This 16th century detailed icon of St. John the Baptist with Scenes from His Life is found in the Yaroslavl Museum of Art, Russia. He is called, Forerunner, Precursor, Angel of the Desert. All around the border there are scenes from John's life. Some are biblical, others are apocryphal, like the image on the left where an angel leads the saint as a little child into the desert.
But notice this, the central figure of John the Baptist wears wings. He is not an angel. Why wings then? In other icons, the wings are even larger than these, signifying the message of John: The Christ I announce has cosmic significance. They are often colored wings —dark red, green, bright orange with white borders. We can detect similar colors in the planets and stars, even without a telescope.
This is simply my conjecturing: but wings are for spreading and for flying — that in Christ — announced by John, God has flung himself in fullness out of the heavenlies into our realm. Then further, that perhaps these wings suggest we might take our own flight from the un-spiritual world of our own mal-creation: the plastic pile-up, the oil soak, the money grab, the gun lust and weapon idolization, the toxification of water, the animal and tree extinction, the child inconvenience, the shopping addiction.
Finally, see the plants growing around the feet of John. They symbolize the full-blossoming of life when Christ comes into the world — beginning with our own personal worlds. The worlds of heart and mind. This is the message Jesus sends back to John.
18 The disciples of John told him of all these things. 19 And John, calling to him two of his disciples, sent them to the Lord, saying, "Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?" 20 And when the men had come to Jesus, they said, "John the Baptist has sent us to you, saying, 'Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?'" 21 In that hour Jesus cured many of diseases and plagues and evil spirits, and on many that were blind he bestowed sight. 22 And he answered them, "Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have good news preached to them. 23 And blessed is he who takes no offense at me."
Ah, there it is — Jesus lays out for John a world that is full-blooming with God's wedding-like love for us.
