2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2
We’ve come to the last Sunday of the season of Epiphany.
I think few of our members grew up in churches that celebrated the classical church year, or even used the lectionary. I’m hearing though that many churches have now embraced it. It has the advantage of restraining a preacher from only preaching his favorite passages. It ensures that churchgoers will hear a wide sampling of scripture from throughout the bible. On the other hand, it does emphasize a tradition of interpretation that is sometimes out of step with more current scholarship.
The church year roughly follows the contours of Jesus’ life: He was born: Christmas. He revealed God: Epiphany, he successfully defeated the temptations of the flesh: Lent. He suffered betrayal and crucifixion: Holy Week. He rose from the dead: Easter. He ascended into heaven and sent the Holy Spirit to empower his church: Pentecost.
And so our scriptures and sermons during Epiphany are intense and mysterious, because encounters with God are intense and mysterious.
Today, the appointed Gospel lesson is Luke’s account of the transfiguration. You may remember the story. Jesus takes his three closest disciples up to the top of a mountain to pray. They fall asleep but are awakened by an amazing sight. Jesus’ appearance, the Greek says, changed to something other, and his clothes shone dazzling white. Then there appeared Moses and Elijah speaking with him. Then a cloud overshadowed them, and they were terrified. God’s voice spoke in this awful darkness: “This is my Son! Listen to him!”
Taken alone, it’s an intense, dramatic scene. But looked at in the context of the story of Jesus, it came after the disciples were horrified by Jesus’ announcing that he must go to Jerusalem to be betrayed and crucified, and after three days, rise again. Worse, he followed up by crying out, “Whoever would be my disciple, let him deny himself, take up his cross and follow me!”
So the deal here is that the disciples were very dismayed that they were not following the future victorious king of the world who would promote them to high positions in his administration. According to him, they were being led to a horrible death by torture.
And so the transfiguration scene is God’s reaction to their unspoken suspicions that this Jesus wasn’t actually the Messiah, but rather a nutcase leading them all to their doom. They were losing faith in their Messiah, and so God had to come down and remind them who their Messiah was, by showing them a preview of his coming glory, as well as its consistency with the story of God’s people, all the way back to Moses.
Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians is mostly an apology for another conflict that began with Paul reneging on visiting them on his way to Macedonia. One of the members of the Corinthian church apparently called Paul’s whole witness into question as a result. At first, Paul wrote angrily to them, and snippets of that letter were included in Second Corinthians by some later editor, most scholars think.
But in today’s passage, Paul is continuing to make his case that his witness was honest and open, that he wasn’t hiding some other agenda. This leads him to compare himself to his former self, Saul of Tarsus, a hardcore Pharisee commissioned to persecute and even murder Jewish followers of Jesus. He remembers Exodus, the story of the newly freed slaves that first encountered God’s glory in Moses, but were terrified of it, just as Jesus’ followers were terrified by the eerie darkness of God’s presence. Because of their fear, Moses hid his shining face behind a veil, because, as Paul says, their minds were hardened against the grace of God. How could they not have been? Having suffered for generations in slavery to a human god, Pharaoh, they found themselves in the hands of an immensely more powerful God, Yahweh, who was laying down a bunch of rules, along with dire threats of terrible vengeance for disobedience.
How do fearful slaves hear God’s law but as a new and more dangerous cage? And what is the likely spiritual outcome of such a perspective? Like a child ordered to stay away from a cookie jar, the problem becomes how to get around the rule, and once around, how to avoid suffering the consequences of disobedience.
The child may think, for example, that if his parents don’t see him taking cookies, they won’t know, and he would therefore get away with it. So he’ll tell his parents he would never steal from the cookie jar, but the moment they’re not looking…
But of course, the parent knows how many cookies were in there, so the child is confronted. If he’s lucky enough to have a brother, he may try to blame it on him, particularly if his brother hasn’t learned to talk yet. Or he may decide that the punishment is worth the cookie, and see it as an easy payoff for the pleasure of cookie eating. Unless the parent makes the punishment more painful than the cookie is pleasurable, this could go on for a long time.
What the child doesn’t know is that self-restraint is a skill that will serve him very well in the world when he grows up. This is what Paul means by not seeing the glory behind the law. He only sees the law as an obstacle to his desire. His mind is hardened against the love of his parents. It’s like a veil over their kind faces. He seems them as unreasonable tyrants.
In turning to Christ, the veil is removed. The hope of our new creation, the spiritual body, the union of flesh and spirit, is what is hidden behind that veil. Our transformation from clever but easily spooked hominids into God’s children of light is revealed in the resurrection and glorification of Christ, the firstborn of the dead.
Gazing on Christ, his life and teaching, is seeing our own transformation, as if we looked in a mirror and instead of seeing ourselves, we see Christ. And as we stare at him, we begin to look more like him, the beloved child of God filled with God’s Spirit, who willingly and joyfully denies their own desires for the sake of others, and less like ourselves, a willful child trying to break the rules and get away with it. The old Adam is being slain, the new child of God is being born.
We’re about to enter Lent on Wednesday, the season of the year when we remember and practice Jesus’ confrontation with temptation. Traditionally, Christians in Lent often give up some bad habit or do without some luxury. Liz and I are going on a cruise. One of my colleagues said, “So you’re giving up work for Lent.” In a way it’s true. I love my job, sometimes too much. It might be something I need to look at.
But what I would suggest is that this Lent, Christians everywhere might respond to a two-thousand year-old email from God asking for five things you’ve done in the past year in accordance with Jesus Christ’s agenda. Bullet points should include, feeding the hungry, giving the thirsty something to drink, welcoming the stranger, clothing the naked, caring for the sick, visiting the imprisoned, biggest points for denying yourself for the sake of others, or taking up a cause on behalf of the weak against the strong. Failure to respond may lead to future termination.
Just a little joke. Let’s have a sense of humor now.
My point is actually that, in Lent, we give more attention to Jesus than we do to all the human gods and goddesses that are constantly entertaining us on our screens. Look into the mirror and gaze on your future, the new creation you were born to be.
Amen.
