnation, and his Sacraments. Later puritanism and its image-smashing in the radical forms of Protestantism went the same way. Anglicanism and Lutheranism are right to side with the traditional Catholic and Orthodox faith against this destruction.

We have images of the Son of God and of his Mother Mary and of the saints for the same reason that our principle worship is on the Lord’s Day, the first day of the week, rather than the seventh day, the Sabbath; and for the same reason that we hallow and proclaim the name which is above all names: JESUS.

To paraphrase the ancient council: The Christian veneration of images is not contrary to the first and second commandments which proscribe idols and idolatry. On the contrary, “the honor rendered to an icon passes to its prototype,” and “whoever venerates an image venerates the one portrayed in it.”[6]

When you look at a photograph of someone you love; when you pick up that piece of paper and kiss it – you are not worshiping or serving a paper idol. You love the person whose image you behold.

Our use of icons and images of Christ, our Lady and the saints – together with images of the various mysteries of the faith – leads us on to the incarnate Son. The veneration of the icon does not terminate there in the image, but points and reaches through it to the Lord[7] – in a word, embraces none other than JESUS.

In the Name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. Amen.

◄previous sermon in the series

next sermon in the series



[1] Book of Common Prayer, 1979, pp. 317, 350; from Exodus 20: 4-6.

[2] Ps. 115:6

[3] At Nicaea, the location of the First Ecumenical Council of 325, which produced the Nicene Creed.

[4] St. John 14:6ff.

[5] From a well-born Christian family, John’s father was a tax collector for the Caliph. Paradoxically, John’s living in Muslim territory protected him from the Iconoclastic Emperor in Constantinople! Iconoclasm was connected to the Monophysite heresy which had an inadequate understanding of the Union of the Divine and Human Natures in Christ.

[6] The Council of Nicaea II, quoted in Catechism of the Catholic Church, p. 517.

[7] Ibid, quoting St. Thomas Aquinas.