Unveiled

The scriptures referred to are Exodus 34:29-35, 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2, and Luke 9:28-36.

Facial coverings are meant to conceal. Aside from brides and children on Halloween, veils and masks usually hide what's ugly—the twisted face of the Phantom of the Opera, the scarred proprietor of the wax museum in the Vincent Price movie House of Wax, and the true identity of every monster in Scooby Doo. The Ku Klux Klan wore masks to hide the ugly truth that some of your neighbors were violent racists. Bank robbers have worn stocking masks, an updated version of the veil, to make their squashed features look ugly and thereby disguise their identities. Even the curtain, the veil's larger “cousin,” covers up unpleasant things, like the messy interior of your house from passersby, or in the Wizard of Oz, where it hides the ugly truth that the awesome and powerful wizard is just a theatrical trick of an old conman. Even superheroes wear masks to hide their identities from ugly retaliation by their archenemies.

In contrast, Moses used a veil to cloak the reflected glory of God. Every time he came back from talking to God, his face shone. And it freaked out the Israelites. They probably weren't listening very closely to the words of God that Moses was delivering because they were too busy trying not to look at his weirdly shining face. Once Moses realized this was happening, he covered his face with a veil to minimize the effect.

By the way, the Hebrew word which means “beams of light radiating” was also used for horns projecting from a head. St. Jerome, translator of the Bible into Latin, used the wrong word, making it sound like Moses grew horns. That's why Michelangelo's otherwise magnificent statue of Moses has those two distracting horns on his head. This mistranslation also led medieval antisemites to say that Jews had horns, making them less human and more satanic.

But the real significance of the incident recorded in our passage from Exodus is that God is light. He appears to Moses as a burning bush, and to the Israelites as a column of fire leading them through the wilderness and as fire on the mountain where Moses goes to receive the law. Humans are created in the image of God and are meant to reflect his radiance. Moses spent 40 days and 40 nights on Mt. Sinai and literally reflected this splendor. But the unfiltered glory of God makes most people uncomfortable. So Moses relented and veiled his face so his followers won't have to see what a person who is close to God is like.

This incident is not discussed much by Christians, although it bears on two of the other passages in today's lectionary. Our gospel, Luke, follows both Matthew and Mark in telling the story of the transfiguration right after the turning point in Jesus' ministry. After Peter declares him to be the Messiah, Jesus starts telling the disciples that he will be crucified. All of his talk about his death and resurrection was freaking the Twelve out and so Jesus takes the core of the group, Peter, James and John, up to the top of a mountain in order for them to talk to God about it.

While they are praying, the appearance of Jesus' face alters and his clothes become dazzlingly bright. And if that weren't enough, standing next to Jesus are Moses and Elijah, the greatest representatives of the Law and the Prophets in the Hebrew Bible. They are talking about Jesus's coming departure at Jerusalem. Both of these men left the world in unusual ways. Elijah was taken up to heaven in a fiery chariot. Moses died on a mountain overlooking the promised land and was buried by God in an unknown place. And Jesus will have the strangest departure from this world ever. So they are backing him up by endorsing his message that he will first die and then rise again.

But the disciples aren't listening. Shaking off the sleepiness of a long prayer session, they are agog at Jesus' guests. Peter babbles that they ought to build some tabernacles or shelters for the three holy figures. Even though Peter is not thinking clearly, he is perhaps remembering the tabernacle that the Israelites carried with them in the wilderness. It became a mobile shrine and the place to meet God during the exodus. Perhaps Peter is thinking they can capture the glory of the moment and make it last by building three tents so they can stay on the mountain like gurus and grace Judea with the word of God. Or maybe he is thinking that if he can get Jesus to settle down on this mountain with his friends, he won't go to Jerusalem and get himself killed.

Whatever jumbled thoughts are in Peter's head, his words are cut off when a cloud engulfs them. Moses met God on Mt. Sinai by entering a cloud. And, just as what happened then, the voice in the cloud doesn't obscure things but clears them up. “This is my beloved son. Listen to him!” In other words, no more nonsense about telling the man you've just declared the Messiah that he doesn't know what he's talking about when it comes to his death. Hear what he has to say!

