18. Travel Greece with a Bible in Your Suitcase | Varlaam Church at Meteora, Greece | Romans 5:12-21 | Matthew 16:18 | Revelation 20:14

by Lorelei GaugerTour GreecePosted on No Comments

This first icon in the antechamber depicts the spirit-fighting church in a very special moment, in the border between the present and the future life.

Varlaam Monastery

Imagine martyrdom, mostly in the time of the Romans. Some of them were so cruel that even the sickest human imagination counts them as sick, martyrdom, suffered by the church. Among them, a saint being skinned off alive, saints being grilled, another being boiled alive, another beheaded, thrown to death, water, a saint being crucified upside down and beside him another saint beheaded with some heads scattered around. Do you remember somebody who was crucified upside down? Peter, according to church tradition. And Paul was beheaded, being a Roman citizen. So, in this chamber, the antechamber of the narthex, we saw the spirit-fighting church depicted.

We walked inside the main room of the Church in Varlaam and faced the door. Kostos pointed up for us to see the crucifixion, and the sleep of Mary.

In the icon of the crucifixion, we saw Jesus on the cross (in the middle) and, on both sides, the 2 thieves. See the group of the women on the left and see John the Disciple? Mary and John have halos. On the right side do you see a Roman soldier coming also with a halo? How is that possible?

On the side of the arms of Jesus see 2 spots, each with a face inside. The one on the right is grey and the one on the left is red.  These depict the representatives of the material creation. The red one is the sun and the grey one, on the right, is the moon. They both look to the Creator. They are shocked; They run the races. This Is why you see the light hair blown by the wheat in front of their faces/ Yet these are the races that brought down. So then there was, for three hours, a total darkness over the earth.

Now I would like tell you about a detail related to the cross. Below the cross of Jesus, inside this cave is the skull of somebody and some bones. A little thing. Take a guess.  Whose skull is this? Adam. Yes, Adam’s head. Remember Adam, with his life up disobedience, brought death to the whole human race and Jesus according to Pauline theology, (the theology of the Apostle Paul, Romans 5:12-21) The last Adam brought life to the human race with his death of obedience. So, they have depicted both the Adams, the first and the last one. 

The second icon was an icon that marks a theological difference with the Catholic church. In the Catholic Church they speak about the ascension of Mary. They say that Mary was brought to Ephesus and from a house there sent to the heavens and so she never died.

So, in this icon you see Mary in her burial bed and Jesus is receiving an infant.

Varlaam Monastery Jesus Revivint an Infant

But if you go to Jerusalem the Orthodox Church points close to the garden of Gethsemane, the Church of the Mission, and inside there you can see the grave of Mary. The eastern church does not speak about the ascension of Mary but about the sleep of Mary. Here is an enlarged picture of the icon.

This is the only time when we see Jesus holding an infant (usually we see Mary holding the infant Jesus.) This is the soul of Mary; the soul departed from the body and embraced in the bosom of Jesus. Now she is depicted as an infant to show that although Jesus was her son, at the same time, He was her creator as well. 

Kostos pointed out another icon, and you will need to imagine this one, as I didn’t find a picture of it. I would like us briefly also to “see” an icon on an arch.

Very briefly, we see the resurrection being depicted. The Catholic Church depicts the resurrection by showing Jesus coming out from the grave, an empty grave (something that never somebody saw because we know from the Bible that when the first witnesses went out to the grave the grave was already empty.) But the Eastern church depicts the resurrection starting from a deeper place – from the Kingdom of Hades.

You see Jesus stepping upon the broken panels of Hades gates. He is in a glory (imagine the grey blue shade above and behind him depicts His glory; Jesus comes down from Hades after He has broken the gates of Hades. And you see an angel chasing the defeated enemy, this dark figure, poised, is Hades Himself.

Remember, when Jesus introduced the church in Matthews gospel? (Matthew 16:18) Jesus said, I am going to build my church on this rock and the Gates of Hades will not prevail on it.

Actually, translating the name Hades as Hell is a total mistake. Hades at the time of Jesus and forthcoming years after Him, for all the people of the Mediterranean world, was the name of a Greek god. Not a situation. Not hell, like in many English translations it is translated.

So the King of Death, the Ruler of the Underworld, is defeated and the angel is chasing him. 

Remember also, in the Book of Revelation (Revelation 20:14) the Apostle John says, In the last day Death, the personality, and Hades, as a personality, are going to be chained and thrown in the Lake of Fire.

