The Sunday of Orthodox
John 1:43-51
Oops!
We have forgotten how to see.
Perhaps we never truly knew.
We are like Plato’s prisoners — chained deep in a cave, backs turned to the blazing mouth of morning, faces pressed toward a cold stone wall. The sun is streaming. The sun is always streaming. But we cannot turn around. We will not turn around.
And so we watch the shadows.
We have given names to the shadows. We have built cities out of shadows. We have written laws for shadows, drawn borders around shadows, made peace with shadows — and called it wisdom.
But shadows are not reality. Shadows are only the rumor of a greater light.
Nathanael was in the cave with us.
He was sitting there, reasonable and settled, when Philip came bursting through the entrance with fire in his eyes:
“We have found him! The one Moses spoke of. The one the prophets dreamed of. Jesus — Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph!”
And what did Nathanael say?
He looked at the shadow on the wall and said, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”
How many of us are Nathanael?
Christ is standing right in front of us — and the skeptic in us sees only the broken silhouette.
Blessed are the poor in spirit — yes, but have you seen them downtown? They make us uncomfortable. They make the streets look a certain way.
Blessed are those who mourn — yes, but tears make us fidget. Someone begins to weep and we change the subject. We look at our shoes. We wait for it to pass.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness — yes, but if they march for it, arrest them. If they carry signs, check their permits. If they are too loud, remind them of decorum.
We have shadow answers for every Christ-spoken Beatitude.
We have made our peace with the cave.
Ugh!
The ancient Fathers called it the darkening of the nous — that deep faculty of spiritual perception, the eye of the soul, dimmed by the fall.
We were made to see God.
We were made to look at a human face — any human face — and see the image of the Living One burning underneath the skin. We were made to look at bread and wine and see heaven bending down to touch the earth.
Something broke.
And the terrible part — the truly terrible part — is not that we lost our sight.
It is that we stopped missing it.
We decided this is simply how things are. That the world is flat. That matter is opaque. That people are only what they appear to be — no more, no less, nothing hidden, nothing holy, nothing waiting to be seen.
We stopped expecting to see anything at all.
Aha!
So what changed for Nathanael?
How was he freed from his chains? How did he turn around and dare to look into the light?
He first had to be seen — then he was able to see.
Philip brings him to Jesus. And as Nathanael approaches, still skeptical, still squinting — Jesus looks at him. Truly looks at him.
“Here is an Israelite in whom there is no guile.”
Nathanael stops. How does this stranger know me?
“Before Philip called you,” Jesus says, “when you were beneath the fig tree — I saw you.”
And the scales fall.
And Nathanael, who saw only shadows, suddenly sees the Son of God.
Whee!
This is what the Church has been doing for you since the first days of your life.
On the eighth day, a priest called you by name and traced the cross upon your brow. He prayed that the light of God’s countenance would leave its mark upon you. He saw you.
On the fortieth day, a priest lifted you in his arms and spoke your name before the altar. He saw you.
In the waters of Baptism, your name was spoken and you were lowered three times — Father, Son, and Spirit — and the waters parted for you as they parted for Israel. God saw you.
And every Sunday, every Lord’s Day, the priest places in your mouth the Body and Blood of the risen Christ, and speaks your name again: “The servant of God [your name] receives…”
The Church sees you.
Christ sees you.
God has been speaking your name since before you knew you had one.
Yeah!
And here is the miracle:
When God calls your name — when you are truly seen — something shifts. The scales fall, just as they fell for Nathanael. You stop staring at the shadows. You turn around. And you begin to see the world not as it appears, but as it is.
You see Christ in the face of the stranger. You see the image of God in the person who frustrates you. You see heaven bending down into the ordinary moments of your day. You have been named by God, and now you can recognize what bears His name.
This is the life we are baptized into. This is what it means to have the eyes of the heart opened.
And the Church, in her wisdom, gives us tools to train this new sight. She gives us icons.
Not portraits. Not paintings of what the saints looked like before photography. Icons are mirrors — and what they reflect is reality. The truest reality. The one we were always meant to see.
The gold that halos every face is not decoration. It is theology. It tells us: this is what a human being actually looks like when the light of Christ shines through them. This is what the world looks like when death has been defeated. This is the world as it actually is — redeemed in Christ, luminous with His presence, every face a burning image of the Living God.
This week, there is an icon somewhere in your home.
Go to it.
Light a candle. Stand before it. And look — not to perform piety, not to analyze the theology, not to check a box — just look.
Let the eyes of the saint look back at you.
Pray with your eyes open. Because that is what icons are training us to do. That is what this whole holy life is training us to do.
And then go out.
Go out into your ordinary, complicated, shadow-filled life — and look at the people around you differently.
That man who exhausts you. That woman you have long since stopped noticing. That person you have quietly reduced to a category, a problem, a disappointment — look again.
The image of God is in them. Buried, perhaps. Wounded, certainly. But there. Burning quietly like an ember beneath the ash, waiting for someone to see it and call it by name.
You already know who it is.
The face is already before you.
Look again.
Heaven is open.
The angels are ascending and descending.
And you — you — were made to see this.
Amen.