V. REV. FR. PAUL WESCHE
St. Herman’s Orthodox Church
Minneapolis, MN
“Orthodoxy is what Christ taught, the apostles preached, and the Fathers kept.”
— St. Athanasius the Great
The Triumph of Orthodoxy commemorates the restoration of icons as essential to Orthodox Christian biblical worship. They proclaim Christ as God incarnate in whom and by whom all things were made, who is Himself the Icon of the invisible God (Colossians 1:15f.). He is the Icon in whom Man was made as male and female (Genesis 1:26-27). Because our “primary substance” is our having been made “in the Icon” that is Christ [Origen of Alexandria], our primary substance is “personal communion” that lives and has its being in the Holy Trinity.
The Triumph of Orthodoxy, then, proclaims the restoration of personal communion with God in the triumph of the Icon, Jesus Christ, over the devil and death. Eden has been opened again and we may enter to become gardeners of immortal plants, communicants of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4).
But Eden is the “icon” of our heart, as St. Kallistos Angelikoudes reminds us. The Triumph of Orthodoxy therefore proclaims the destination of our Lenten journey: “Christ in you, the Hope of Glory.” In the Light of Christ who illumines all, we take up the cross of the Fast to follow Christ from the Jordan into the wilderness of our own soul, and into the tomb of Lazarus, our own heart. Like Lazarus, we are called by Christ to “come forth” and to follow Him into His New Tomb and into the Garden of His Resurrection, the Pasture of eternal life in the Personal Communion of the Holy Trinity.
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