One year during my church’s annual festival, I was in the team giving the church tour/presentation and afterward, as usual, one visitor, a Protestant in his early 20s, came up and asked me a question.  He began by saying, “Who’s that?” angrily holding the booklet that visitors received when they entered the festival like the book was something loathsome.  He was referring to the icon that was on the cover. It was an icon of the patron saint after whom our church was named.

So I answered him that it was the saint after whom this church building was named.  Then he asked me if this saint was in the Bible.  I said no.  He paused seemingly to think (but from multiple experiences of the same sort, I knew his answer was rehearsed already), and already I saw sweat falling on his temples, then he said, “I thought this was a Christian church.”  I replied, “Yes, it is.”  He said, “So why do you have a picture of this…” and he had difficulty pronouncing the name of the saint.  I replied again that this saint was the person after whom our church building was named, and that this saint had happened to die as a martyr for Christ.

The conversation then went into dogma and sacraments and faith and salvation.  I’m sure many of you know the type of conversation I am describing.  Maybe you’ve had a similar conversation yourselves.

Yet, what I want to focus on is that there is such a misunderstanding of the saints in the West in both Protestant and Apostolic churches that this topic usually devolves into emotionalism when touched upon.

There is a right way to view the saints, yet that view is often lacking.  But If we go back into our Christian past and seek to understand what saints are and their meaning in the light of Christ, then the result is that all of us will grow to be like Christ.

Greek Icon of the Second Coming, c. 1700

Christ is surrounded by the saints

The Character of Christ

Before we can begin to understand the meaning of the saints, we have to go back to our Lord Jesus Christ. We must first understand what character is, and then what His character is like.

To make things simple, character is the combination of features that make the individual nature of a person or thing.  These features include:

1. Values (or what one holds important)
2. Priorities (or the ordering of one’s values from most important to least important and which allows us to act)
3. Confidence (or what one has full trust in);
4. Actions (or what one does).

Since Christ became human, He has a human character built on this combination of features.

The Gospels make the values, priorities, confidence, and actions of our Lord Jesus clear to us.  Our Lord’s mission was to save humanity; that was His main priority.  He did this by giving us a model of how to live our lives and selflessly dying for us and rising from the dead; these were some of His actions which broke the hold and power of sin over us.  He had confidence in His Father and in the Scriptures that He inspired.  He was the fulfillment of God’s promises and plan of salvation for humanity.  The result was that He created a community of believers who no longer were held by the power of sin and lived in the way God intended for humans to live reflecting His love out of their own freedom by imitating Christ.  This does not mean that they did not occasionally sin as all of us do, but that they were no longer defined by it because of the work of Christ.  This is a simple sketch, but it briefly shows Christ’s character.

If we contemplate on our Lord Jesus Christ’s character and come near to Him, then He becomes a model for us.  But should we model our lives on His?  Isn’t it enough to simply believe that He did this for us and that we be true to ourselves?

Actually, no.

Imitation and Faith

To begin with, believing in Christ does not mean only believing that He died on the Cross for us.  That is historical fact.  Rather, believing in Christ means believing that His way of life and teachings, which are His example is the one that you should take up into your own life.  This can only be done through imitation, but that imitation must be done out of love.

Imitation and Love

Humans are highly imitative creatures.  In fact, we might be the most imitative of all creatures.  Almost all we do since we are born is the result of imitation.  We pick up language solely by imitation and assimilation from our parents.  We learn the most basic body language such as eye contact, smiling, and compassion by imitation of our parents, mostly our mothers.  This happens unconsciously.

We imitate continually. But most of all, we imitate what we love.  The ones we first love are our parents.  Thus, most of us are like our parents in significant ways.  For example, if our parents love learning and model that for us at a young age, then we love it too.  If our parents have certain hobbies such as working on cars or gardening, then we love those too.  If our parents are easily angered, then we are too.  If our parents cry a lot, then we tend to cry a lot too.

If you think about these things, and what your parents were like, and what you are like, then you will realize this is the case.

Yet, some of you will be suspicious about all this, and think of counterexamples to what I am saying. Your siblings will come to mind, and according to the line of thinking I mentioned above, then they should be just like you too.  But they’re not.  Why not? This is because we have different friends than our siblings do.  If we are friends with certain people, then we come to love them too (indeed the word “friend” in English and many European languages comes from a root word meaning “to love”), and as such we imitate them consciously or unconsciously.

To illustrate the power that friends can have on us in terms of our behavior, I remember when I was in high school, I had several friends who read the Bible, and this was one of the reasons (but certainly not the only reason) that I read the Bible in high school. I still remember a conversation that I had with one of my good friends in the fall of my senior year about reading the Bible regularly and how he told me to not feel like I was unworthy to read it. I remember that I finished the New Testament for the first time shortly after that.

In the same way, when we have friends who cuss, party, drink heavily, do drugs, and fornicate, then we will end up like them too.  If you go through these things yourself, think about when and where you first started these vices, and you’ll find that your friends (or family) were there.

We imitate what we love, and this happens unconsciously for the most part, and it leads to a transformation of who we are.

The Saints as Imitators of Christ

In the same way, Christ as a human, becomes a model for us to imitate.  When we look at the characters of saints and consider the character of Christ, then you’ll find that Christ appears in them, and sometimes in a very clear way that it is almost uncanny.

This is by design because the saints have Christ living in them through the Holy Spirit.

