Who Am I?
Sacrilege for Jesus
I spent the latter half of last week stepping on icons and Bibles.
I suspect, probably, that most of you will react negatively to that.
I have my reasons, which, I will try to convey to you here but, suffice to say that I know from the outset that a lot of you won’t be able to go there with me. That’s fine. No worries. I still count you as my friends.
Sparing you the backstory (which began over an argument about the appropriateness of a Eastern Orthodox Icon Sports Jacket) I got into a rather heated (at least on the other side) debate about the role of images in religious life and whether or not modern people, especially modern Eastern Orthodox and Catholic people, occasionally go too far with them and slip into idolatry. I contended that they do and my interlocutors contended that, no, they don’t, and, moreover, that such was almost practically impossible. You cannot, said they, be guilt of idolatry unless you are worshiping an image and (very conveniently) the definition of “worship” that they have in their catechisms is extremely narrow and limited only to those occasions on which one offers sacrifice to something. The Mass, they said, or The Divine Liturgy, was worship, because they were participating in the sacrifice of the Eucharist there. Everything else, again, practically speaking, was ipso facto less than worship, and fell under the categories of “Veneration” or “Respect.”
Okay. I guess.
I get the argument but it’s a little too make-sweet for me. A little too, I don’t know… precious? It feels like a word game. It feels as though you’ve created a dictionary that circumscribes everything that a normal, non-theologically educated person would understand by the word “idolatry” and made it licit through the proscription of one highly specific action.
It feels like a cheat.
Setting aside the fact that our own liturgies speak frequently of many kinds of sacrifice that you do indeed give to icons and other images, a “sacrifice of praise”, or “a sacrifice of prayer” to name but a few, I’m not blind. I see you, with my own eyes, lay flowers and incense and other trinkets and gifts at the foot of statues and other sorts of iconography. Throughout most of history, I content, that would have counted as a “sacrifice”. A gift or a present given to a deity, or other spiritual being. My suspicion that a lot of people are playing the “it’s not worship it’s veneration” dance a little too close to the line is not alleviated at all by the fact that none of the people playing it seem at all interested in any sort of self-consistency. “It’s only worship if it’s sacrifice!” Okay… what about that sacrifice of flowers right there at the statue of Mary’s feet. “That doesn’t count.” Why? “Shut up you protestant.”
I’m not protestant.
I’m also not an iconoclast.
I have images. Seven or eight of them. Most of the Eastern Orthodox variety but two or three very Roman Catholic ones. They adorn the walls of my house in various places, and I use them as tools for meditation, contemplation, and prayer. Sitting them around my environment throughout the day, I find that they can help me to remember not to forget God in the business of life. Little mementos of Heaven if you will. Keepsakes of a promise. And that, I always thought, was the point of such things. Drawing the mind upward. Depicting holy events and people from the past who you didn’t get a chance to see so that your imagination could get a handle on them more easily. I never for a moment thought that they were supposed to be considered more than that. That these pieces of wood and stone and with pretty paintings on them were considered by many (most?) to be holy in and of themselves. And, even then, okay… I can see that. They are images, tools, set apart (aka “holy”) for religious use. Fine. My contention with my interrogators though was that, even if all the above is accepted (big If in my opinion), it’s still inappropriate to hold icons as de facto more holy than Men and Women which, it really really seems like you’re doing, if your position is that Icons are these sacred, untouchable things that shouldn’t be replicated on clothing lest they be sat on or made dirty or sullen through wear and tear. “Not Respectful.” They said. “A soft sacrilege”, said others.
I don’t believe that.
Not for a second.
And, to prove it, I posted a short little video of me taking one of my icons, an image of Jesus feeding the five-thousand, putting it on the floor, stepping on it, and rubbing my toes in Jesus’s face.
This got more of a reaction than I’d imagined. Some tens of thousands of impressions and at least one prominent Youtuber take-down later… I can’t say that they’ve convinced me that I was wrong in thinking that the Apostolic Churches have an image problem. Death threats, claims that I was possessed by demons, that I was “a Jew” (keep it classy Ortho-bros), or that I was now destined to Hell flooded in upon me by the thousands, which, is okay. I lived through covid without wearing a mask (very often) or getting a shot… I grew necessarily thick skin against the howlings of the mob. Truly, none of that bothers me.
What bothers me is that no-one believed my central contention. What I felt compelled to assert dramatically over the den of Christians telling me otherwise. The contention that I, a living man, am more holy than any icon, and that I bear the face of Christ in a way that painted wood can never match.