You see Jesus coming down from the Kingdom of Hades drudging out of the graves an old couple, these are the forefathers of humanity, Adam and Eve.

Again, here we have the theology of the Apostle Paul who said that As through one person, death came to everybody, the same way, through one person, Jesus life and resurrection will come to everybody. (1 Corinthians 15.)

So, in the icon we are reading, do you see, can you imagine, that the representatives of the human race are taken out of their graves? Behind Adam you see some people with crowns. These are the Kings of Israel, pointing to Jesus, and on the other side you see the representatives of the Gentiles also pointing and looking to Jesus.  Among the representatives of the Gentiles, we see Abel, the first righteous, who was killed by his brother. We see Melchizedek, the chief priest of the Most High God, and also Noah. So we could say a lot.

Look here, imagine also, the assembly the cross, You see Jesus using a ladder to ascend on the cross and possibly you wonder if the painter knew the actual and historical circumstances of the crucifixion. Because definitely, somebody couldn’t be crucified using a ladder.

My question is Do you know somebody else outside of the Bible who was crucified, who was a famous historic personality?

Have you heard the name Spartacus? Who was Spartacus? Spartacus was a defeated, rebellious slave and Himself together with His 3000 followers were all crucified. Was Jesus like Spartacus, a defeated rebellious slave? He died as a slave, but was he like Spartacus?  No. Jesus willingly ascended to the cross and this is why you see the ladder there. Jesus offered Himself to become the sacrifice.

We could say a lot of things but there were other groups waiting in the hallway. Let’s continue outside to see the other environments of this monastic move.

17. Travel Greece with a Bible in Your Suitcase | Varlaam Church at Metora, Greece

by Lorelei GaugerTour GreecePosted on No Comments

At the Varlaam church at Meteora, Kostas gave us an introduction to Greek icons (while I modeled a skirt based on historical usage at the Monastery.) The most important part of this picture is the golden halo seen in the icon behind me.

Look, first, at how the 3 main figures (Mary, Jesus, John the Baptist, and the angels) are depicted. There is no shape behind the figures, at all. The figures are flat. Do you see the abstractions and the lack of proportion?  The abstractions became, no longer the main characteristic of the primitive art, but also the main characteristic of the modern art, i.e. art that used abstraction on purpose, because of philosophical (theological in this case) ideas.  

See the name of Jesus being depicted on his halo? ὁ ὢ ν

Omicron, Omega, Nu.

I would like us to speak a little bit about the three letters: The omicron on the left side is faded out in my picture, but you can clearly see, in his halo, the Omega above and the Nu to the right.

These three letters form two words, ὁ ὢν “the/that being.”

  1. ὁ – Omicron is a word by itself. The/That. It is the definite masculine article.
  2. ὢν – Omega and Nu form another word, the participle of the verb “I am,” the verb “to be.”

The participle form of these two words, ὁ ὢν, was adopted by the Greek philosophers. This happened between two cities, Ephesus and Miletus, major cities of Asia Minor, Turkey today, Greek Ionia of that time It was also adopted in the Bible to describe God and Jesus generally. I say adopted because the Greek philosophers used it first! Here’s the history of how that happened.

In the 6th century BC, Greece had thinkers who were no longer satisfied with the Greek myths. Why? Myth, for them, was not able to explain the first origins of nature. So, they decided to find out if the origins of nature were part of myth. So they studied nature, intensively … and what did they discover? 

  1. They discovered, first, that nature is a chain, it is not compartmentalized. From the very little to the very big is a chain, a continuous chain.
  2. Secondly, they saw mathematics everywhere.  
  3. Thirdly, they discovered that all living nature (that means, plants, animals and humans in their outer form) has the same tendency to fulfill the same one mathematical formula, 2x + 1/x (which possibly is known to you from your mathematics class.) This is the tendency of all living nature.
  4. The ancient Greeks of Ionia, at that time, considered this mathematical formula the expression of the ideal and harmony and they called this formula the Golden, or Divine, Ratio.
  5. As their conclusion, these people considered nature as a unique mathematical artifact, not many artifacts in a row, but one single mathematical artifact. And they were the first who called this artifact, “Jewel.”  The Greek word for “Jewel” is Cosmos (Cosmetics in English.)
  6. And these people were the first who formed the idea that the concrete (the visible) went to the invisible (to abstraction.)

