Exodus 34:29-35
“Bearable Brightness”
February 14, 2010 - Transfiguration

         Eddie’s back was glowing. We were high up in the Sierra mountains and had just spent an hour swimming in a cold mountain lake and then drying out on a warm rock in the sunshine. What Eddie hadn’t counted on was the intensity of ultra-violet rays at 8,000 feet. He laid down on his stomach with the sun on him for at least thirty minutes. His back was cooked, so red that it really did seem to glow.

         At high altitude sunlight is just about unbearable for prolonged exposure, especially to fair-skinned people like Ed and I. His last name is Lesnansky. People from the part of the world our fathers came from need to do everything we can to hide from the unbearable brightness of the sun.

         As Moses came down the mountain from talking with God, he brought with him a brightness which made the people of Israel want to hide. It wasn’t sunburn, but verse 30 says that Moses’ face was “radiant” because he had been with God. Aaron and the people who came to meet him were afraid of what they saw. They hung back from his glowing countenance, until Moses called them near enough to hear God’s message. After he spoke, he put a veil over his face, hiding the radiance.

         For Transfiguration Sunday we read the story about Jesus’ transformation on the mountaintop from Luke. Chapter 9 verse 29 says only that His face was “changed,” but in Matthew’s version, Matthew 17:2, we’re told that Jesus’ face “shone like the sun.” He looked like Moses, face shining bright with the divine light of God.

         Moses came down from the mountaintop bearing the brightness and bearing the Word of God. His face was shining with the power of the Law God sent to His people, the Ten Commandments and all the rest. The combination of the glow and the commands was almost unbearable. It was all fiercely intense.

         This last week my daughter Joanna and I visited the campus of Notre Dame. You may know from televised football games the familiar image of the giant mosaic that looms above Notre Dame’s stadium, Jesus with His arms upraised, “Touchdown Jesus” as all the Domers call Him. You probably don’t know about the statue that’s just around the corner on the west side of the library, “First Down Moses.” It’s an 18 foot tall sculpture of Moses with the Commandments in one hand while the first finger of his right hand is raised high in admonition. And there are two horns on his forehead.

         Firstdown Moses is a pretty intimidating figure, especially frightening with those horns. They appear because the Hebrew word for “rays” of light also means “horns.” Our word “ray” comes from “radius” which originally meant a staff or a spoke. So we talk about “staffs” of light while the Hebrews talked about “horns” of light. Either metaphor makes sense. But people in the Middle Ages gave Moses literal horns and the Croatian sculptor of Notre Dame’s Moses followed suit.

         I wouldn’t want to have that fierce face looking very hard at me, whether it had rays of light or horns sprouting out of it. The statue has Moses’ foot poised on the head of golden calf, crushing the idol the Israelites created while he was up on the mountain with God. The man with the shining face means business. The light of God’s Law burns the skin that covers all our tender secrets. It peels away our outer layers of fake goodness and reveals the scarlet flesh of lust and anger and envy and all our other sins. It’s like letting the light into a room that hasn’t been cleaned in awhile. All the dust shows up.

         That’s why people didn’t want to look at God’s face. They were afraid to even look at a face that had looked at God. The brightness would be unbearable. It would burn like the sun at high altitude, frying fragile skin and revealing just how skin deep our righteousness really is..

         Verse 33 tells us Moses took pity on the people. After he had said what God wanted said, he put a veil over his face, a veil like women in his time would wear. So he could come down and mingle among the Israelites, go home to his wife, spend time talking like a normal man with Aaron and the others, Moses covered the divine light shining from his forehead and cheekbones.

         Like the Israelites, you and I might like Moses to keep his veil on all the time. We don’t really relish a brilliant light being shone into all the dark corners of our lives. Hearing or reading God’s Word we come across convicting “horns” of light that stab into us: Jesus’ warning about the worship of money when we’re wishing we had more; His call to forgive those who’ve hurt us when we’re feeling wounded; His identification of hatred with murder or lust with adultery when we’re experiencing those so common human emotions. Whoa, Moses, Jesus, put the light away, you’re hurting our eyes.

         Experienced in that way, the way Israel heard Moses on Mt. Sinai, the way we hear Jesus preach His Sermon on the Mount, the light of God is unbearable. We want it to be veiled. We want to hide from it. We want to conceal the flaws it lights up in us. So as our text from II Corinthians suggested, we put on our own veils.

         Our first couple days back in the Midwest last week it was snowing. We drove around Grand Rapids with care and holed up in our hotel room. On Wednesday the snow had stopped and it was time to drive on to South Bend, Indiana. The sun had come out. I thought it was a wonderful day to drive. But as I pulled out onto the highway I forgot just how intensely sunlight reflects off snow and wet roads. I was blinded by the glare and quickly fished for sunglasses to hide my eyes from the light.

         God wants us, as Paul says to the Corinthians, to see His light, to hear His Word, without shades, with unveiled faces. Verses 34 and 35 of our text about Moses show that he went in and out of God’s presence. Every time he went into be with God and came back out with commands for the people, he was not wearing the veil. They heard God’s Word out of his shining mouth. Only when done speaking the Law did he put the veil back on.

         Yet Paul talks about being able to see the glory of God with unveiled faces, without sunglasses shielding our eyes, without all our facades and masks and disguises hiding who and what we really are. Moses had to hide the glory. Jesus came to reveal it in a new way so that we could see it all the time.

         One of the things we learned in the Boy Scouts was how to handle a flashlight outside in the dark. If you’ve ever given a youngster a flashlight out in the dark, you know that he wants to shine it full on everything, including the faces of those he’s with. If you ask him to provide light to see where you’re going or to set up a tent in the dark, he’ll shine it in your face, blinding you in the process.

