Main news for 28 March 2026

The Torah gives us several grounds for the second commandment of the Decalogue, which forbids every kind of sacred image, not only pagan images but also Yahwistic ones. One of these grounds comes down to the fact that God never revealed Himself to anyone among His people in any concrete image with which He could be identified. At first glance, such a statement can look strange: after all, it was near Horeb, where Moses first met God, that He revealed Himself to him in the shining cloud that Moses took from a distance for fire.

But by this radiance God only marked the place of His presence, and it has no relation to His essence. The mystery of God's inner, as we would say, personal life remains a mystery to us in any case. It is open only to the Savior; but in order to understand it, we would have to contain within ourselves, as He does, all the fullness of God, and such containing is, of course, impossible for us. That is why the Torah forbids not only pagan sacred images, but also Yahwistic ones. Every sacred image in antiquity claimed precisely to reveal to the worshiper the essence of the deity he worshiped, so that the worshiper could share in that essence. But in the case of Yahweh this was impossible: His essence remained hidden from the human being by definition. Here what theologians call the transcendence of God manifested itself.

One might think that theophanies could give an idea of God's essence. This was so in the case of pagan gods and cults, but not in the case of the God of Israel, because here theophany did not imply the full overcoming of the abyss that separates God from the human being. A partial overcoming made communion with God possible, but not knowledge of the essence. That is why identifying the theophany with God in this case would be like identifying a person you are speaking with on the phone with the handset from which his voice is heard.

The situation changed radically only with the coming into the world of Christ, who brought the Kingdom with Him. Of course, even there, in the Kingdom, the distinction between God and the human being does not disappear; but there, at least, the abyss that completely separates them disappears. It disappears, of course, not because the human being becomes equal to God, but because the Kingdom is wholly permeated by the breath of God and His love. But there is no image here either. Instead, a relationship appears here, replacing that image. It is a relationship guaranteed by the One who brought the Kingdom into the world.