Icons and Glory

Name your three best friends, and then name the three nations that you most admire. This test for self-knowledge generally reveals the discrepancy between the truly significant others in our lives and what we esteem as the great and glorious nations. Generally, the three most significant and dear persons in our lives are not particularly wealthy, or powerful or prestigious, or from ‘superior’ ethnic backgrounds. Yet still we persist in identifying glory with manifest power, a fact which underscores the urgent need for Christians to recapture a proper understanding of “glory’, now almost obscured by the modem secular notion of power. For surely it is our Christian conviction that the glory of God has been revealed in the poverty of Christ?God speaks his word of hope and love in human images (in Greek eikones—‘icons’), sacraments or ‘efficacious signs’ which move our hearts and enlighten our minds. We cannot do what we cannot at least in some way imagine or envision. We cannot believe, hope and love—our most significant ‘doing’—without enabling images (’icons’, in other words) or sacraments. We cannot perform the deeds of faith and hope and love without the living icons that constitute orientations to action. The Eternal Word of God became flesh in the perfect image of God that is Jesus Christ, in order to transform all human hearts and minds, enabling us through the gift of his Spirit to love God above all and our neighbour as ourselves. Jesus Christ and his Church are the sacrament or efficacious sign of God’s creative and sustaining and predestining activity in the universal, human story, making possible our responding love and faith and hope in God. The Christian community affirms that it has seen or experienced the ‘glory’ of God in his perfect image Jesus Christ, for the glory is the impact of God’s active presence transforming our lives.