Sermon for February 15th
Sermon for February 15th
It was often believed that to see God face to face would result in a person’s death. This wasn’t due to the fact that God’s face was a private, holy thing that upon viewing would incur God’s wrath and vengeance. It was simply that this was the Divine, the author of all creation. How could any mortal possibly look upon the progenitor of all life and think that they could withstand the magnificence of what they were seeing? It would be overwhelming in every sense of the word. This plays out throughout scripture. Moses, in our reading from Exodus, goes up the mountain and into the cloud, where he spends forty days and forty nights. He was in communion with God and when he descends from the mountain top, he bears with him the first set of the ten commandments. But at no point does it say that he saw God. In the text, God’s presence is explained as a devouring fire. It was a representation of the Divine, not God in God’s pure form. Even Moses couldn’t bear that experience, and so God often came in the guise of fire, and as a voice, and as a presence, but always at something of a distance. The ancients knew that to see God was to be undone.
This shows up in other places in scripture. In Isaiah, the prophet sees God seated on a throne, with seraphim attending God. But the point that gets special attention is God’s robe, which fills the temple. One would assume that it is the fringe of the cloak that Isaiah sees, not the full magnificence of God. Always, the true magnificence of God is screened from mortal sight, so as the shield them from something they simply could not comprehend. What they do see is often enough, leaving them changed forever.
Oddly enough, this ancient way of explaining how the true form of the Divine is shielded from our mortal eyes tracks with modern scientific understanding of the universe and our ability to comprehend creation. We think that our eyes, ears and other senses give us a true representation of the universe. But our senses are crude tools that allow us to understand enough to survive and even marvel at creation, but we do not see the full scope of creation. We see what our senses gather and what our brain extrapolates. And there is nothing to say that how I view something like a mountain is exactly the same way you view a mountain. Our bodies and senses are not precise instruments. They are tools we use to navigate the world we live in. Many believe that if we were to see beyond the scope of what our senses offer, it would be too much for us to handle and our minds would collapse.
It is interesting that both the ancient Israelites and the modern scientists of our day hold a similar notion. We are limited as human beings. We cannot come close to discerning the true nature of the world around us and whether we see the world through a lens of science or a lens of faith, it amounts to this same conclusion. And so where does that leave us? With a God we can never know because we simply can’t? We don’t have the capacity. Does it leave us with a far distant God, transcendent and unknowable? If that were the case, then the ancient faith of the Israelites, which eventually led to the rise of our faith tradition, would have been no different from the other faith traditions that surrounded them. They would have worshipped a unknowable, distant God that perhaps would show up in a pillar of fire or a burning bush, but never in a way that felt approachable or knowable.
On first blush, our Transfiguration text seems to be cut from a similar cloth. The disciples are confronted with Jesus, not as they have known him, but transfigured. He demonstrates now some measure of his glory and divinity and they are overwhelmed. The likely reality was that this was still not the full measure of Christ’s transfigured form. Rather, it was a taste of what he was. A fully transfigured Christ may have completely broken the disciples. But even this glimpse is enough. They don’t know how to react or what to say. They are seeing something that no other mortal of their generation has even seen.
Left there, this text would serve to reinforce the overwhelming, transcendent nature of God. But that is not where the text stops. Christ doesn’t go through the rest of his journey in this new, transfigured state. Rather, he returns to being the Jesus they knew and loved. He journeys to the cross as a human. People come to know him as a human.
I mentioned earlier that God would only show God’s self in one guise or another in order to spare the one who was encountering God. One could make the argument that in Christ, God is doing that again. Jesus was the disguise of God walking in our midst, a muted reality for us to know God and not be overwhelmed by the divine.
But in the person of Jesus, we encounter the true enigma and mysterious lynch pin of our faith. Jesus is God, though not in his full glory. He is a subdued version of the Divine, a version we can come to know and love and not feel overwhelmed by. But Christ is also the truest expression of God. To know Jesus is to know the heart of God, without artifice and without disguise.
The Jesus who appeared to the disciples on the mountaintop was a measure of Christ’s divinity. But the Jesus who walked down from the mountaintop with his disciples, though diminished in glory, was the truest representation of God. Christ’s love, mercy, forgiveness, his teaching and his challenging lessons, his healing, his death, and his resurrection, is the truest revelation of God. Jesus is both diminished and on full display.
Only in God’s infinite mystery can we say that we can never look upon the true face of God as a mortal being but then say, with equal certainty, that we have looked on the face of God every time that we have experienced love, every time we have marvelled at the great mysteries of the universe. Have you ever stood on the mountain side, after a long and arduous hike, sweaty and tired, only to be utterly transfixed by the beauty of our surroundings? The mountains are not God, nor are the trees, the sky or the water. But in the mountain, the trees, the sky, and the water, we know God. We know some measure of the beauty of God’s nature. Yes, we could never look upon God face to face, just as we could never comprehend the nature of the universe we live in. But God still reveals God’s true self in the world around us. This isn’t an unknowable God. This is a God who made God’s self known in Jesus, and who continues to make God’s self known everywhere we look, if we have eyes to see.
We are about to embark on our journey of Lent. Lent has often been seen as a more somber time, where we put away the alleluias and the overt joy of our Sunday celebrations. But perhaps, in this quieter, reflective time of the church year, we can begin to see again with eyes of faith. It is easy right now to see with eyes of fear and anxiety, wherein only the sad and ugly things seem real. But God is still there. God is still revealing God’s self to us.
As we journey through Lent, may we learn to see this revealing God again and in so doing, find hope. As we train ourselves to do this through these forty days of Lent, we will be confronted with the greatest revelation of God, the crucifixion. With eyes of despair, Good Friday is a horrible moment. But with eyes of faith, we can again see what this moment is all about and how God’s love is on full display on the cross, as Christ’s outstretched arms seek to embrace the entire world.
Amen