That’s true.
Do you get that?
It is.
Assuming (I guess not unreasonably maybe), by the actions in my video that I was a protestant… you know, probably one of those dread “sola” types… I got thousands of messages telling me that I wouldn’t dare to do the same with a Bible.
So, again.
I did.
I took a Bible, opened it up in the middle, and stood on it with my bare feet.
Same principle. Same reason.
Because the Bible is God breathed. Of course. I affirm it. But I am more-so. Because an icon may depict our Blessed Lord… But I do it better.
And so do you.
“…then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.”
— Bible, Genesis 2:7
Who goes to Heaven? Men and Women or Bibles? Icons made of wood? Does God declare Icons co-heirs with Christ? Does God adopt Bibles as his own children. Does a piece of wood dare to say, “Our Father, who art in Heaven?”
No.
And I would trample over a thousand such relics to drive that point home.
Many chided me, saying I was a Gnostic, that I did not understand the incarnation and therefore did not believe that matter, physical material, could be a means of conveying grace.
Very stupid. Is it not they who do not understand? For the “carne” in incarnation means “meat”. “Flesh.” It does not mean
wood or stone or ink on paper. Christ entered the material world, yes, but he did so specifically in my species. I, Yoshi Matsumoto, am of the same kind as God Almighty. He did not become wood, nor stone, but flesh, Human Flesh, and I am in his image.
I am in his image ten-thousand percent more than any drawing.
So God created man in his own image,
in the image (aka icon) of God he created him;
male and female he created them.— Bible, Genesis 2:1-27
My point then was that standing on an icon, or a Bible, is exactly correct, and no blasphemy, for the Most Holy thing is above the less holy thing. It would be disrespectful, perhaps, to place an icon beneath a pile of trash, or under feces, or to draw faces on it with a marker. Fine.
But it is no disrespect to be under Human Feet, for that is as near as that icon has ever been to God.
If icons could speak, they would venerate us.
That’s the point. That was my point and, frankly, I’m a little sad so few people were willing to see it. For if the gospel means anything it means that God has decided to role you into his family, to, literally, make you divine and put you on the same footing as Christ Jesus.
That is the good news. That is the gospel. That God became Man so that Man might become God.
…
A few people asked me, they said, “Where do you get off doing this though? Okay. I see your point. Fine. But who are you to be the one to make it?”
Who am I?
I am a descendent of Adam and Noah by the flesh, a descendent of Abraham by the Spirit, a living Man redeemed by the blood of Christ, and a child of God Most High.
I love icons.
But they’ll never come close to that.
Your piece is strongly polemic. I will have to re-read it to better understand it.
For now though, a thought:
Consider the act of laying flowers on the grave of a loved one at the cemetery. This happens all the time. What am I doing? Am I worshiping the deceased person? Am I worshiping the stone? Am doing it because I believe the deceased person is greater, higher, or more holy than anyone else?
I don’t think you’re quite understanding this issue, nor do I believe that anyone who uses an image to remind them of their relationship to God or a saint is putting that image somehow above a human being. You have complicated things far beyond any need. The image is simply a representation that helps us to make a connection between ourselves and a being in the spiritual world.
Faith isn’t something we can manifest within ourselves by demanding it or insisting we have it. It has to be nurtured, and this is one of the ways we do that. Let’s face it: most of us don’t experience God directly, and many struggle with faith that sometimes flags. I’ve never known anyone who worshipped an icon of any kind, or who thought about such a thing in the way that you’ve imagined. We don’t worship the image of Christ on the cross, but it is meaningful and affecting because we are creatures living in a visually rich world and it’s natural for us to engage our visual sense in all that we do.
I don’t think the comparison to Santa is a fair one, because there are essentially two Saint Nicholases - one is the actual saint, the other is a cultural figure that partakes of some of the saint’s qualities. But, to answer your question, to most normal human beings, defacing or destroying an image that calls to mind someone beloved, living or dead, feels cruel, heartless, and pointless. To prove what? Do you really need to prove that you love the person, not the picture that calls them to mind?
I keep a picture of my beloved grandfather next to my bed. He’s no longer in this world. I keep this picture to remind me of him in a way that is more meaningful than what I can conjure with memory that fades as time passes. I really don’t have to burn or deface his picture to prove that I don’t worship him or think that the picture IS him in some way. There is something just a bit disturbing in the way that you seem determined to deny people a harmless comfort that is not at all what you think it is.