This Sunday is the culmination of the season of Epiphany. And that culmination is always on the Mount of Transfiguration. My general meditation on the seasons is this. God does some major act in his creation. The start of Epiphany is the end of the Christmas story, the three gentile kings show up with their gifts. Does anybody really know or understand what has taken place? The answer is clearly no. Even Mary “gathers up all these things and ponders them in her heart.” And then across the season of Epiphany we “see” various miracles – the signs and wonders – of the life of Jesus. It is a crawling toward understanding just what has come to us. Then on that mount of Transfiguration you get the full revelation. Of course that full revelation is too much in itself. Peter doesn’t know what he is saying. James and John remain silent telling nobody what they had seen. How do you explain the vision?
I think that is a common way of experiencing life for many of us. Something happens. We know it is something big because it changes things. But we don’t really understand it. We haven’t incorporated the new event into our personal narrative yet. You only understand it when you can tell the story. And the story changes. And by the time you can tell it, something else has come. In the very midst of life surrounded by shadows of ourselves. Sometimes we become crippled, weighed down by how much we don’t understand even of ourselves.
But there is another story that crosses that mount of transfiguration – that of Moses. For as big a role as Moses seems to play in the Old Testament story, the reality is that he is an oddball side character. The story is that of the promise. Father Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Joseph’s providence. Joshua’s conquest. David’s heart after God. The tabernacle and temple and throne often against the prophetic word. All of Israel struggling to see and never seeing. But Moses “was 120 years old when he died. His eye was undimmed, and his vigor unabated.” Being someone who has worn glasses since the third grade, that line has always stuck out.
Moses is the man through whom God performed his signs and wonders over Pharaoh and all Egypt. Moses is the transcriber of the law and the entire Torah, the first five books of the Scriptures. Moses is the man who talks with God, goes to the mountaintop, delivers the law in cloud and majesty and awe. Moses shepherds the people in the wilderness for 40 years feeding them with the manna and providing the water from the rock. Moses “was faithful in all God’s house as a servant, to testify to the things that were to be spoken later (Hebrews 3:5).” But Moses was not The Son. Moses knew. His eyes were undimmed. But Moses is the law. And the law does not save. Not even Moses. God would tell Moses to preach to the rock to produce water the 2nd time, and Moses struck it again. And for this careless trespass would not enter the promised land. With his undimmed vision he was given a sight of it, but in this life would not enter it.
The law is a faithful servant. It gives us eyes to see, probably better than we want to see. But the servant does not inherit the house. The Son inherits the house. And we can only receive the Son by faith. We enter the promised land by faith not by sight. The spies saw the inhabitants of the land and deemed it impossible. Joshua by faith crossed the Jordan. In the very midst of life we may not know ourselves but we are known. We may not see with undimmed eye, but we hear the voice of the Son inviting us into the house. Moses takes you as far as he can go. We cross the Jordan by faith.
