Day: January 29, 2023

“Why are ye so fearful?”

Today’s Gospel marks the end of the Epiphany season this year. And it ends, appropriately enough, with an Epiphany of Christ as Pantokrator, the ruler of all. “What manner of man is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”

But the manifestation of Christ as Pantokrator is not some imperious display of power and domination. It is more about divine compassion, a form of love. This sensibility is seen visibly in our icon of Christus Pantokrator. The icon is a Russian copy. The words around the figure written in the Cyrillic script are part of the so-called Comfortable Words in the liturgy. “Come unto me all that labour and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you,” Jesus says. The icon includes the words which immediately follow: “take my yoke upon you, and learn from me”(Mt. 11.29a). For as Jesus says, “I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Mt. 11. 29b,30).

“For there is no power but of God,” Paul tells us in Romans 13, again the continuation of the readings from Romans 12 that we have had on these Epiphany Sundays. This is all part of the doctrine of the Epiphany, not the narrative. It is all part of what is manifested so that we may learn about God and his will and purpose for our humanity.

The image of Christus Pantokrator seen in relation to this Gospel story counters the great fearfulness of our culture and world. “Master, carest thou not that we should perish”, captures something of the ‘catastrophism’ of our time and the default to a kind of despairing hedonism, a retreat into immediate pleasures and emotions having despaired of thought. But in having despaired of thought, our loves, too, are in disarray and disorder. It is a kind of solipsistic nightmare, the idea that reality is just what we feel in our minds.

This is more than just the fall-out from Covid, the new ‘cancer’ fear word of our times. Catastrophism concerns our world environmentally, economically, politically and socially but in each case there is a kind of philosophical despair borne of the assumption that the good can only be simply something material and physical, pleasing and comforting, hyggelig, as it were. Our catastrophism assumes that now is the end of the world, that the failure of the modern liberal project is the absolute end of nature and our humanity. Will it end with a big bang or a whimper? This was already raised by T.S. Eliot, “this is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper” in his 1925 poem, The Hollow Men.

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