Lectionary Notes: Mar 2, 2025

tl;dr: This week for the Transfiguration includes talk of mountains, shining faces, veils, and religious continuity.

I've been invited to join a group spanning a few churches to share reactions to the lectionary text for the week. Here are my notes going into our final week, Transfiguration Sunday.

The Texts

Here are the texts.

This one felt more like the same themes throughout all of them, rather than a progression from one text to the next, so I'm going to structure my notes that way.

Mountains

Interesting that the encounters with God happen on a mountain each time. It wasn't unusual in the ancient world to see mountains as liminal spaces, where the gods could more easily meet with humans. Mountains also had practical advantages as the best places to build a city: easier to defend from attackers, easier to have waste water flow downhill away from drinking supplies.

Maybe we could argue there's still some sense that "mountains as liminal space" is true because being on a mountain evokes awe at creation which can make you feel closer to God, but I'm not going to read too much more into it than that.

Shining

I love the idea of faces literally shining after encountering God. Jesus is shining in the Transfiguration. Moses shines without even realizing it after talking with God and receiving the commands. Corinthians doesn't reference shining but does promise transformation in other ways: real freedom, not losing heart, sticking to the truth and conscience.

Veils

In fact, Moses' face shone so much that he had to put a veil over his face. He had to be an intermediary between the Israelites and God because the glory of God was scary to the Israelites.

Corinthians uses the veil language a slightly different way. After referencing how Moses needed a veil to keep people from looking directly at God's glory, he claims that whenever Moses is read, there is still a veil over their minds. In contrast, when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed and now we see the glory of the Lord as if through a mirror, a perfect reflection. By seeing that perfect image of God, we also become more transformed into that image.

The veiled message through Moses wasn't wrong. But it was a little bit blurry, veiled for a people who weren't quite ready for it. Now in Jesus we can see more clearly.

There is some potential for antisemitism in the veil idea, if we equate "in Jesus we think we see God more clearly" as "Jewish people are inferior." There isn't a logical reason why the former would lead to the latter, but it is pretty common in our culture to take a lot of our sense of worth from being right about something, especially the big worldview-shaping things like religious belief. We can simply and humbly acknowledge that the Christian tradition thinks Jesus is the clear revelation of God. It's fine that Jews and Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists and everyone else disagrees. That doesn't make us superior to them. There's no reason why difference has to mean hierarchy.

Continuity

I think the essential counter in these texts to some of the antisemitism risk is that Jesus is within a long line of Jews who encountered God. We get the Moses story, shining so brightly that others couldn't look at him. The psalm references Moses, Aaron, and Samuel. Corinthians mentions Moses. And Luke mentions Moses and Elijah. There is a sense that Jesus is the fullest revelation of God, but that is firmly coming within the continuity of the Jewish tradition, not discarding that tradition at all.