And then there's no one left but Jesus and the disciples. And it's what everyone needed. Jesus gets the encouragement he needs to face the ordeal in Jerusalem. And the disciples see the glory of Jesus unveiled, even though they still don't understand exactly how what he's saying fits in with what they think they know about the Messiah.

Obvious parallels are there: Moses, mountaintops, clouds, shining faces, freaked out followers. But there are contrasts as well. Moses came down with a shining face and communicated what God told him but when Jesus comes down off of this mountain, nobody's face is glowing and the three disciples are too affected to tell anyone.

In his epistle, Paul connects the glory of God both veiled and unveiled. The glory of God that was reflected in Moses' face was dimmed and eventually faded. And Paul says that same veil mutes the splendor of God's written revelation. People tend to read it and then filter out what is truly marvelous about it.

That's true of many preachers and churches. They take what should be good news and they muffle it. They flatten it and make it sound like any other inspirational message. The leader of a retreat I went to said that he knew of a church where the vestry (board of lay leaders) took the priest to task for talking too much about Jesus. “How are we going to attract new people if everything is all about Jesus?” There are those who would rather the Episcopal church become the liturgical arm of the Unitarians.

The Evangelicals can filter the gospel too, if every sermon is about salvation, especially a narrow interpretation of it that makes it all about the afterlife and never about this one, or all about your private life and not your public one as well. The opposite error is when a church makes the gospel all about social issues as if Christianity were just another social program or a party's political platform. All of these unbalanced, one-note ways of reading the gospel mute how glorious it is. Usually this is to mask how radical it is.

The Lord is the Spirit, Paul reminds us. And God's Holy Spirit is not barred from any area of life or creation. He is not merely a still small voice in our head, nor is he the voice of the mob. He is not confined only to personal spirituality, nor to the social arena. He is not excluded from sexual behavior nor is he primarily concerned with that subject. The changes the Spirit makes in us have repercussions in every part of our individual and corporate lives. He is God without borders.

“Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” That's a passage of scripture rarely preached on because it's scary. And that's because when we say freedom we mean different things. Freedom means one thing when a teenager says it and another thing when a recovering addict says it. It has a different emphasis when said by an artist, by a cancer survivor, and by an immigrant. It can even mean different things to different prisoners, if one is in the general population and one is on death row. That's because freedom is never really defined until you ask, “What is it freedom from, and what is it freedom to do?”

From the context here, Paul is talking about freedom from a diminished, narrow sense of the gospel and freedom to fully reflect the glory of God. We are to mirror God's splendor and reflect it to each other and to the world. By doing so we are transformed into the image of God, moving from one degree of his glory to the next. Our God is infinite and no one Christian can reflect his image in its entirety. But all of us can come together to reflect the many facets of God. It's like one of those portraits of Jesus that are made up of hundreds of little photos of people, using them like pieces of a mosaic. It wouldn't work if we were all the same. We need variation and contrast to make an accurate picture of our huge, holy, loving God.

Recognizing that we all reflect some aspects of God and that by the mercy of God we are called to unique ministries that combine to reflect his glory, we must not lose heart, Paul says. We also need to make sure we don't dull our ability to reflect the nature of God by doing shameful things. Every time the secret sins of Christians are revealed, it makes it harder for other people to see God's goodness.

We don't practice cunning, either. The world has various tricks to promote its version of things, using spin to make its point of view look different from what it really is. We are not to engage in such things. We are not to falsify the word of God. Or as Eugene Peterson translates this passage in The Message, “We refuse to wear masks and play games. We don't maneuver and manipulate behind the scenes. And we don't twist God's Word to suit ourselves.”

Ultimately, it comes down to trust. Do we trust God's Word to liberate and heal and save people from their self-destructive ways? Do we trust the God who is behind scripture? If not, maybe we need to look with fresh eyes at his revelation, which in Greek literally means “unveiling.” God has nothing to hide. Do we?

Originally preached on February 14, 2010. It has been revised and updated.