In the Eastern Orthodox tradition of iconography – supposedly one of the first icons that every monk-painter must paint at the start of their apprenticeship is the vision of the Christ, transfigured and shining on the mountaintop with Moses and Elijah, and the stunned disciples nearby.
Of all the biblical scenes that could be chosen – it is this scene – the Transfiguration – that is the starting point for a lifetime of icon painting.1
The idea here is that the painter would then paint all the rest of their icons in the light of the Transfigured Christ.
Iconographers don’t so much paint in and with colors, as they paint with light, their works are invitations and mirrors to ponder and experience the illuminating glory of God.
Our scriptures today are full of encounters with illuminating glory.
There is Peter and John and James who witness the glory of Jesus dazzling like lightning.
There is Moses, who encounters the glory of God on the mountaintop and whose very face was changed by this glimpse of the God of mercy and grace and steadfast love.
There is Paul, who waxes poetic on the glory of the new covenant of God through the Spirit of Christ.
All these examples lead to a question: How do we respond to God’s glory?
Glory is God showing up in a majestic, powerful way. Glory is God’s honor and renown…God’s illuminating brightness. Glory is magnificence and beauty.
Glory is less an attribute of God – than the recognition of the full weightiness and mystery and power of who God is.
So, how do we respond when we encounter the mysterious glory of God?
Moses gives us one intriguing response.
In the book fo Exodus – we get the story of God delivering the people of Israel out of slavery in Egypt. They are journeying together through the wilderness.
There, Moses ascends the mountain of God, entering the cloud for forty days and forty nights, receiving from God the stone tablets of the covenant, written by the very finger of God (Exod 31:18). But while he’s lingering in mountain heights, the people down below have made for themselves a golden calf to worship. Moses has to implore God not to destroy the people for their idolatry. Moses reminds God of God’s covenant. But Moses himself is furious and he smashes the stone tablets and then with his supporters lashes out in violence against their own people.
So Moses for a second time, re-ascends the mountain and implores God to “Show me your glory, I pray.”
God responds by placing Moses in the cleft of the rock on the mountain, and passing over, proclaiming Godself as YHWH, “a God merciful and gracious and slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.” Moses brought with him stone tablets to write down God’s words of covenant to bring to the people.
And so when Moses descended the mountain to the people for a second time he was a changed man…even if he didn’t quite realize it yet. We’re told that “Moses didn’t know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God.”
There is ambiguity with in the text about how this kind of face-to-face encounter with the glory of God.
Earlier in the story, we’re told that “YHWH would speak to Moses, face to face, as one speaks to a friend” (Exod 33:11)…but on the mountaintop, God strategically places Moses in the clefted rock and shields Moses with the palm of God’s hand…so Moses can only see the “back” of God…the rationale that God tells Moses is that, “you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live.”
So we’re left with a tension: the glory of God is both frightening and overwhelming but also the glorious joy of talking face-to-face with a friend. And so Moses veils himself when he is not talking to God or sharing the commandments of God with the people.
Moses is able to witness how he’d been changed by his encounter with the glory of God – when he sees the shock and fear in the eyes of those who can see his changed face.
His face bears the sharp brightness of someone who has dared to look and listen and sit with the Almighty.
The glory of God is something entrancing and terrifying. The veiling and unveiling of Moses’ face symbolizes that paradox.
In our Luke gospel story of Jesus’ transfiguration, the three disciples follow Jesus up the mountain to pray.
As Jesus undergoes a mysterious metamorphosis into dazzling brightness – the disciples are struggling to stay awake. The weightiness of the glory of God appearing in Christ and in Moses the great law-giver and Elijah the great prophet becomes too much for Peter, John, and James. They’re eyelids grow heavy with drowsiness.
It’s only at the end, as Elijah and Moses are about to depart that Peter pipes up with an idea to build some tents, evoking the Festival of Booths, commemorating God’s faithfulness through the exodus.
And even though Moses and Elijah were having a conversation with Jesus, about his own “exodus” or departure, possibly referring to his own death and resurrection and ascension that awaited him, the disciples seem not to have been a part of this exchange. Instead, the only divine words that they and we are given come at the story’s end. An overshadowing cloud moves in and the divine voice speaks, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!”
