by CCW | 29 January 2023 10:00
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.
There is all the difference in the world between trying to control the world and trying to understand it. The illusions of control belong to our technocratic world which seeks to manipulate nature and us to ends which increasingly serve only an elite at the expense of others. The presumption is that technology will save the world, on the one hand, by those who have already despaired of the world and seek only to protect their own interests, on the other hand. The problem is not with technology nor simply with the world but with us. This is not new. This sense of the fearfulness of things leads to ressentiment – a resentment of one another and anger about everything predicated on an assumption that the world owes us what we think we deserve. This results in complete disappointment.
Jesus’ question confronts us. “Why are ye so fearful?” It awakens us to what we have forgotten: God and God’s world and who we are in God. “It is he that hath made us and not we ourselves.” We need not place ourselves in the sinking boat of catastrophism, trapped in the company of the miserable and the despairing. Those who would awaken Jesus are asleep to the reality of who he is. They do not awaken him for any other purpose than to join them in their sense of hopelessness and despair. Yet Jesus takes this scene of despair to awaken us to the truth of his abiding presence with us in the storms of life, the storms not only of nature but of human presumption and disorder, the storms of our hearts and minds which are often the greater storms.
The American educator and philosopher, Neil Postman, reminds us that the problems of the 21st century will not be greater than what has been faced in the centuries of the past. It is a question about our thinking. He recalls us to Henry Thoreau that “all our inventions are but improved means to an unimproved end”, to Goethe’s advice that “one should, each day, try to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if possible, speak a few reasonable words,” to Socrates’ wisdom that “the unexamined life is not worth living”, to mention just a few voices from the heritage of the past. The simple point is that “there is no escaping from ourselves. The human dilemma is as it has always been, and it is a delusion to believe that the technological changes of our era have rendered irrelevant the wisdom of the ages and the sages.”
This, too, is the wisdom of the early 20th century poet, Rainer Maria Rilke. “We have no reason,” he says, “to harbour any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers we must try to love them.” It is all about how we face things.
That is the point of the Epiphany of Christus Pantokrator. We are recalled to the abiding presence of God with us made manifest in the Word made flesh whose words rebuke the wind and calm the sea storms of the world and, most importantly, of our hearts. Our fearfulness pits us against one another. Christ’s word gathers us together in care and compassion towards each other.
Our problems will not be solved by practical and technological means, by the ideologies of bureaucratic and technocratic process and programmes, or by administrative diktat about what must be said, subscribed and proscribed; for the problems are spiritual and intellectual. They remind us of who we are in the sight of God whose care for us and towards us is the grace of Epiphany precisely in the face of the world’s darkness and uncertainties, precisely in the face of its tyrannies.
“Fear not, Mary,” the Angel said at the Annunciation, the very beginning of God being with us; “Fear not,” the Christmas Angel said to the shepherds; “Fear not to take unto thee, Mary thy wife,” the angel of the Lord said unto Joseph; “Be not afraid,” an angel said to the women who came to the tomb of Jesus. It is a recurring theme. Here it is in the form of a rhetorical question that makes manifest the real comfort and strength for our souls in the face of all the dangers of the world.
We forget that the desire to know, the love of learning, often happens in the darkest and most difficult of times: Plato despairing of Athenian politics was moved to philosophy, Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita despairing of the futility and stupidity of war is taught by Sri Krisha about his dharma and to act without attachment to the results, Boethius writes his great treatise, The Consolation of Philosophy, while in prison awaiting his execution based on trumped-up charges, and Dante begins his great poetic Summa, the Divine Comedy, awakening in a dark and savage wood, selva oscura e selva selvaggio where he says he found “a great good.” And so may we if we recall that “there is no power but of God” and that his power and authority is the ground of all power. Jesus is with us in the storms of life, not just as another victim seeking vengeance but as the strong Word and presence of God with us. To know his love for us is to know even as we are known in God himself.
“What if this present were the world’s last night?” John Donne asks in a powerful and remarkable sonnet. The poem bids us look within ourselves and call to mind the image of Christ crucified in the artistic traditions that emphasizes in various ways the suffering humanity of Christ – perhaps, even the image of Christ bearing the marks of the plague as in Matthias Grünewald’s 1515 Isenheim altarpiece. He bids us ask whether that countenance frightens us and whether that tongue, recalling the words of Christ on the Cross, condemns us. These rhetorical questions presuppose the answer given in the sestet; “No, no.” What we remember as seen and heard is not meant to frighten or condemn us. To the contrary, the image of Christ crucified, at once so hideous and grotesque, is “a beauteous form” which “assures a piteous mind,” a mind which is open to the mercy and truth of Christ. The sonnet complements Christ’s rhetorical question, “Why are ye so fearful?” The abiding Word of God is the comfort and strength of Christus Pantokrator as divine compassion and strengthening love.
Fr. David Curry
Epiphany 4, 2023
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