How To Behave in the Presence of God: three addresses for Holy Week 2009

Monday in Holy Week: Earth

It’s fashionable for booksellers to pile their counters high with small, well-presented volumes with winsome titles such as ‘Forty Hints for Husbands’ or ‘Surviving your Children’. Inspired by such bijou publications, and conscious that I am preaching before the Icon of the Crucifixion for the first time, I have entitled this series of three addresses for Holy Week ‘How to Behave in the Presence of God.

Let me explain. Most of us observe some sort of bodily ritual on entering a sacred space, from nodding our heads to prostrating ourselves headlong. In these three addresses I will consider the three gestures associated by Orthodox Christians with the presence of icons.

This is Chapter One of my slim, hard-back volume: Earth.

When President Obama travelled to London last week a number of bags of his own blood travelled with him. When an Orthodox Christian approaches an icon he stoops down and touches the ground before it. If the President ever ponders that particular element of his travel arrangements then it may remind him of the ever-present possibility of his death. If the Orthodox Christian ever ponders the custom he has known all his life then it may have a similar effect. In touching the ground he is acknowledging the dust of which he is made, and to which he will return.

‘The dust of which he is made, and to which he will return’. That is a phrase with which we began the journey into Lent. It acknowledges our relationship with the dust upon which we stand, and it assumes three quite distinct stages in that relationship. We begin as dust; we live; we dissolve into dust. The Orthodox gesture of touching the ground suggests that the three stages are not nearly so distinct as we might like to think.

This is clear as we contemplate the stories of the Passion of Jesus, which is not only a story of people. It is a story of dust, a story of the dust upon which people walk. On Palm Sunday the crowds rejoice at the coming of their King. According to St Luke the Pharisees tell Jesus to tell them to be quiet. He answers that if the crowd was silent the very stones would shout out. On Good Friday Jesus dies upon the cross. According to St Matthew he cries aloud and breathes his last. At that very moment the earth shakes and the rocks split.

So what lies beneath the feet of Holy Week’s protagonists is not inanimate stuff, the passive backdrop to the drama enacted upon it. The earth is instead a responsive, empathetic player in the drama.

This is a motif that recurs throughout the Scriptures. Isaiah speaks of the hills bursting into song and of the trees of the fields clapping their hands at the return of God’s people to Zion. St Paul writes of the whole creation groaning with the pains of labour.

We are of dust and we will return to dust. The salvation for which we wait must also be the salvation of dust. The whole earth cries out for redemption, for re-creation, for renewal. This is not trendy environmentalism but orthodox faith. What turns upon the events of this week is not the purification of our interior lives; it is the purification of all that is. The earth is not God. But God has created the earth out of nothing; God sustains it in being every second of every hour; it is beloved of God and in need of God’s work of re-creation.

We touch the ground in the presence of God not to emphasize our separation from the earth or our elevation above it, but to recall our creatureliness, our utter dependence in solidarity with all that is, on God’s loving attention.





Tuesday in Holy Week: Flesh

This is the second in a three-chapter work entitled ‘How to Behave in the Presence of God’, a rumination on the three gestures Orthodox Christians associate with the presence of the divine in icons.

In Chapter One I considered the first of these, stooping to touch the ground, and I pondered how in Holy Week this identifies the worshipper with the dust of the earth, the dust that cries out for redemption just as the worshipper cries out for redemption.

Now to Chapter Two: Flesh.

After touching the ground and making the sign of the cross the Orthodox Christian approaches the icon and plants a kiss upon it. I say upon it; she will often in fact kiss the small replica of the icon which is positioned below the icon itself, sparing the often ancient and venerable gold leaf of the original.

A kiss.

When my colleagues and I were considering how we might raise the general standard of conduct at Sunday worship here (at both 10 o’clock and at 11.15, I should say) one proposal was that we might introduce a poster of the sort that some of us remember from the swimming pools of the 1970s. A series of cartoons might warn the faithful in simple terms: ‘no running; no smoking; no pushing’. However the proposal foundered on our recollection of the injunction ‘no petting’ and its picture of a couple entwined, the man looking down lasciviously on his bikini-clad paramour who gazes up at him adoringly. For we actually do rather a lot of kissing in church.

