Last Sunday after Epiphany; 27 February 2022; Last Epiphany C (RCL); Exodus 34:29-35; Psalm 99; 2 Corinthians 3:12 – 4:2; Luke 9:28-43a.
Paul turns the story of Moses’ face on its head, and makes it into a condemnation of Israel, for its failure to see Jesus as the Christ. In its initial setting, the story of Moses’ face was meant to show him as a true ‘friend of God,’ who could gaze on God’s glory without fear. The rest of us poor mortals couldn’t even gaze at Moses.
But setting aside that anti-Jewish screed, all three lessons have to do with our ability and inability to see God. In Exodus 20:18-21, the people tremble in fear at the voice of the Lord, and ask Moses to speak to them in God’s place. Here, Moses speaks to God as an intimate and communicates with the people, with a veil over his face. The holiness of God is thus protected from profanation by the people, and the people from the danger of God’s holiness.
Paul shifts our understanding of God’s glory as something sacred and set apart to something in which we participate. Now, we see it in a mirror (looking at our own faces? why else does one use a mirror), but we are being transformed into the same image we see in the mirror. The mirror, not the veil, is now our protection from the danger of God’s glory, but in such a way as to attract us to that glory, rather than shield us from it.
In Luke’s telling of the Transfiguration, we have all kinds of allusions to Israel’s story. Of course, both Moses and Elijah encountered God on the top of a mountain, Moses in the presence of a thunderous voice, which terrified the people, and Elijah in the sound of sheer silence, which terrified him, and then gave him a gruesome mission. Here, the voice says simply, “This is my Son, my chosen; listen to him.”
The cloud is likely the pillar of cloud that led the Israelites through the wilderness, and settled on the tent of meeting when God was in residence. Moses and Elijah speak to Jesus about his exodus, which he was about to accomplish in Jerusalem.
The RCL adds as optional the story of the encounter with the demon-possessed boy, which seems an odd accompaniment to the story of the Transfiguration, especially taking into account Jesus’ impatience or anger at “this generation.” But it is also interesting that the boy is his father’s only son. The juxtaposition between the glory of the Father’s Only Son, and the spirit-possession of this father’s only son is jarring. The disciples have yet to understand Jesus’ predictions of his passion, and Luke tells us that the Transfiguration takes place eight days (one week) after Peter’s confession of Jesus as the Christ.
Perhaps this “faithless and perverse generation” has failed to see the glory of the Only Son in the demon-possessed boy, and that is why the disciples cannot cast it out. Chrysostom said that if we cannot see Christ in the beggar at the church door, we will not be able to see him in the chalice on the altar. If we share in Christ’s human nature by virtue of baptism, and participate in it in the eucharist, then his glory is ours. In 1 Corinthians 13, Paul says that now we see only riddles in a mirror, but then face to face. Removing the veil means seeing the divine glory in ourselves and in others. The glory of God does not immunize us from suffering (as the passion of Jesus shows so clearly), but shows us the divine in the beggar at the church door, and in ourselves when we see aright.