Christ Pantocrator

Now, Mount Sinai, we've heard the story of Mount Sinai in the Old Testament, where Moses went and received the Ten Commandments from the Almighty God.

Sa- um, o-on Mount Sinai, in which my husband and I have been there and have seen this monastery, it's an ancient monastery, contains some of the oldest icons, and one of the oldest ones is the icon of Jesus Christ Pantocrator, Greek, which means ruler of all.

This is the oldest known icon of Christ dating to the sixth century.

It's well-preserved in this remote monastery of St. Catherine.

It, it, and this monastery itself has an incredible history.

We will have to tell you that story on a future Journey of Hope, right? It's one of the most important icons in the monastery's collection.

Uh, and this icon of Jesus Christ Pantocrator, in fact, uh, you can also see this icon on our website, pilgrimcenterofhope.org. After hearing Journeys of Hope, you'll want to go to this and, um, the website and see, um, the i- this specific icon, which is really one of my favorites.

We have a print of, um...

There are many ways of representing him, but you know...

And, and, and each one, we have to, you know, really have a good image of that experience of Jesus kinda going from one town to the next, eh? And, and you could say, even if art, in all its different forms, has found many, many ways of representing Jesus, our Lord, the real art comes from the, I would say, the living tableau that we devise in our minds in our own personal prayer, eh? Whether it's like a severe Pantocrator, you know, of an old Byzantine icon that appeals to us or a Renaissance fresco of Jesus with all his serene and harmonious equilibrium, or maybe a, a Baroque Jesus with his kind of sometimes contorted musculature or, or maybe, imagine the dreamy romantic figure that we see in nineteenth century paintings, eh? Each one of us really has to come up with our own Jesus that we can touch, that we can listen to, that we can experience as real in our prayer as though he was walking with us.

We are walking with him in that journey with the apostles and the holy women.

And when Jesus said he had no place to lay his head, well, he was responding to someone who was willing to follow him.

It's probably familiar to many of us.

That's the image known as the Pantocrator, or Christ the ruler of all.

The original image comes from St. Catherine's monastery, which is in Mount Sinai.

Leon, again, this is a church called St. Isidore's.

Insofar as you have to convince your readers of the unseen existences themselves, much like Reagan, that there's more going on than you might take for granted just walking around.

It's kind of a book for them, for the outsiders, for the people we're trying to invite into the Christian tent.

But then, insofar as it seeks to explain what God is up to by making the real stuff less obvious, by encouraging relationship growth, prayer, faith, hope, and love, it really is a book for us, the initiated Christians.

So let's begin on page two.

You say, remember what our ancestors knew.

A spiritual world underlies what we think of as the ordinary world.

But, you continue, under the pressure of modernity and its subservience to empiricism, heaven seems to have gone missing in much of Christian theology.

In the field of academic theology, there is a tacit embarrassment to speak too seriously about heaven lest one be dismissed as a fundamentalist rube by Christianity's cultured despisers.

Of course, if, if in modern terminology, we say as long as it's not deadly sin.

sin.This is, uh, what we've talked about too, in the beauty of the architecture of a Byzantine church is the icon that is farthest away, that's untouchable, that's totally else, is the Pantocrator-

Mm-hmm

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