         So you say, “No, no. Don’t shine it at me. Come over here and point it ahead where I’m going or at the knot I’m trying to tie.” And so he learns to come alongside with that bright new light, illuminating instead of blinding.

         When God came to us in Jesus Christ, His light came in a new way, alongside us, shining with us instead of at us. For the first time in a complete and permanent way the divine glory was shining out of a human life instead of at human lives. That’s what the disciples were able to see in Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration. They saw His glory without sunglasses or veils, because as the first and only Man-who-is-also-God, the glory did not blind them, but showed them the way, guided them forward. That’s why the voice of God told Peter, James and John to listen to this Man who shined with glory.

         Jesus came to make the unbearable light of God bearable. Yes, His light does reveal all our sins. His brilliance does burn and peel the surface off all the darkness we hide just beneath our skins. You can’t listen to what Jesus says very long and not feel like you are standing in front of one of those new scanners the TSA is putting up in airports. All our nakedness and shame is revealed by His teaching. Yet Jesus shines His light not so much at us as alongside us.

         As human as we are, Jesus stands with us in His glory. In just the previous chapter in Exodus we learn that not even Moses could look at God’s face. The most he could see was God’s back. Even as he received the Commandments in God’s presence, Moses was not seeing God face to face. Yet Peter, James and John looked Jesus full in the face. They saw His glory. God came to them in a way He could be seen. Jesus came to them and comes to us with a bearable brightness. As John 1:14 says, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory.”

         Yet the brightness of Jesus is not just bearable in the sense that He humanizes the light of God, makes it endurable and lets it shine into our lives in a healing, illuminating way. The brightness of Jesus is bearable in the sense that you and I are meant to bear it upon our own countenances, to wear it on our own faces.

         The point, of course, of all the commandments that Moses taught while his face shined at the foot of Mt. Sinai was to change the people of Israel, to make them into good and holy people that they had not been before. They weren’t just given laws about not eating pork and doing no work on Saturdays. They were taught to treat each other justly, to be honest, to be faithful to their spouses, to help the poor and to be hospitable to strangers. The shining light of God in Moses’ face was there to transform Israel into the people God meant them to be, a people like the world had never seen before.

         The light of Jesus, the bearable brightness of Christ our Savior, is meant in an even deeper and more profound way to transform you and I and everyone who comes to Him into new people, the people God means for us to be, shining people. II Corinthians 3:18 says, “And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory…” Jesus came not just so that the light of God would shine out of His face, but so that it would shine out of our faces. That’s what He meant when told us, “You are the light of the world.”

         You might think now that my admonition to you today will be something like, “Get out there and shine!” Go forth into the darkness and help people who are weak, feed people who are hungry, be friends to people who are lonely. Cultivate a character of light, that’s gentle and humble and gracious and kind and loving. Well, yes, that’s the idea, but the risk of asking you to shine is that we will forget where the light comes from.

         Paul says that we “reflect the Lord’s glory.” When we bear the light of Jesus on us, it’s still His light. We only reflect it. If we go after a glowing life as some sort of contest or achievement of our own, we’re going to miss it and end up in the dark. We shine with the light of Jesus when our attention is on Jesus.

         In our old house, our daughter Joanna pasted little white plastic stars on the ceiling above her bed. When she turned out the light those phosphorescent shapes glowed down at her. But their light was borrowed. They needed to be exposed to daylight or a least a bed lamp for awhile each day. Hide them in a box at the back of your closet and haul them out in the dark and they would have no light. That’s how it is with Christians. We glow when we keep our faces turned toward the light that God has given us in Jesus.

         So before you try to shine, expose yourself to the light. If you want to forgive someone, read the crucifixion of Jesus and remember that He’s forgiven you. If you want to come to the aid of someone who is poor, spend some time contemplating how much Jesus gave up to come to your aid. If you would like to be a friend to someone who is difficult and unlovable, ponder how Jesus befriended you. Spend enough time in the light of Christ that you can bear that light with you as you go.

         That’s why we come here. That’s another way to understand what worship is about. We come into the brilliant light of God in Christ so that we can go out phosphorescent with His glory.

         And as we remember that the light is His, not ours, we will focus more and more on Him and less and less on our own attempts to shine. The first verse of our text from Exodus told us that Moses “was not aware that his face was radiant.” It’s been my experience that the people who shine most with the light of Jesus are least aware that they are glowing. They are so aimed at His light they are not even conscious of their own.

         Monty who led me to Jesus, or Howard who drew me into the Covenant church, or Jay who’s been my friend since college don’t seem very much aware at all that their faces are radiant with the love and glory of Christ. They were and are much more interested in knowing Jesus and enjoying His light than in making a big deal of their own.

         As she visited colleges this last week, my daughter met several Christian young women who hosted and or welcomed her at the schools she’s considering. One girl at the secular University of Chicago invited her to a Bible study, not knowing if Joanna was a Christian or not. I don’t think any of them was deliberately trying to shine or that they were self-consciously aware of their Jesus light. But they had been with Jesus enough that when it came time they were able to offer the light of Christian friendship and love to my daughter. That’s how I hope we all might be.

         In our sin and darkness, the brightness of God is unbearable. It burns our skin and blinds our eyes. Yet the grace of the love of Jesus turns that fiery gleam into gentle, guiding illumination. Jesus makes the brightness bearable. May we then we become the bearers of His brightness, out into the dark world, into gloomy lives that need His light. May you and I let His light constantly shine on us so that we will always be able to bear it.

         Amen.

Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2010 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj