Sermon for Zoom Service 7th February 2021: : Colossians 1, 15-20; John 1, 1-14

Fr Leonard Doolan – St Paul’s Athens

 

One of the daily walks taken by our dog Hektor, takes us past a statue of a great Philhellene President of America, Harry S. Truman. With fountains both sides of it, it is an impressive sight, but the lovely fountains and water features were hidden because the hedges had overgrown, and the trees were in need of a good trim.

One day we noticed that everything was being cut back, tidied up,  revealing the full impact of what had been hidden. Then one day, in another part of this little garden some workmen appeared and started to build a modest marble plinth. Day by day we have seen the work developing, and suddenly a statue appeared on the top of the plinth. I say a statue appeared – it hasn’t really because at the moment it is covered over by protective covering, so we await the day when it is uncovered.

As we await this revelation, this manifestation, we become more and more intrigued as to the identity of the hessian clad figure. It is a mystery waiting to be revealed; so much work over so many weeks, craftsmen working on their craft, so much unseen work by a sculptor in a workshop somewhere, then more cryptic weeks. The imagination is running riot – what sort of creation will be unveiled? In fact the statue is very close to the Indian Embassy, so we are speculating if it is connected to India – might it be Ghandi, or the saint, Mother Theresa, or who? We wait with baited breath for the final act, the birthing of the statue, the genesis when the covering is removed and we will all have an epiphany.

It is to genesis – birth – that our two readings focus our attention this morning. St. John’s magisterial introduction to his gospel ‘In the beginning was the Word’ (John 1,1), is set beside the words of St. Paul in the Letter to the Colossians. ‘Christ is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation’. (Col. 1,15)

The Book of Genesis, the first book of the Old Testament, expresses the Creator God in his act of Creation. It is called the Creation Narrative (though in fact there are two Creation Narratives in this book, a fact that does not need to worry us, as I will go on to say). ‘In the beginning…’ is how it begins (Gen.1,1). However, there is also a Creation Narrative in the New Testament. It is this majestic Prologue in St. John’s gospel. This too starts with the ‘In the beginning…’ The two (or should I say three) Creation stories are not in competition with each other, but in fact each subsists in the other.

The common factor in all the Creation Narratives is Christ. In the Book of Genesis God speaks as ‘we’ and ‘us’. Not a ‘royal we’ but rather ‘we’ as in plurality. We may believe dogmatically that God is one – we are monotheists – but God is not ‘monologue’. God’s word is plural – it is dialogue always. He is a discursive God. So the God who is one is not a tyrant God, but rather a God who communicates. Shall we remind ourselves how St. John’s gospel begins, ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God’. So, our Creator God is a God constantly in dialogue, constantly discursive, always plural and in conversation – thus God is always ‘We’ and ‘our’, as in the rather basic but profound statement, ‘We have made man in our image.’ A friend of mine, Fr. Isidoros Katsos puts it in a recent scholarly paper in this way,  ‘Without discursiveness there can be no Word of God because without discursiveness there can be no word’. *

 

In the beginning… Genesis starts off; In the beginning…. John’s gospel starts off. We have two Creation stories in the Book of Genesis, and we have the New Testament Creation story in John. These are not in any way in contradiction and we have to read them of course, but also MOST importantly, we also must ‘read’ what is unwritten, we must read between the texts. To paraphrase Fr. Isidoros; The truth of scripture is not to be found in only one of the versions of the texts. It is to be found between the words of the texts… it is before the written text and it is after the written text.*

St. Paul, in his Letter to the Colossians, seems to get this. He knows his Hebrew scriptures inside out, but he has also had an earth shattering insight into the very nature and being of God – ‘Christ is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all Creation; for in him all things were created, things visible and invisible…’ This insight of Paul’s is revolutionary, and is a personal discovery, for remember Paul had never read those magnificent words at the start of St. John’s Gospel, which had not yet been written.

Paul recognizes Christ as the one who is Logos, the Word, present ‘In the beginning…’ εν αρχή, before the beginning of all beginnings of time and space.*

For Paul it is knowing the relationship between each of us as ‘person’ and the person of Christ. Paul speaks of being ‘in Christ’ as Christ is part and parcel of our identity. It is this Christ, image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation… the Word of God, who inhabits the personal pronoun when God says, ‘We have made man in our image, male and female, we have created’.

 

This mystery unveiled is the reason why each of us must revere the sacredness in others – for God inhabits fully all aspects of what is created. With us ‘in Christ’ and ‘Christ in us’ despite all our human limitations and restrictions, we are the ‘image of the invisible God’. The word in the Greek text of Paul is not so unfamiliar to us in Greece, or anywhere really, because it is the noun είκων, icon. In the mystery of creation we are the icons of Christ, the first born of all creation. Just as an icon in church or home is a dialogue between God, holiness and the person, and in a discursive response, the person, holiness and God, so we inhabit this iconic status – you see, you don’t have to be a Greek Eleni Mercouri, ora world famous Lady Gaga to be an icon!

Christian discipleship therefore is not just about following statutes, codes, laws, and prescribed rituals, it is also, and perhaps most importantly, about how we understand and act as participants of the mystery of God-in-creation. One of the blessings in our Epiphany season phrases this rather beautifully: ‘Christ the Son of God perfect in you the image of his glory and gladden your hearts with the good news of his kingdom…’ On account of this we must respond to anything that distorts the beautiful icon, the image of God in us and of others; so we must rightly react with outrage at oppression, exploitation, or inhumane actions of states or individuals against others, such as the deeply distressing news of the treatment of Uighur Muslim women while held in Chinese camps. However this is but one current example of mankind’s inhumanity. It happens against Christians also. However it is not just Christians who are made in the image of God. If it is a mystery of universal Creation, then it is a mystery in all of us, for ‘in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible.’ (Words from Colossians)

So we wait with baited breath to discover whose physical icon is under the veil of the monument in that little garden.  Someone’s creative powers will be revealed, and the mystery will be unfolded. Something veiled will be in full sight. Who is it, I wonder?

 *Quotes from, or allusions to, a recent paper by Fr. Isidoros Katsos ‘A Letter that Killeth: Gregory of Nyssa on How (Not) to Read Scripture, Platonically’ delivered to the D Society, Cambridge and Hebrew University January 21^st 2021. I am deeply grateful for his profound insights.