Glimpsing God’s Glory
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis
February 14, 2010, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill
Ezekiel 43:1-9
Matthew 17:1-7
II Corinthians 3:7-11; 18
“As the glory of the Lord entered the temple by the gate facing east, the spirit lifted me up, and brought me into the
inner court; and the glory of the Lord filled the temple.”
The cell whose light literally brought me to my knees on sabbatical in the Cloisters of San Marco was the cell whose fresco proclaimed God’s glory in the
blinding white paint that surrounded and almost seemed to emanate from Fra Angelico’s transfigured Christ, a Christ drawn in the form of a cross. Like the
disciples who necessarily shaded their eyes at the vision, my head bowed at the brightness of glory brushed across the wall.
For hours I baked in the heat of a Florentine August that day, beholding God’s glory in the face of Jesus Christ. What might it have meant for this friar to
study in this light, to pray in this light, to write sermons by this light, to sleep with God’s glory shining on him, all to the end that he bear this light
to the Florentine world? As a child I feared the dark but, like Peter, I surely would have come to fear the light as well—exposing the shadow of my
mortality and my sin.
I am in good company. Moses stammered too and veiled his face on the mountain when he glimpsed the blinding light of God’s glory as God’s hind parts passed
before him. Likewise the Israelites trembled at the bottom of Sinai and begged to be spared the sight. Second hand reportage was sufficient because God’s
actual presence was too dangerous. I also take comfort in that incredible story of the Philistines who captured the Ark of the Covenant, God’s portable
dwelling place, and suddenly found themselves with the heavy presence of God’s glory on their hands: the nth degree of a pyrrhic victory.
But then, less comforted, I read in Ezekiel’s 10th chapter of the day when God’s glory departed from the temple in Jerusalem because of the abomination of
the people’s worship, leaving God’s exiled children to weep by the waters of Babylon. Sometimes it feels as though we are those children in exile. Scattered
and assimilated in a society that worships other gods, we gather in the sanctuary only to remember the days when God’s glory filled the temple. “In these
days when consumerism can make going to worship often feel like going to the mall,” writes scholar Donald Luther, “when koinonia is understood as
conviviality…when…meeting our…needs makes us the center of worship, we need to tend to expectations, lest thinking we’ve worshiped, we never notice what
we’ve missed.”
What we have missed along with the Israelites, as Paul so pointedly puts it, is the greater glory—God’s living presence--revealed to us in Jesus Christ.
God’s glory has indeed returned, Paul says, but not to a temple constructed by human hands, not to an institution in need of shoring up, not to a religion
chiseled in stone: God’s glory has spilled over into him who is the “reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being.” To behold God’s
glory revealed in Jesus is to risk the possibility of transfiguration, says Donald Luther. I have no imagination for this. Here on the mountain, prose fails
me. Poetry being the language that dares the ineffable, I borrow the language of the disciple in Edwin Muir’s The Transfiguration:
So from the ground we felt that virtue branch
Throughout all our veins until we were whole, our wrists
As fresh and pure as water from a well,
Our hands made new to handle holy things,
The source of all our seeing rinsed and cleaned
Till earth and light and water entering there
Gave back to us the clear unfallen world.
We would have thrown our clothes away for lightness,
But that even they, though sour and travel stained,
Seemed, like our flesh, made of immortal substance,
And the soils flax and wool lay light upon us
Like friendly wonders, flow and flock entwined
As in a morning field. Was it a vision?
Or did we see that day the unseeable
One glory of the everlasting world
Perpetually at work, though never seen
Since Eden locked the gate that’s everywhere
And nowhere?
To see God’s glory, God’s very being in the face of Jesus Christ with human eyes is, in the first place, to be recreated and placed anew in the world with
the source of all seeing rinsed and clean: our blind eyes washed in the waters of baptism and suddenly able to see the unseeable one glory of the
everlasting world perpetually at work all around us; our hands made new to handle holy things; our wrists made fresh and pure as water from a well.
I think of Paul who certainly was changed by the sight. On the Damascus road, says theologian James Alison, the God “about whom he had talked, whose Law he
had obeyed, to whom he had prayed and for whom he had preached, organized and persecuted, was suddenly present to him in a way which completely inverted
everything he had known….[S]uddenly God was an ‘it’ or a ‘he’ no longer, but was ‘I am’ coming towards him out of nowhere….In other words,” says Alison,
“Paul was undergoing a theophany of the sort that experts in the sacred texts, such as he was, could recognize as being that of the Lord….One of the
telltale signs… of the experience of undergoing ‘I am’ coming towards a human is that thereafter the human becomes aware of the universe tilted on a new
axis….What appears to be the most ethereal and least solid part of the universe comes to be the real centre of solidity and rooted-ness in being. Part of
the authentic nature of the experience of undergoing [God] is this Copernican revolution out of human and cultural foundations and security into receiving a
centre and a non-grasped-after solidity that was entirely outside of human control and from which all comes to be.”