At the Eucharist the first ritual act of the president is to kiss the altar, acknowledging on behalf of the people the divine presence in the lives of the saints, whose relics were originally embedded within the table. Then once the Gospel has been proclaimed the president kisses the book, acknowledging on behalf of the people the divine presence in the written Word. Then, before the gifts are brought to the table, we acknowledge the divine presence in one another at the Peace. It’s true that being British and Anglican we normally shake hands, but when we do so we are echoing St Paul’s command that we should greet one another with a holy kiss.

So a kiss is for us a familiar way of acknowledging the divine presence, and kissing a sacred image ought not present us with any difficulty. This is Holy Week, however, and in Holy Week we remember only one kiss.

‘Judas, is it with a kiss that you are betraying the Son of Man?’ The gesture is so terrible that the evangelists are divided over whether it actually happened. John cannot bear to contemplate it, and has Jesus identifying himself to the guards; in Luke Jesus forestalls the act with his question; only in Matthew and Mark does Judas actually make contact with Jesus, greeting him as ‘Rabbi!’

It was an acknowledgement of presence, just as our kisses are; it was perhaps even an acknowledgement of divine presence, a last roll of the dice for Judas, desperate to goad his God into action. But it was also the betrayal of a friend.

We dare not turn Judas into a scapegoat. For our kisses betray; our protestations of loyalty ring hollow; our vows of friendship deceive. We bring our lips to the cup of Christ’s presence and yet crucify him in our hearts and minds.

We kiss the sacred image; we acknowledge the divine presence; we recall that in so doing we worship one who will never fail, never betray, never deceive.



Wednesday in Holy Week: Fire

This is the third and last chapter in a volume entitled ‘How to Behave in the Presence of God’. In it I have offered some reflections on the three gestures that Orthodox Christians associate with the presence of God in holy icons.

In the first of these I considered the custom of touching the ground upon which the icon stands, a recognition that the worshipper is formed of the dust of the earth and will return to the dust of the earth, and so is a part of the entirety of creation that longs for God’s redeeming work. In the second I considered the custom of kissing the icon, a recognition of the divine presence that the icon mediates, a recognition which perhaps dawned dimly on Judas Iscariot when he kissed the Rabbi in the garden.

So to the third chapter: Fire.

After touching the ground and kissing the image the Orthodox Christian lights a candle before it, a candle which will burn long after he has left the place where the icon stands.

Of all three gestures this is the one with which we are most familiar. It’s not just that lighting candles is a popular activity in this parish; it is a popular activity throughout the length and breadth of our culture. Votive candles, so called, can be bought in Ikea as easily as in ecclesiastical outfitters, and they adorn not only the roadside shrines which have become a commonplace of contemporary life but also suburban dining tables and fireplaces. The lighting of candles is an acceptable secular liturgical act to which none now object. It’s strange to think that it caused such controversy in our church in the late nineteenth century.

Candles vary, of course, from ordinary tea-lights to extravagantly coloured and exotically perfumed confections that are scarcely recognizable as candles. What they all have in common is that they are made for a common end: their own destruction. That’s their point. Burn a candle and you’ll be left with nothing but a waxy pool, a lingering scent, and a memory of beauty, warmth and light.

Perhaps that is where the disciples of Jesus found themselves as night fell on Good Friday. Their dear friend had been destroyed as surely as are the candles lit here daily. His life had burned so brightly, shedding warming rays and dispelling gloomy shadow. But as the shades lengthened around the rock-hewn tomb the disciples had to adjust to a new reality. He was dead. It was finished. And all that was left was a beautiful memory.

Here we run out of gestures, metaphors and illustrations. A spent candle is a spent candle. It cannot be re-lit.

So let me suggest this. A candle is created for its own destruction. That is a common hallmark of human creation: rubber tyres are made for wearing out, steak and kidney pies for eating, and atomic weapons for detonation.

Perhaps God’s creation is different. He hates nothing he has made, as the Lenten Collect reminds us. Perhaps God’s creation is never for its own destruction. Perhaps it is only ever for its own transformation, for its transformation from glory to glory. Perhaps the dust and ash of the earth awaits such transformation; perhaps the denial of Peter and the betrayal of Iscariot await such transformation. And perhaps we await it, too.

Christ stands in the garden of Easter, his wounded hands outstretched towards us.