Imagine a man in love. He adores his beloved with every cell of his body. He loves her with every fiber of his being. She is everything to him — all of his soul, all of his mind, all the strength of his body. He falls asleep each night composing poems in his mind, and he awakens each morning feeling this love rise like a spring from his heart.

And what does someone do when he is in love? Why, he wishes to gaze upon the face of the beloved, to place her picture by his bedside and to adorn his walls with her image. He keeps a snapshot in his wallet. This is not duty nor a daily test of commitment. This is personal.

A leading scholar of the Greek Fathers (and close friend of Patriarch Kirill) wrote, "Christianity is not a theory but an encounter with a person, Jesus of Nazareth" (Joseph Ratzinger). Christianity is not mere duty. It is love. And each child of God seeks His Face urgently — with a living, breathing desire.

Hinduism seeks to sacralize the entire universe with its 33 million gods leading to a vast awareness of the sacred, yes, but each individual deity, being born to life and subject to death, is not the Image of God. Collectively, nearly beyond numbering, they point outward to an unknowable universe.

Similarly, Allah is deemed to be God in the religion of Islam, but having neither material nor spiritual being leading not to particularity but toward vast abstractness. Any impulse to depict God is met with swift and severe penalty. The suras of the Quran, written by scribes under the first Caliph, Abu Bakr Siddiq, are intended to regulate life as Chinese civil religions do. Yes, the Quran was said to be divinely inspired to Muhammad, but it has been continually revised and recompiled to order society. This is Islam's hallmark: law and order.

Like Islam, but preceding it by thousands of years, Judaism has condemned depictions of God, placing this prohibition at the top of the Ten Commandments:

Before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, we might say that the opposite principle applied: idols present a face but of no person while God sets forth a felt presence but no face .... that humans might behold. Faithful Jews called God "Father." They knew of His mercy, patience, and love. But as to personal relationship .... we read in Job,

With the Advent of God, Father God bestows the greatest gift of love: Himself .... longed for by Abraham, by Moses, by Job, by every life born into the world since the Fall of Eden. He bestowed once again Face-to-face relationship with Himself. Is this not the incommensurable and overarching attribute of Eden? .... Face-to-face love and relationship with God? With, first, the birth of His Mother and, then, the appearance of His Gracious Self in the Person of His Son, we behold the gates of Eden opening once again. You see, the point is not the appearance of God, for God is always and everywhere Present. The point is the renewed offering of relationship .... as it was from the Beginning.

In Jesus Christ, God is with us. This is the Good News! He is God, yet He is really and truly human .... like us made of flesh and bone and blood. The Man is not a medium depicting God. His Divinity is not a medium depicting humankind. He is God. And He is man.

Before the Advent of God, who might arrogate to represent God as an Image? Yet, following the great gift of God's Self-revelation, Who might fail to bow down and serve Him?

Yes, Abraham and Moses spoke with God, but these were rare and brief moments having severe limitations. All of this was to change with the birth of a vulnerable, approachable infant in Bethlehem, truly

He was a vulnerable infant, yet still God. He was approachable, but the danger of approaching God was still immanent within Him as the execution of God's Son demonstrated to all the world forever.

But this would not be the last word. More audacious than His birth as God's Son would be His resurrection and ascension into Unity with the Father Who sent Him, a Unity, more audacious still, because it includes us. As we read in our Gospel lesson this morning:

Which Master? The answer, of course, is "One. Only One. The One Who created all things and without Whom "nothing was made that was made" (Jn 1:3).

Preceding the birth of Jesus Christ, an image of God was an obscenity. Yet, following the birth of Jesus Christ, which Christian could doubt God's will concerning Holy Icons? No cornerstone of our faith is surer than this: that the Son of God has material being and Divine being — one indistinguishable from the other. This was the towering point made by the Fathers of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, which defended icons against those who would destroy them and outlaw them.

With the development of Islam in the seventh century, the edges of the Eastern Roman Empire bordering Arab lands were chronically subject to raids and destruction arising (among other things) from Muslim outrage over Byzantine coins. Beginning in 695 the Emperor Justinian II decreed that the full-face Image of the Lord Jesus Christ was to appear on all newly minted gold coins. Constituencies subject to these raids petitioned that this policy be reversed. The further one drew into the Byzantine cities and strongholds away from the borderlands, the stronger the defense of the coins .... and icons. The further one drew toward the Arab frontier, the deeper ran passions of iconoclasm: "Destroy those icons!" In 717, the new Emperor, Leo III, a Syrian, born into and formed by Islamic culture, condemned icons in general and ordered all existing icons to be destroyed. His rationale was primarily the Second Commandment prohibiting graven images.

The Council Fathers replied that God had instructed Moses to make images of cherubim wrought in gold (Exod 25:18). They explained that these icons represented actual persons, the cherubim; idols do not. They adduced writings of the Fathers approving icons and considered that God Himself had produced that wonder among icons, acheiropoieta — "icons made without (human) hands" (such as the Image of Christ's Face imprinted upon St. Veronica's handkerchief).

But no argument made at the Seventh Ecumenical Council surpassed the deepest and greatest reality in human history: that God is seen in the Image and Person of His Son, whose material Nature is indistinguishable from His spiritual Nature.

Icons are not photographs. They are mysteries. They are not representational art as portraits are. We might say, naively, that their perspective is all wrong. But that would miss the point. They are possessed of a kind of distance, an other-ness, which calls us away from the world. They do not imitate nature. They are portals into .... we might say "the supernatural" if the Divine world were not at the core of who we are.

When we approach an icon of Jesus, it is personal. It is an encounter. We speak to Him really and truly. Where is the connection between this encounter and the paints and wood that underlie the Holy Image? Who can say?

Who can say what makes the physical heart quake from spiritual love? Who can say what brings a woman to ignore the laws of personal survival, laying down her life for her children? In matters that lift us far above the gritty world, where is the line separating the physical from the spiritual? Could a scientist .... or an emperor draw it? Where does the one meet with the other? Where is the boundary? Or to borrow the words of the poet W. B. Yeats,

Let us draw near to Heaven through our Holy Icons. St. Luke did not hesitate to make an icon of the Mother of God. Through Divine encounter, generations of Christians have witnessed their wonderworking powers, dripping with myrrh as dew upon the windows that look on to Heaven. Bow down. Reverence them. Venerate them. Cense them with rarest incense. Light tapers before them. Kiss them with a quaking heart. And never doubt that there is mirth in Heaven for such as these.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.