• Exodus 34:29-3

Moses descends from the mountaintop and returns to the plain of of everyday living carrying “the two tablets of the covenant.”  When Aaron and “all the Israelites” saw him they “were afraid to come near him” because his face was glowing.  Apparently unaware of his appearance, Moses called out to Aaron and the other leaders and “gave them in commandment all that the Lord had spoken with him on Mt. Sinai.”  When he finished speaking, Moses put a “veil” over his face, but took it off when “he went in before the Lord to speak with the Lord.”

• Psalm 99

When the psalmist experiences the greatness and holiness of the Lord,  the earth “trembles.”  The God of Jacob “loves justice” and establishes righteousness.  God spoke to Moses, Aaron, Samuel and the priests shrouded in clouds.  The psalmist summons all to praise the Lord and to “bow” toward the holy mountain where God spoke and the earth shifted.

• II Corinthians 3:12-4:2

Paul recalls that strange detail of Moses using a “veil,” which is descried in our reading from the Hebrew scriptures this Sunday, to characterize the resistance of his own people to Christ.  With Christ, Paul writes, our faces are “unveiled” so we see “the glory of the Lord” and are “transformed.”  Paul goes on to describe his ministry as a refusal to “falsify God’s word,”  commending “ourselves to the conscience of everyone in the sight of God.”

• Luke 9:28-36, (37-43a)

Luke begins what turns out to be one of the most exotic and extraordinary events in his gospel as if it were just another occasion when Jesus took aside some disciples with him–on this occasion Peter, James and John– “up to the mountain to pray.”  But on this occasion, as he prayed, the countenance of Jesus was “altered” and his clothing “became dazzling white.”  In this “glory” two figures appeared, Moses and Elijah.  The three discussed among themselves the “departure of Jesus, which he was to accomplish in Jerusalem.”  Peter, James and John were aroused from a deep sleep to witness the three talking amongst themselves.  Peter speaks first, although he really does not know what he is talking about, the text states, suggesting they construct three “booths” for Jesus, Moses and Elijah.  As Peter was talking, a cloud shrouded the mountain and a “voice came out of the cloud, saying  ‘This is my Son, my chosen, listen to him.'”  (Luke specifies that the three disciples who witnessed this event kept silent about it “in those days.”)  The next day, another large crowd gathered around Jesus.  A man in the crowd shouts at Jesus to help his only child., his son.  The man continues by describing to Jesus how the young boy is seized by “a spirit” and shrieks, foams at the mouth and is “mauled” by it.  He says he asked for help from the disciples of Jesus, but they were unable to help him.  Jesus is exasperated with this “faithless and perverse generation.”  In Luke’s account, Jesus “rebukes the unclean spirit,” heals the boy and returns him to his father.  Only Luke concludes his version this way: “and all were astonished at the majesty of God.”

God is experienced as God in the Hebrew scriptures as dazzling and pure holiness, justice, judgement and mercy.  Although these are traits which humans can know and even mimic after a fashion, they are so purely seen in God that they are bathed in “glory,” inspiring awe and even intimidation.  They are the consistent manifestations of “the majesty of God.”  For Paul and Luke, these traits– holiness, justice, judgement and mercy– are seen in Jesus, the Christ, and will be most fully revealed “in Jerusalem,” at his arrest, execution and resurrection.

On these two occasions, from Exodus and Luke, God’s “glory” is revealed with dazzling  clarity, and individuals speak to each other across time barriers, coming into and out of focus.  A “Voice” speaks out of the clouds.  Even the narratives themselves are oblivious to ‘normal’ conventions of time and space.  They stubbornly ignore human explanation.  Despite the surreal occasion, they make clear, bold announcements.  They are what they are: declarations of facts about God and, in Luke’s text, God’s “Son, my chosen.”  They interrupt our normal, flat, busy-body conversations, or arouse us out of a “deep sleep,” with strange, outlandish announcements of unimaginable love and of pure justice.

Trained in Aquinas and Augustine and inspired by Levinas and Derrida, John Caputo, Professor Emeritus of Religion and Humanities at Syracuse University spelled out in a 1993 work, “Against Ethics: Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction,” what he called his “logic of the impossible.”  He wrote:

“…what comes about when the kingdom comes looks and sounds like what contemporary French philosophers call an ‘event’ (evenement).  We would say what Deluze says of Alice [in Wonderland]; to understand it requires a ‘category of very special things: events, pure events.’  The coming of the kingdom is an out-coming, bursting-out-of-something we did not see coming, something unforeseen, singular, irregular.  Alternatively, the event is what Derrida calls l’ivention de l’autre, the in-coming (invenire) of something ‘wholly other’ the breaking into our familiar world of something completely amazing, which shatters our horizon of expectations.  In the military, when someone shouts ‘incoming’ the sensible thing to do is head for cover lest we be blown to kingdom come.  This outburst or out-coming shatters our horizons of expectation.  Otherwise, nothing is happening, nothing much, nothing ‘new’; creation is grinding to a stop, and yes is loosing the strength to repeat itself, to come again.”  (Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology, p. 477)

The shock of something so beautifully unexpected in the routine of things is just the way it happens; (the disciples assumed they were going with Jesus for a routine time for prayer and had even fallen asleep). 

The January 2010 issues of The Believer, a magazine that always delivers small and sometimes large delights, the American novelist Chris Bachelder describes the persistence of surprises which, in his life, are supplied by reading and the endless questions of his pre-school aged daughter in the course of their daily rituals and conversations.  First, he notes,

“A surprise always lifts aliveness toward consciousness, where it does not (and cannot) permanently reside.”  [We do not “reside” on the mountaintop, as we know].  Then he observes, “A surprise is surprising, in part, because it pierces inattention.”  [Luke says the three disciples were in a “deep sleep.”]  “It is the opposite of boredom and mindlessness, and for this reason it is always nearly a gift.” (p.26)

The bizarre events described in this Sunday’s excerpt from Exodus and Luke and the psalmist’s encounter with God are quixotic narratives told in anything but ‘normal’ language.  Although delivered in language– written tablets or a voice out of clouds— they announce things we cannot understand, which is, of course, God’s pure love and absolute justice.   It is so outside our ‘normal’ “boredom and mindlessness” it still to this day amazes and surprises us.  A surprise, by definition, comes out of nowhere, interrupts daily obsessions, shakes us out of something like sleepwalking through life, and “lifts us toward consciousness….”  And, “it is always nearly a gift.”

The full revelation of God’s bewildering, wonderful gift will come in Jerusalem, from  sundown Thursday to sundown Sunday