What does it mean to be chosen by God?
This is the last week before the return of the Lenten season. For forty days, we’ll be asked to dwell with this question in particular connection to the Trinity’s Son. Our focus shifts: from incarnation to atonement. The great gift of God’s love culminates in God’s self-sacrifice.
In our readings this week, multiple mysteries are chronicled and, to some degree, are left without solutions. God causes a column of fire to appear on Sinai, calling Moses forth; Moses enters a cloud and does not emerge for forty days (Exodus 24:18).
As with Jesus’s time in the desert, Moses’s forty days before God remain largely a mystery. We are told that, in this period, he received the law. We assume that much more than this occurred, but it remains concealed.
We know only that the strain and wonder of sitting so intimately with God for so long initiated a lasting transformation in Moses. From the time he left the cloud, and for the remainder of his life, he had to be veiled; the sight of him, of a man burdened, or blessed, with residual holiness, was deemed too much for the people of Israel.
Or maybe it was simply too difficult for Moses to bear. He was never a fan of the ostentatious; he begged that God choose someone else to fulfill his prophetic duties. Heavy of mouth, heavy of tongue, he claimed: I’m not the one you want for this. But the burden and the blessing were his. Whether he’d desired it or not, Moses’s transformation on Sinai was bestowed upon him, and it eternally set him apart.
A burden, and a blessing. If Moses had not been chosen to go before God, to endure and emerge from those forty days bearing revelatory gifts, we would not have the law. Our understanding of God’s relationship to humanity would be incomplete. Israel could not have wholly understood itself. And yet for Moses, these blessings have great costs: never again would he be in perfect company with mankind.
Those who have stood before God are changed. Those who have heard God’s voice are different. We receive their news with spiritual hunger, take it in out of a desire to know God, but if we ask ourselves the question of whether we need to stand with Divinity as the prophets have done in this life, our answers may unsettle us. Do we want to know so much that we crave, with knowledge, the irruption it brings?
Jesus redoubles the enigma of humans-before-God. Not only one chosen to stand in God’s presence, Jesus is said to himself be God enfleshed. The Gospel of John renders him as the Word which was with God, always, which had a hand in creation, which is the hope of the world. With the exception of the Transfiguration, this being man-and-God instead of man before God had the effect of normalizing Jesus’s outward humanity; but what was inward, what was divine, remained undetectable to curious human eyes.
Jesus knew God always. The strain of having to face Heaven, in a variety of situations, did not force him to begin his human life again. He was formed differently; what mere men could not endure without being visibly taxed, Jesus was formed to endure.
And because the outward sign of divine contact was something that Jesus could choose to assume, rather than something he was forced to bear: Jesus, unlike the prophets, could choose where, and how, his connection to Heaven became outwardly manifest; he could selectively determine who it was that witnessed it.
In our Gospel reading for the week: his viewership is sparse. Three alone watch as, upon a mountain, Jesus’s whole countenance transforms: all he wears turns white, and light emanates forth from him (Matthew 17:2). Even more so than the miracles, this is an outward sign of his inward divinity. It’s a moment in which they’re forced to confront, beyond doubt and equivocation, the reality that Jesus was something entirely different from who, and what, they were.
Jesus’s Transfiguration was amplified by the moments-later appearance of Moses and Elijah. He now stood before three of his disciples with the greatest prophets of earlier ages. They knew that he was different; their familiarity with what differentiation cost Moses and Elijah afforded them greater clarity regarding what may have been next for Jesus.
If he was a prophet, much would be asked of him; much would be given through him; and, most troublingly, there would be no comfortable place for him in common society.
Perhaps out of pity, or out of fear for Jesus, Peter offered to build Jesus and the other prophets dwelling places on the mountain (Matthew 17:4). Presumably, they could use such spaces either as havens for the receipt of prophecy, or as a home apart, or as both; Peter offered a form of protection for these blessed, chosen figures.
Before that offer could be confronted, more mysteries were revealed. Jesus was different; his difference was akin to that of the prophets; but he was not a prophet alone.
The witnesses to the transfiguration, having accepted that the light of Heaven was in Jesus, having seen the great prophets of old standing beside him, were now triply challenged with the emergence of a voice from the skies, one which demanded that they acquiesce to one last divine mystery: that Jesus was God’s only child (Matthew 17:5). They’re asked to stand witness to this revelation, but also to keep it secret until “after the Son of Man has been raised from the dead” (Matthew 17:9).
The greatest mysteries remained to be revealed: the man they now knew as the Child of God had yet to retreat to the desert and be tested, to ride into Jerusalem, and to face a tribunal and an execution. They had no sense of any this yet. They knew only that God was with them, and that the implications would be vast. Great blessings were on the horizon; but for the prophet and Son who had been revealed, great burdens were similarly inevitable.
We are not asked to meditate too thoroughly upon our own self-worth in connection to coming atonement. That flesh is weak and beyond perfection is a given; if we could magically make ourselves worthy of God, there would be no need of prophets, and no endless sin to atone for. Moses is given over to God, and what he delivers is a grace to us; so too is Jesus. We have much to be grateful for.
And still: it does not hurt to take time to reflect, and to stand in gracious deference to the considerable sacrifices human beings, and beings both divine and human, have made in order to offer us a glimpse of God’s love. Without them, what would we know? And to be them: how great a tribulation?
God’s ways remain a mystery. We are assured that Heaven’s love for us is great. We have only to accept the burden of proof with gratitude.
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