SUNDAY MESSAGE (audio message)
BY HIS EMINENCE THE METROPOLITAN
KYTHIRA & ANTIKYTHIRA SERAPHIM
FIRST SUNDAY OF LENT - OF ORTHODOXY
(01-03-2026)
WRITTEN DIVINE PROCLAMATION
Today, the first Sunday of Lent is called the Sunday of Orthodoxy. As today, our holy Orthodox Church triumphantly condemned iconoclasm and restored the holy icons.
Icons dominated very early in the piety and worship of the Church. They followed life and tradition and expressed its teaching and ethos. Their defence was a defence of the foundation of the Christian faith, which is the incarnation of Christ for the salvation of man. The icons bear witness to the fruits of the Divine Incarnation, they represent the reality of the Divine consent, the Divine Economy, by which the world is saved. The icon is not only an ornament of the temple or an object of worship: before it the faithful pray, embrace it, treat it as a sacred object. It is not an idol, which is a substitute for the invisible God, but a sign of His living presence in the Church. The Fathers of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, following Basil the Great, stressed that «the honour of the icon is on the original». In worshipping the icon, the faithful do not worship a painting with colours, but the one who is represented on it, Christ, the Mother of God, the Holy One.
The icon is a window to another world, the eternal and spiritual world, said Fr. It is the opening to heaven. So the images have their originals in heaven. They have an eternal impact. That's why every icon is the tangible space where the Holy Spirit acts. They are relations between God, man and creation.
Those who do not have spiritual conditions cannot understand the sacred secret world of icons. In order to understand the icons we need to do what the right icon painters do: practice, prayer and inner purification. Only then the supramundane world of sacred icons is revealed to us.
The icons of the churches have now been restored. But there is another icon, which is the basis and the beginning of all icons. This icon, unfortunately, is thrown away. It is our image. It is us, whom God has created in His own image, so that we may become in His own image. But we do not live rightly and we corrupt our image.
When will we restore this image? When will we place it in the place it deserves?;
Archimandrite Frumentios Demetriou
