Abstract
The oldest surviving icon of Christ the Ruler of All, Christ Pantocrator, is held in St Catherine’s Monastery on the Sinai peninsula in southern Egypt. This Greek Orthodox monastery is properly known as the Sacred Monastery of the God-Trodden Mount Sinai. According to tradition, it is here that God appeared to Moses in the Burning Bush. The spiritual heritage of the monastery, from the Law to Mary (the Theotokos) and the saints, is kept alive by the monks of Sinai. The icon of Christ Pantocrator dates from the 6th century.
Christ is depicted as slender with a strong and powerful neck, a slight beard, dark haired and brown eyed. The eyes are large and captivating. As we gaze into the icon, Christ’s right eye looks directly towards us, while His left eye is slightly offset, as if looking beyond us, perhaps to the Father. His face is peaceful, while the halo overshadows the world behind. In His left arms, Christ holds the Gospels, with a large cross set on the book cover reminding us of His passion. His right hand is raised in the traditional blessing: His fingers form the initials of His name in Greek: IC XC. As we gaze into the face of Christ, we are blessed by Him.
Christ’s eyes are peaceful, brown and dark. In silent gazing, in meditation, though the icon may lead us to a pervading sense of the deep peace of God, there is a darkness in the eyes which we cannot penetrate. Christ may look into our soul, penetrate our darkness, but we cannot see into His. The icon portrays His humanity and with that we feel a connection; He is one of us. In meditation, it is possible to feel embraced by Him, but the darkness in His eyes conceals the Mystery of God: always, God dwells in the darkness.
In the Old Testament lesson, having received the Law, Moses is commanded by God to leave Mount Sinai. Uncertain about the way ahead, Moses challenges God saying, ‘You have not let me know whom You will send with me.….Now if I have found favour in Your sight, show me Your ways, so that I may know You…’ In reply, the LORD said to Moses, ‘I will do the very thing that you have asked.’ There is an echo of this interaction in the Gospel of St John when Thomas challenges Jesus saying, ‘Lord, we do not know where You are going. How can we know the way?’ In reply, Jesus said, ‘I AM the way, the truth and the life….If you know Me, you will know My Father also. From now on you do know Him and have seen Him.’
Moses asked to ‘see’ the glory of God. God replied, ‘You cannot see My face; for no one shall see Me and live.’ However, God promises to protect Moses in the cleft of a rock while His glory passes by. This is the language of ancient mythology: we are to encounter God through imagination, poetry and emotion. God is elusive, the luminous darkness, the Being who is not a being at all. In Psalm 99, the psalmist reminds us that God spoke from the pillar of cloud. On the Mount of Transfiguration, with Jesus, Moses and Elijah, it is from the cloud too that God speaks. Though God cannot be ‘seen’, God’s glory can.
‘Glory’ is a reference to God’s Presence, power and sovereignty. For Moses, this was a moment of encounter, a deepening of inner awareness and the gaining of a more profound sense of the Holy. ‘Seeing’ the glory of God is a mystical experience. Perhaps for the first time, Moses was overwhelmed with a sense of the all-pervading nature of the Divine reality: all things in God and God in all things. In the Book of Job, in the final chapter, after conventional religion had failed him and after he had been utterly broken by life, Job ‘saw’ God. His ‘seeing’ was a moving beyond what he had heard; it was a firsthand experience of God, an experience which shattered and left as empty the traditions of religion.
In St Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians, the apostle commends the people for turning from idols to serving ‘the living and true God’. In the Gospel of St Matthew, Jesus is asked about the paying of taxes. At the heart of the question lies the head of Caesar. To the Roman world, Caesar was ‘Lord’, ‘Saviour’, ‘Son of God’ and the one who brought peace to the world. In reply to the question, Jesus said, ‘Give…to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’ In part, the question faced by Jesus is about idolatry. Nothing on earth should be worshipped; no image or person. God is holy, beyond human description, beyond every proposition and, more importantly, Caesar was the antithesis of Yahweh. Caesar represents the world, its power, status and all the desires of ego, not the Divine.
In calling us to pay to God the things that are God’s, Jesus focuses our attention on the One whose face cannot ever be seen. The most important journey any of us can make is the inner journey. It involves a letting go of the values and treasures of this world that we may submerge ourselves in the Spirit that lies at the centre of all life, the Spirit that is Life. If we let the words of Jesus sound in our soul, ‘Give to God the things that are God’s’, Christ enters our soul, lives in us, and our thoughts and desires become His thoughts and desires. In order to encounter the Sacred, we must withdraw for a time from Caesar’s world, be with Moses on the mountain, be still in the Presence of God and let God be all in all.
Jesus was a mystic, for whom the Divine was an ever-present reality. While acknowledging our obligations in society, Jesus lived with the sense that God’s call upon us is all-consuming. In the end, God is everything to us. Caesars will come and go. There will be wars and violence. There will always be gods and idols and each day we must wrestle with the ego. The choice between God and Caesar is an internal struggle and choice. Each of us must meet our obligations to the world while, at the same time, honour the Divine and acknowledge the centrality of the Sacred above the world.
It is only when we still ourselves, let the voices and noises of this world and conventional religion fall away, that we begin to ‘see’ the Divine and deepen our inner awareness, like Moses and Job. It is when, with the icon, we gaze into the face of Jesus, feel His Presence and calm, that He becomes the Ruler of All, the One whose call upon us is total.