Heresy in Unexpected Places

For an upcoming service I wanted, or thought I wanted, an image of an icon of the Holy Family, so I did what anyone in my situation would do and went Googling for one. Partway down the page of images came one of an icon defaced with a large red cross, as you see here. What’s that about, I wondered, and it led to this Orthodox website.

Their claim is that this image is heretical and has no place in Christian tradition. That may make you blink a little, as it did me: it’s quite a statement to make, as the picture looks entirely innocuous, touching even. But the argument is this: that it attempts to corral the truth of the Incarnation, that God is come among us and that human life is therefore transformed, into an essentially worldly agenda by creating an image of the eternal Son embedded into a human family, rather than a human family changed by the eternal Son coming into it. It makes Christ marginal in his own story, makes him the son of the couple called Mary and Joseph, rather than the everlasting Second Person of the Trinity to bear and care for whom their vocation is. The website then links this with arguments about the perpetual virginity of Mary, arguments which go back a long, long way (those who doubted it on the basis of some passages of Scripture were ‘enemies of Mary’, said St John Climacus in the 6^th century), but I think these are a bit beside the point, especially as I don't have much of a problem with the idea of Mary having borne children after Jesus. 

It was a point which had its effect, though, I have to say. As I looked at the Holy Family icon I could see more and more what this faintly extreme corner of Orthodoxy meant. That image, of Mary embracing Jesus and Joseph embracing them both in an attitude of fatherly, husbandly concern, may well be what happened historically, but that’s not what icons are supposed to depict: they delineate heavenly, not earthly realities, eternal dogmas and not the fleeting accidents of what happens here. And in heaven Jesus is the focus, Mary is eternally his mother, and Joseph looks on supportively from the side. This is not an ordinary family, nor should it be reorganised to serve propaganda that elevates the human family into a religious principle.

So I won’t be using that image. Instead I found this one, from the Grotto of the Nativity in Bethlehem (where better), and that seems more correct.