It seems as if God is speaking to the disciples here – not to chastise them for drowsiness or to belittle Peter’s enthusiastic construction project – but God speaks to help them interpret this moment of overwhelming glory, redirecting their attention to Jesus, God’s Beloved One. “Listen” is the command.
The scene closes and we’re told that Peter, James, and John “kept silent and in those days told no one any of the things they had seen.”
The three disciples descend the holy mountain after witnessing this glorious vision of who Jesus is as God’s Beloved Son – and they take with them neither glowing faces reflecting God’s glory or stone tablets inscribed with words of gracious covenant.
They descend the mountain only with their silence.
Sleepiness and silence are the disciples’ collective responses to the glory of God shining in the Transfigured Christ.
In the disciples’ befuddling example we’re given seeds of how to be gentle and patient with ourselves as we come to an unfolding understanding of who this glorious God is.
When super intense events happen to us and in front us – our millenia-old response to keep ourselves safe is to fight, flight or freeze. WE can resist what is happening, we can jump into action to build tents or run away or organize or resist or protest. But we can also freeze when something absolutely boggling fractures the understandings of who we are and who God is and what this world is supposed to be about.
Getting sleepy and remaining silent are protective husks, the disciples use because what has happened and is happening around them is more than their brains can compute and souls can stomach in one setting. It will take a lifetime for each of them to fully live out and understand and speak to the glory of who God is in Christ Jesus.
Especially after their friend, God’s chosen one, will be killed, fracturing even further who they thought God was.
I love that the text ends with the snippet that the disciples told no one about any of the things they had seen…. And yet, there was as day, when through the patience of time and through many nights where the gentleness of dreams had allowed this story to settle in their souls… they finally found the words to speak what they saw. And what they saw was that the glory of God looked like Jesus, shining as bright as any light they’d ever seen.
So if Moses’ response to glory was an embodied transformation he couldn’t even see, but others reacted to when they saw it…and if the disciples’ response to glory was sleepiness and then silence, and then inevitably a testimony…
Paul’s invitation on how to respond to God’s glory is to reflect that glory to one another, being mutually transformed in the process.
Our text from Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians is a tricky one – with words that have been used by Christians in dangerous and antisemitic ways to justify their own superiority. Paul as Jewish follower of Jesus’ involved in sharp squabbles with other Jewish interpreters of the the Law Prophets gets to use language I recommend that we don’t.
The invitation to us, from this 2 Corinthians passage is to let God’s illuminate us and then to reflect to others what we have first encountered in Christ. Our text ends with this beautiful line, welcoming us all to bare our faces to one another, so we can all witness the shining glory of God in Christ:
” And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.”- 2 Corinthians 3:18
All the ways we might respond to God’s glory seem a little strange, a bit perplexing. Glory is that word we use to name the overwhelm we feel at the weightiness of God’s love. Glory is something so hard to describe that we use words like light, lightning, dazzling, seeing God from behind, passing over, and cloud to get at the reality and fuzziness of what we feel.
And Paul’s image isn’t any clearer – God’s glory means that the community following Jesus is a hall of mirrors – all of us reflecting one anothers faces, in turn reflecting the face of Christ…a carnival fun house where by the grace of God all of us are being transfigured from glory to glory by this holy vision.
God’s glory is the dizziness of you all, who in your love and care and graciousness, reflect something of who Jesus is, all of you dazzling, blinding, weighty mirrors of our Holy God. All of our faces look best when lit up by the love of Christ.
I imagine the face of an iconographer sitting down to work… gathering their brushes, preparing their gold leaf and mixing their pigments… and no matter which biblical story they are reanimating or which saint they are bringing forward into our time…
They are painting with the same light that streamed from Jesus on the mountain of the transfiguration.
So when you ponder or wrestle with or doubt or wonder about the glory of God…I pray that you will be a reflection of the glorious light of Christ.
I pray not only that the face of the Lord would shine on you and be gracious to you, but I pray that you would respond also by reflecting God’s glory to everyone you meet.
You may not always not know what to do when faced with the good, but nonetheless overwhelming glory of God – and that’s OK. You might pick up a paintbrush or hide your face or build a tent or want to fall asleep or not talk about it for a whole long time.
But in the end remember to reflect what you’ve seen and share the light of God so that by it we all might see.
- Alfredo Tradigo, Icons and Saints of the Eastern Orthodox Church, trans. Stephen Sartarelli, (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2006), 125. ↩︎