Are You a Little Icon?

Colossians 1:15-28; Luke 10:38-42; Amos 8:1-12

We are all familiar with logos. They are symbols that represent a known company or group. When you see the multi-colored stylized peacock, you know that it is NBC. The same is true of the CBS eyeball. The red dot within a larger red circle means Target. MLB stands for Major League Baseball. An “F” on a blue square is Facebook. 

Those of us who use computers or smart phones all the time are quite familiar with the icons on our screens. Each one stands for an application (app for short) and if you click on one, the app opens and you can do whatever that app allows you to do – send email, take pictures, write a letter, do your taxes, play music, count your steps, just to name a few.

Another definition of icon is a person or thing that is revered or idolized. We could say that Elvis Presley is a cultural icon of the 20th century or that Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr., were icons of non-violent socio-political change.

Going back the linguistic family tree, the Greek word eikon meant an image or a representation. During the history of the church through the early centuries of the second millennium icons developed as paintings of Jesus Christ or another holy figure, typically in a traditional style on wood. These were venerated and used as an aid to devotion in the Byzantine and other Eastern Churches. Orthodox icons are not just pictures. They are windows that open onto God, and for some, windows of God opening on the human soul.

Paul uses the Greek word eikon to describe Jesus: “The Son is the image [icon] of the invisible God, the one who is first over all creation.”  As we listen to Paul’s words, we realize that he is not just speaking of the Christ who confronted him on the road to Damascus. Paul is singing of the cosmic Christ. This is a Christ who is the one and only one to have this status of being the firstborn of all creation. He outranks Adam; in fact, he was present for Adam’s creation.

We also realize that the humanity of the earthly Christ is inseparably united with the preexistent and cosmic Christ. These two aspects of Christ cannot be wrenched from each other without destroying any basis of belief in him.

And, for Paul, the saving work of Christ as well as the creative form of the church as his body could not have been conceived of without the cosmic reality of Christ. 

Paul’s theology always runs very deep. But here he manages to do it without some of his often lengthy and convoluted sentence structure. Yet for all the unfathomable depth of his theology, his faith boils down to a simple, unerring belief that Jesus is Lord and has been from forever ago and will be forever from now. 

Paul says that everything – thrones, powers, rulers, authorities – were created through Christ and for him. That little word ‘for” shows the purpose of all creation – to glorify Christ. We have to step back to see that. Increasingly we have little confidence in and great disdain for the thrones, powers, rulers, and authorities that we are stuck with. Surely God in his mercy wouldn’t give us any of the political candidates that we will have to choose from. Surely God wouldn’t have brought Britain into the European Economic Community only to have them leave years later. Surely God would have kept the National Socialists from rising to power in Germany in the 1930's. Surely God will find a solution to the racially-inspired violence that fills the news. We have our doubts about God.

In some ways we have not gotten much further in our belief than the folks in Colossae and other places in Paul’s time. False teachers stirred up the fledgling church people by telling them that the physical world was evil. If that was the case, then God himself could not have created it. If Christ were God, they reasoned, he would be in charge only of the spiritual world. But Paul explained that all the thrones, powers, rulers, and authorities in heaven and on earth, of both the visible and invisible world (physical government and spiritual forces) were under the authority of Christ himself. 

Paul listed these particular categories because of the people’s belief that the world was inhabited by powers and beings that worked against humanity. Because the false teachers may have given undue prominence to these, Paul quickly put them under Christ’s rule. Christ has no equal and no rival. Because Christ is the Creator of the world, all powers, whether the spiritual forces the Colossians wished to study or any material force, were under Christ’s final authority.

Scripture commentators sometimes have a field day trying to order and rank and explain the words that Paul has used. I think we get bogged down if we try to define them in political terms. The things that rule and have power over us, the things we allow to be authoritative for us are not necessarily personalities and people. What often rules our lives are attitudes. We are frequently governed by fear. We are hemmed in by ignorance. We find blustering arrogance authoritative. We bow before the throne of hatred, regardless of what it names itself.

One of the results of bowing to the thrones, powers, rulers, and authorities of the world is that we downsize Jesus. We make Jesus manageable, palatable, acceptable. He becomes our pet rather than our Lord. We tame him so that he is no longer an active force in our lives. That allows us to appreciate Jesus, rather than bow before him and serve him all our days.

But what if Jesus is the image of God? What if Jesus is an icon that takes to the very center of creation where God’s ongoing creative power is mixed with God’s grace and mercy as well as God’s judgment? If Jesus is creator of all that is, both seen and unseen, if Christ is the “firstborn of all creation,” then these thrones and powers, rulers and authorities which were created by him have now been “dethroned” by means of the cross and the empty tomb. They can no longer enslave. They hold no sway over us. In spite of what things look like, in spite of what our gut reaction is to the events of the world, everything holds together in Christ, the One who is the image of God. We can’t see all that from our angle of vision. We can’t see around corners unaided. Christ calls us to trust that if he can create, he can also redeem and rule as only God can.

One popular iconographic representation of Jesus depicts him as the ruler of the universe, Christ the Pantocrator. The haloed Christ looks at the viewer with a solemn, loving stare. His right hand is extended to teach, and in his left hand he holds the Holy Scriptures. In that form he is the head of the church. His work is to teach and to put the word of God into the hearts of his people. While all the thrones, powers, rulers, and authorities have a multitude of names, there is only one name for the one who is head of the church, the one who is our head. So as we have one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, through Christ we become little icons for him. Representatives of the one who has no equal, the one who rules rulers, empowers power, undergirds true authority, and who is the basis for any throne.

Sometimes when I reload or update a program on my computer, I have to remove the icon from the task bar and reinstall it so that the new program is the one that comes up when I click on it. When we come to this table, we are reinstalling in our lives the one who is oversaw our creation, the one who is our savior and our only authority. In that way we can keep on being little icons for the one who is the visible image of the invisible God, the one who defines power and authority, the one who combines spiritual and physical, the one who judges and blesses with mercy and love. 

Friends, this is the Lord’s table. Here we see the preeminence of the one who is the anointed of God, our Lord and Savior, our Christ.


Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com. 
Copyright © 2016 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.