To give an example, we can go back to the martyrdom of St. Polycarp of Smyrna.  He was persecuted for being a Christian, he was betrayed by some in his own family to the Roman officials, he spend his time praying before being taken to trial, he said “May God’s will be done,” and he courageously kept his faith to the end.

You may be sensing Christ in these few details, and that is because it is the Spirit of Christ living in Him that worked in Him to bear witness to Christ even by his death just like Christ did Himself.  If you read the actual Martyrdom of Polycarp, you’ll see that there are more similarities.  This is because the early Christians were well aware of the fact that Christ was truly living in them and as such His works and pattern of life would be evident in theirs too especially in the martyrs because their death was in the likeness of Christ’s life and death.

At the end of the martyrdom account, the Jews who were present “asked the magistrate not to hand over the body of Polycarp, ‘Or else, they may abandon the crucified one and begin to worship this man.’… who even watched when we were about to take the body from the fire.”

The writer of the martyrdom then explains, “They did not know that we will never be able either to abandon the Christ who suffered the salvation of the whole world of those who are saved, the blameless on behalf of sinners, or to worship anyone else.  For we worship this one, who is the Son of God, but the martyrs we love as disciples and imitators of the Lord, as they deserve on account of their matchless devotion to their own King and Teacher.  May we also become their partners and fellow disciples” (The Martyrdom of Polycarp, Holmes translation, 17.2-3, 325, 326).

That is, we can see the work of Christ clearly in the martyrs.

To make this clear, let me give an image.  Imagine you have a glow in the dark toy, and you bring it near a light source and let it remain in the presence of that light source.  When that toy goes into the darkness, then it glows like the light it received from the light source.  The light is not its own, but it bears the light of the main source.  If we keep that toy in the darkness, then the toy’s light will disappear, and it will become indistinguishable in the darkness along with everything else hidden in the darkness.  It will no longer have an identity of its own.  But if the toy comes back regularly to the light source, then it will continue to glow.

The saints (including we who are devoted to Christ) are the glow in the dark toys.  The light source is Christ.  The darkness is the world devoid of Christ.  Going back to him are the combined activities of prayer, confession, and the sacraments through which we receive the grace of Christ.

The martyrs and saints could do the type of courageous actions described above because it was Christ who was working in them that allowed them to stand firm like this. This came about through the Holy Spirit whom Christ sent and who proceeds from the Father. The Holy Spirit takes of what is Christ’s and gives it to us.

In his Letters on the Holy Spirit, St. Athanasius describes this reality saying, “Do not sadden the Holy Spirit in whom you have been sealed for the day of redemption[Eph 4.30]… Indeed, this anointing is the breath of the Son, so that whoever has the Spirit can say: We are the good odor of Christ[2 Cor 2.15]. The seal makes an imprint of the Son, so that whoever has been sealed has the form of Christ, as the Apostle says: My little children, with whom I am again in travail until Christ is formed in you![Gal 4.19]” (Letters to Serapion on the Holy Spirit, 2.12.2-2.12.3, 121).

Imitating Christ vs Idolizing Christ

When we see the character and work of Christ in the various saints, it is because it is His Light and His Spirit living in the saints.  It truly is His work, but it manifests itself in individuals from different languages and nations.  And even though the saints have died, their light has not stopped shining because it was not their light to begin with, but the light of Christ, and since Christ is God, that light can never stop shining because He lives forever.  They bear witness to Him in life and death so that we can have a precedent for what it looks like to live like Christ and to reflect His light and work in our own lives.

Yet many people approach Christ like an idol.  But this is gravely mistaken because an idol is a representation, not the reality, and it is usually a projection of something going on inside of us.  We give the idol our own forms, but in Christ we receive His form.

But those who idolize Christ turn Him into a teacher who wants us to have our most successful lives now. This is not Christ, but an image that people have created for themselves and projected it onto Christ.

Christ Himself rejects this way of thinking because He is the humanized God.  If God became human, then now He is clearly imitable, and if He is, and this is what can be, then His purpose is to live in all of us.

Sanctification

For all the reasons above, it is no happy mistake that the Church has always put the lives of the saints in front of us.  It has done so by constructing synaxaria, by having their names in the songs that we sing in the Church, by putting their icons in front of us in Church, and even by using their names to name our children.

When we are surrounded by the icons and stories that the icons naturally generate of so many martyrs and saints, then the result is that our faith is taken seriously.  It exudes a gravitas.

On the other hand, to ignore the saints’ lives and writings is simply to ignore the work of Christ and the Holy Spirit living in them to further the Kingdom of God.  This is one reason why I think so many in the West are leaving Christianity.  There is no gravitas.  By removing the remembrance of the saints from the churches, Protestant Christians think they are truly following Christ, but the reality is they have removed the concrete examples of what it looks like to live for Christ.  The result is that they set up an idolized version of Christ on whom they project their immediate fashions and desires.  This is inevitable because it is left to interpretation what it means to follow Christ, but in the saints, we have the clear examples of what it means to follow Christ.

For that reason, in the Apostolic Churches, there is gravitas of Christ.

“Therefore we also, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God” (Hebrews 12:1).

And in the words of the author of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, “The martyrs we love as disciples and imitators of the Lord, as they deserve on account of their matchless devotion to their own King and Teacher.  May we also become their partners and fellow disciples.”

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