They became the first real philosophers, because they made up this question: “If what we see, all around us, is a perfect mathematical jewel (a Cosmos) then who is the “Jewel” maker? Who is the Cosmos maker?”

  1. Their answer to this question, was a conclusion that, “There should be, definitely, one mathematical mind (or more than one mathematical mind) able to express themselves, mathematically, in a way parallel to the human mind.
  2. So, through mathematics we can have with Him, or Them, a kind of communication.
  3. The second question became, Is this communicator one person (one mathematical mind) or more than one?
  4. They reasoned that many minds see the same reality from a different point of view, something which in art destroys harmony and for that reason, in all of art history, every single artifact, is signed by one artist who expresses his own personality.
  5. That made them to say that: behind this “Jewel,” this mathematical artifact, there should be one and only one great mathematical mind
  6. This great mathematical mind was not identified with the other gods of the myths.
  7. So, here we have the roots, the beginnings, of the concept of the great mathematical mind, the Creator, the Unknown God.

Now, while all these things were happening in philosophy, King Darius was expanding his empire from India to the West (remember we spoke about that in Thermopylae.)

Darius called for all these places, places where thoughts were being developed, so he created a wave of immigrant thinkers.

One of the immigrants was called Xenophanes. At the second part of the 6th century BC, Xenophanes, immigrated from Asia Minor (from the city of Colophon, close to Ephesus.) He, finally, with some other immigrants from Asia Minor, built a Greek city in South Italy and built his home.

Xenophanes was a carrier of his ideas.

  1. Since he brought his own ideas with him, he was the first person in history to make a severe criticism against Homer.
  2. He accused Homer of being sacrilegious; because Homer depicted divinity in a very brutal anthropomorphic way, attributing all the defects of human nature onto divinity. 
  3. And that, for Xenophanes was sacrilegious. 

The next “president” of this school was Parmenides.  Parmenides combined Xenophanes’ ideas and the duality that we see nature. In nature we see death and life, darkness and light, lies and truth.

So, Parmenides said,

  1. If everything we see around us is subjective, in possibility and death, then the Great Mind should be the light.
  2. If everything is in darkness and the light comes to destroy darkness, then the Great Mind should be identified with the light.
  3. And the Great Mind, in the many lights, is the only truth.
  4. As a conclusion Parmenides identified the Great Mind with the truly-existing-one, using the two words, ὁ ὢν.
  5. Parmenides was the first who spoke about “The Being,” using two words, ὁ ὢν (the participle form of the verb “I am.”)

At the 2nd century before Christ, in Alexandria, 72 pious Jewish scholars, sponsored by Ptolemy II, came to translate the Holy Books of Israel into Greek. 

  1. 72 wise Jewish men arrived to translate the name Jehovah.
  2. For the 72 men the translation came down to translating the name of Jehovah, “the God who presented Himself ” to Moses in front of the burning bush.
  3. So, they translated the Holy Name of the God, Jehovah, as “the God who presented Himself ” with a phrase in Greek, ὁ ὢν. They chose these two words, ὁ ὢν, to speak to the Greeks.
  4. ὁ ὢν, God who presented Himself to Moses in front of the burning bush, He is sending you to set them free.

The Apostle Paul based his speech on Mars Hill, in Acts 17 to the Athenian philosophers, on the concept of the great mathematical mind, the Creator, the Unknown God.

The Gospel of John, which is mostly addressed to the Greek mind, identifies Jesus as ὁ ὢν. Jesus uses these two words to present Himself and the Apostle John also uses these two words to present Jesus .

In the book of Revelation, the participle form of the verb “to be” is the only title that is continuously used from the beginning of the book to the end, to describe the Coming Messiah, Jesus Christ.

These two words, ὁ ὢν, connect The Being with

  1. The Great Mathematical Mind (from the Greek philosophers)
  2. Jehovah (from the Old Testament)
  3. Jesus (from Nazareth of the Gospel of the Apostle John) and
  4. The Coming Messiah (from the Book of Revelation.)

These two words, ὁ ὢν, are so important; The Being. Jesus “The Being” depicted in the icon at the church in Meteora, Greece is the truly existing one, presented to you – to set you free. 

Jesus, “The Being,” depicted in the icon at the church in Meteora, Greece, the truly-there-really existing one, presented to you – to set you free.