Dear Friends,
Just a note from an Eastern Christian perspective . . .
When we adore Jesus, we are adoring a composite Divine Being - that is Someone Who has our nature.
God Himself mediates salvation to us through the “Man Jesus Christ” as St Paul says.
The veneration of Saints is not to go to “middle men” at all. Jesus lives in His Saints through the Holy Spirit. Jesus mediates His salvation to us and lives in our hearts. To pray to a saint is to pray to Jesus who lives in the saint.
Devotion to the saints and to icons/images for that matter is intimately connected with the Incarnation of the Divine Word. God became Man so that we might see Him and be all the more intimately united with Him.
He didn’t appear in the clouds, but of a Virgin in a manger. He taught that anyone who receives one of His witnesses, receives Him. And whatsoever you do to the “least of My brethren, that you do UNTO ME.”
In the Incarnation, God unites Himself with our humanity and offers us the real possibility of not only being saved, but also deified in Him through the Holy Spirit.
In the Eastern Church, the saints are all depicted in heaven of similar height and look - they are all made to look like the proto-icon of God the Word, Jesus Christ, Whom they have taken on themselves.
To venerate an icon or a saint etc. is to honour the Incarnation. The Seventh Ecumenical Council was a victory of Orthodoxy (i.e. right belief and right worship) because it proclaimed that icons could be made of God the Word Incarnate. Just as a previous council declared the term “Theotokos” as the orthodox confession of the Incarnate Lord Jesus, so too the icons of Him and His saints and their veneration are a confession of the truth of the Incarnation. To refuse to venerate an icon or a saint is to, on various levels, deny the Incarnation took place (even if that is not our expressed intention).
In Christ, we become a “little Christ” which is the best possible definition of what a saint truly is.
To venerate such a “little Christ” is to honour the Christ Who lives in the saints by means of His Holy Spirit.
That is the message of Incarnational Christianity and of the Catholic Church of the Apostles.
There can be no wavering in this.
Alex