The axis on which the world now turned for Paul was the cross. This was no private vision, given to him for the sake of his spiritual growth: this was the
gospel, given to him for the sake of the recreation of the whole world! “Was the change in us alone,” asks Muir’s disciples rhetorically on the
mountaintop,
And the enormous earth still left forlorn,
An exile or a prisoner? Yet the world
We saw that day made this unreal, for all
Was in its place. The painted animals
Assembled there in gentle congregations,
Or sought apart their leafy oratories,
Or walked in peace, the wild and tame together,
As if, also for them, the day had come.
The shepherds’ hovels shone, for underneath
The soot we saw the stone clean at the heart
As on the starting-day. The refuse heaps
Were grained with that fine dust that made the world;
For he had said, ‘To the pure all things are pure.’
I take it that to behold the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ is, in the second place, to see the world as charged with God’s grandeur and to
exclaim amid dappled things, skies as couple color as a brindled cow, rosemoles all in stipple upon trout that swim, fresh firecoal chestnut falls, finches’
wings, landscape plotted and pieced fold, fallow and trim, all things counter, original, spare, strange; whatever is fickle, freckled, with swift, slow;
sweet, sour; adazzle, dim, to exclaim in the presence of him whose beauty is past change, “Praise him!” Not only is our seeing and touching and tasting and
smelling recreated in the presence of God’s glory: in Him all creation is made new.
Yet there is another sense in which the ‘I am’ coming towards Paul out of nowhere is not for him alone but for the sake of the world: God’s glory not a
private vision but a public truth to be embodied and proclaimed. Muir’s disciples continue:
And when we went into the town, he with us,
The lurkers under doorways, murderers,
With rags tied round their feet for silence, came
Out of themselves to us and were with us,
And those who hide within the labyrinth
Of their own loneliness and greatness came,
And those entangled in their own devices
The silent and the garrulous liars, all
Stepped out of their dungeons and were free.
Reality or vision, this we have seen.
In merely mundane words, I imagine not only the natural world transformed in the sight of those who have seen the ‘I am’ coming towards them, but also, in
the third place, the political and social world transfigured such that God’s glory is glimpsed in the human arrangements that set people free. So it was in
the light of God’s glory revealed in the transfiguration, Christian ethicist Paul Lehmann saw that “the mystery and meaning of the ultimate presence and
power by which reality is, and is defined and directed, are unveiled and concealed in the hiddenness and openness of a human person whose presence and power
set the whole off-course world and human story on course again.” To wit, we who have beheld God’s glory in the face of Jesus Christ, go into town
(he with us) to see those who were “other” and to see them not as they once appeared but as they are seeable as if for the first time in the light of God’s
presence: stepping out of their dungeons free.
On this side of the grave, we apparently are given only a glimpse of God’s glory and God’s kingdom come. “If it had lasted another moment,” Muir’s disciples
confess,
It might have held forever! But the world
Rolled back into its place, and we are here,
And all that radiant kingdom lies forlorn
As if it had never stirred; no human voice
Is heard among its meadows, but it speaks
To itself alone, alone it flowers and shines
And blossoms for itself while time runs on.
Once again, in the words of another poet, “as in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed/To do more than entertain it as an
agreeable/Possibility, once again we have sent Him away,/Begging though to remain His disobedient servant,/The promising child who cannot keep His word for
long.” Blindness once again overtakes us; the hands made new to handle holy things now grasp after utilitarian ideas; our clothes feel heavy on our backs;
we are east of Eden and weeping in Babylon for the glory that has departed to return. “Human beings discern [God’s presence] as a surging which soon
vanishes and leaves in its disappearance an absence that has been overcome,” writes Samuel Terrien. “It is neither absolute nor eternal but elusive and
fragile, even and especially when human beings seek to prolong it in the form of cultus [of religion]. The collective act of worship seems to be both the
indispensable vehicle of presence and its destroyer….It is [only] when presence escapes [our] grasp that it surges, survives, or returns.” And yet….
“Years ago, the great Russian Orthodox liturgical theologian Alexander Schmemann noted that the Sunday liturgy begins when one’s feet touch the bedroom
floor and take the first steps toward the assembly. He commented that one does not need to check the time at the Eucharist [no need to look at your watch]
since future appointments lose their meaning when one is on the way to the eschatological banquet. I took him seriously,” said Donald Luther, “and found
what he said to be true….To gather in this assembly of the new creation is to be ever so briefly at home base, in the presence….Whether we dramatically
encounter the presence of God or not is not the point. The church’s history is full of the lives of people who waited for a mystical encounter with the
presence and never received that gift. The point is in the waiting, waiting for God.” Waiting, as Muir’s momentarily transfigured disciples wait,
for the glory to return:
But he will come again, it’s said, though not
Unwanted and unsummoned; for all things,
Beasts of the field, and woods, and rocks, and seas,
And all mankind from end to end of the earth
Will call him with one voice.
In the meantime, we do glimpse his glory: in the world filled with his grandeur, in the other whose humanity is revealed to our eyes by His light and in
this sanctuary as with one voice we summon him and so risk being transfigured by his love. Praise Him!
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