After the Order of Melchizedek

Alexander Ponekhalsky (Alexandru Ponehalschi) (fl.1746–82) was born in present-day Ukraine and settled for four decades among the Romanians of Maramureș in the Carpathians, becoming one of the most renowned artists in the region. He was incredibly prolific, painting some eight hundred icons (Baboș 2024: 15, 25).

One of those is Christ the True Vine, an icon type that remains popular in Romania and other eastern European countries. Even within the Church of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary in Călinești Căeni, Ponekhalsky painted the subject at least three times: on a portable triptych wing, as a prothesis icon (the area behind the iconostasis), and, pictured here, on the northeastern wall of the sanctuary (Ibid 2024: 37, 147, 152).

The mural shows Christ seated on a draped altar, naked except for a loincloth and a crown of thorns. Out of his side wound grows a grapevine, which arches over his body. From the bent-over vine he grabs a cluster of grapes, squeezing their juices into a chalice. To his left, the Romanian inscription translates to ‘Jesus Christ, giver of life’. And on the right, an angel holds a scroll bearing words from the Office of Oblation (Proskomide), recited in preparation for the sacrament of the Eucharist: ‘You have redeemed us from the curse of the law by your precious blood’.

The icon represents Christ as both the sacrifice that is offered (the victim, though a willing one) and the one who makes the offering (the priest); his hands prepare the drink, and yet that drink is procured from his own torn body.

This idea of Jesus as both offered and offerer is expressed in the Prayer of the Cherubic Hymn in the Divine Liturgy: ‘For you are the One who offers and the One who is offered, the One who is given and the One who is received, O Christ our God’. And in Hebrews 7:27: ‘He has no need, like those high priests, to offer sacrifices daily…; he did this once for all when he offered up himself’ (emphasis mine).

References

Baboș, Alexandru. 2024. The Icons of Alexander Ponekhalsky / Jertfa di la mine zugrău Alexa cel păcătos, Museikon Studies 5, (Cluj-Napoca: Editura Mega), available at https://www.academia.edu/126754025/The_Icons_of_Alexander_Ponekhalsky_Jertfa_di_la_mine_zugr%C4%83u_Alexa_cel_p%C4%83c%C4%83tos [accessed 31 March 2025]

Nicolae, Jan. 2014. ‘«Iisus cu viţa» este cea mai iubită icoană a lui Hristos, în Ardeal’, Formula AS, available at http://arhiva.formula-as.ro/2014/1125/spiritualitate-39/pr-prof-jan-nicolae-iisus-cu-vita-este-cea-mai-iubita-icoana-a-lui-hristos-in-ardeal-17977 [accessed 31 March 2025]

Executed by anonymous Antwerp Mannerist painters, this eucharistic-themed triptych shows Jesus offering himself as the bread of life (John 6:35) who feeds and redeems.

The central panel depicts the Last Supper. Jesus and his disciples are seated in a lavish Renaissance interior before a brocade cloth of honour. As the host of the Passover meal, Jesus leans over the table to give a piece of bread to Judas, who clutches his moneybag and whose foot is poised to leave the room. After this, Jesus will institute what the Church often calls the Lord’s Supper, a ritual to regularly commemorate his death. This scene is the antitype of the two ‘types’ portrayed in the wings.

Typology is a Christian way of seeing the person and work of Christ foreshadowed in the Old Testament. On the left, one such ‘shadow’ of Christ is Melchizedek, an ancient Canaanite priest-king who ‘has neither beginning of days nor end of life; rather, resembling the Son of God, he continues a priest for ever’ (Hebrews 7:3). Melchizedek predated the Levitical priesthood that began with Aaron, the older brother of Moses. (And Moses, in a further typological pairing, is depicted as a bronze statue above Christ’s head.) But Melchizedek served El Elyon, ‘God Most High’ (Genesis 14:18).

Hebrews 7, and this left wing, recounts the story from Genesis 14, where Abraham returns triumphantly from the armed expedition that saved his nephew Lot and is presented with bread and wine, and blessed, by Melchizedek.

Christ arises as a priest ‘after the order of Melchiz’edek, … the surety of a better covenant’ (Hebrews 7:11, 22)—‘better’ because ‘he continues for ever. Consequently, he is able for all time to save those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them’ (Hebrews 7:24b–25).

The right wing of the altarpiece depicts Moses and the Israelites in the desert fed by manna from heaven (Exodus 16:11–36; Numbers 11:7–9), and the outer panels (not pictured) depict the Temptation of Adam and Eve.

The Latin inscription on the lower section of the original frame that runs beneath all three panels makes clear how the giving of bread in blessing unites all three episodes. Taken from Matthew 26:26, it translates:

While they were eating Jesus took bread, and blessed, and broke it, and gave it to his disciples, saying…

This icon from early seventeenth-century Russia is of the rare and enigmatic ‘You Are a Priest Forever’ type, its name taken from Hebrews 7:17. (It is not to be confused with Christ the Great High Priest / Great Hierarch; see an example from 1702, held in the Alexander Nevsky Crypt Museum in Sofia, Bulgaria.) It portrays the self-offering of Christ as high priest, an act that slays death forever.

Though the earthly reality of the Crucifixion is signalled by the hill of Golgotha at the foot of the cross, the iconographer relocates the event from outside Jerusalem to the heavenly realm, emphasizing its cosmic import and Christ’s exaltation, for he is ‘seated at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in heaven, a minister in the sanctuary and the true tent which is set up not by man but by the Lord’ (Hebrews 8:1–2). Through the cross, he has penetrated the veil into the very presence of God and gives us the same access.

Christ’s crucified body is enfolded by the wings of a white seraph—an iconography adapted from Western depictions of the stigmatization of Saint Francis (Kriza 2016: 116)—and flanked by two red seraphs. An Orthodox commentary known as On the Ancient of Days, which survives in a late sixteenth-century manuscript, states that the three seraphs here symbolize Christ’s soul (Kriza 2024: 259)—but they surely also evoke visionary descriptions from Scripture of the throne of God (Isaiah 6; Revelation 4).

Christ is represented, symbolically, twice more in the icon: as a youthful, fiery red warrior-king holding a sword that destroys the works of the devil, and as ‘a priest’ standing in ‘the power of an indestructible life … holy, blameless, unstained, ... exalted above the heavens … a Son who has been made perfect for ever’ (Hebrews 7:16, 26, 28).

The thrice-depicted Christ—priest, king, sacrifice—is enthroned inside a luminous rhombus backed by a red rectangle representing the heavens spread out like a curtain (Isaiah 40:22; Tradigo 2006: 231). In the four corners are the four living creatures of the Apocalypse, who sing ‘Holy, holy, holy’ (Revelation 4:6–8) to the sacrificial yet victorious Lamb who makes peace by his own blood.

References

Kriza, Ágnes. 2016. ‘The Russian Gnadenstuhl’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 79: 79–130

______. 2024. ‘“You are a Priest Forever”: An Anti-Heretical Mnemonic Icon’, in Enigma in Rus and Medieval Slavic Cultures, ed. By Ágnes Kriza with William F. Ryan and Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, Sense, Matter, and Medium, vol. 8 (Berlin: De Gruyter)

Tradigo, Alfredo. 2006. Icons and Saints of the Eastern Orthodox Church, trans. by Stephen Sartarelli (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum)