The Sinai Christ follows an ancient icon, based on a miraculously imprinted cloth, possibly the shroud.

The Word Was Made Flesh

The icon’s raison d’etre is the experience of the first Christians, and of every Christian at his/her conversion - the paradox of God made man. The icon became very important to the universal Church at the time of the Council of Chalcedon (451 CE), when it became the banner of those who held the orthodox faith - those who believed Jesus Christ is ‘truly God and truly man...the character proper to each of the two natures was preserved as they came together in one person and one hypostasis.’

The exciting evolution of the icon was in finding how to paint this paradox. Some believed Jesus could and should be painted because he was a real human person. Others believed it was blasphemy to try to paint God. Out of this came a form of painting which preserves both what is known of the physical characteristics of Jesus of Nazareth yet never attempts the photo-realism of the Renaissance: it remains in an extraordinary tension between portraiture and symbolism.

Born of The Virgin Mary

The next Council of the Universal Church which shaped the icon was at Ephesus in 431 CE. The hot issue of the day was whether the Virgin, because she miraculously conceived and gave birth to someone who was true God and true man could be called the Mother of God. Ridiculous, said the anti- lobby - God is pre-eternal, of course no woman can give birth to the maker of the universe. No, said the pro-lobby - it wasn’t just an imprint of God which was turned out, it was the genuine article ‘we confess that the Holy Virgin is Theotokos because God...from her conception united with himself the temple’(the body) received from Him.’

This led to icons of the Virgin being painted in all the major churches as a sign of faith. They were not the first icons of her, however. A longstanding tradition attributed the first icons to St. Luke, a doctor and painter who was fascinated by the conundrum of the Virgin birth and wrote about it extensively in his Gospel.

The Yaroslavl Elousia
(Tenderness)

The Ascension:
Woodchester parish church

The Resurrection Of The Body

The icon not only witnesses to the miraculous Incarnation of the Lord, but to the Christian belief that the body, too is part of us for all eternity, and not just sloughed off in death. Of course it will undergo a change, of course that which we see decaying will decay, but underneath all that, irrevocably part of the human make-up is the blueprint of ‘bodyness.’ St. Paul discusses this is some depth in I Corinthians, where he says that, of course, what we see now is a rather insignificant shadow of what the resurrection will be. C.S. Lewis called the decaying earth the ‘Shadowlands’ - which foreshadow! Orthodox theology deals extensively with the divinisation of the human person, including the place of the body in this.

In the icon, not only the Lord is portrayed, in this unique mixture of sign and portrait, but so are the saints and the whole universe, pointing to ‘a new heaven and a new earth’ in which ‘the dwelling of God is with men..for the former things have passed away.’