Exodus 24:12-18 Commentary

Worship Connection

Transfiguration Sunday offers a bridge every year from Epiphany, the season of light, to Lent, the season of Ash.  What light and ash have in common is fire, which creates both.  Although the Transfiguration Gospel text from Matthew doesn’t name fire as an element in the Transfiguration of Christ, many of the images can be associated with fire.  Additionally, the setting is a very intentional allusion to Moses’ receiving the law on Mt. Sinai, a scene that does explicit reference fire in verse 17, “To the Israelites, the Lord’s glorious presence looked like a blazing fire on top of the mountain.”

This Sunday holds out the possibility of a great lesson in the church calendar.  The season of light comes to an end on Ash Wednesday when we enter into a Lenten season of fasting and repentance.  Many in our congregations may not know that, at least traditionally (at least when the pastor is on the ball), the ashes smudged on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday are made from the dried-out palm branches from last year’s Palm Sunday celebration.  There is no reason this has to be done in a backroom during the week (or, in my case, frantically on Wednesday afternoon hoping they will cool in time for evening worship.) Why not make this a part of your worship service on Sunday? Especially this year when the element of fire is named directly in the Hebrew Scripture lesson?

[Note: For the Year A Season of Lent and leading up to Easter, CEP has, in addition to these weekly sermon commentaries, a special Lent and Easter Resource Page with links to whole sermons, commentary on Lenten texts, and more.]

Commentary:

Playing with Fire

There is a reason, of course, why we are told not to play with fire — it is dangerous, uncontrollable, and can rapidly consume and destroy what it touches. And yet, perhaps for this very reason, Scripture is shot through with incendiary images.  The Biblical authors seem to play with fire all the time. In their commentary on Exodus 24:17, the CEB Study Bible reminds us that “God’s presence is often associated with fire.” They go on to offer other examples:

Genesis 15 – the covenant with Abraham

Exodus 3 – the burning bush

Exodus 13 – pillar of cloud and fire to guide God’s people through the wilderness.

And conclude with Acts 2:1-4, the Holy Spirit made visible and imparted on Jesus’ followers on the day of Pentecost. In other words, the image of fire holds both law and Spirit together in Scripture.

Rachel Held Evans wrote of the dancing witness of the Holy Spirit through the image of fire across Scripture when she wrote, “The Spirit is like fire, deceptively polite in its dance atop the wax and wick of our church candles, but wild and mercurial as a storm when unleashed. Fire holds no single shape, no single form. It can roar through a forest or fulminate in a cannon. It can glow in hot coals or flit about in embers. But it cannot be held. The living know it indirectly—through heat, through light, through tendrils of smoke snaking through the sky, through the scent of burning wood, through the itch of ash in the eye. Fire consumes. It creates in its destroying and destroys in its creating. The furnace that smelts the ore drives off slag, and the flame that refines the metal purifies the gold. The fire that torches a centuries-old tree can crack open her cones and spill out their seeds. When God led his people through the wilderness, the Spirit blazed in a fire that rested over the tabernacle each night. And when God made the church, the Spirit blazed in little fires that rested over his people’s heads. “Quench not the Spirit,” the apostle wrote. It is as necessary and as dangerous as fire, so stay alert; pay attention.”

Seeing God

It is largely surprising to Christian sensibilities when we talk about seeing God as in a direct, unmediated sense.  This is the arresting scene at the heart of Transfiguration Sunday, that God’s glory was revealed in Christ.  Something of his humanity was dislodged for a moment, like a mask slipping, and something real behind it shone out. The ancient patriarchs showed up beside him, a bright cloud and a voice from heaven declared, “This is my Son whom I dearly love. I am very pleased with him. Listen to him.”  Even as a Christian who holds to the Incarnation of God in Christ, this kind of appearance is overwhelming.

Now imagine the shock of God’s glory appearing in an Old Testament context.  The enduring chasm between heaven and earth has not been breached by incarnation yet. The holy otherness of God in the Ancient Near Eastern imagination is nearly inviolable. Backing up, then, slightly from our stated pericope this week, verses 9-11 set a critical context, “Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and the seventy elders of Israel went up and saw the God of Israel. Under his feet was something like a pavement made of lapis lazuli, as bright blue as the sky. But God did not raise his hand against these leaders of the Israelites; they saw God, and they ate and drank.”

Robert Alter helps us absorb the absolute shock of these words for a Jewish audience. “The boldness with which this immediate vision is stated is startling, especially against a biblical background in which humans repeatedly fear that they cannot see God and live.” Quoting an ancient Aramaic translation of this text that softens the meaning by translating this text “and they saw their sacrifices that had been accepted favorably”, Alter points to this as “a symptom of how shocking this frank anthropomorphism could be.” Alter also draws out attention to the way the author seems to quickly avert his gaze lower, to the ground beneath God’s feet.  “Mere flesh and blood cannot long sustain the vision of God, and so the visual focus immediately slides down to the celestial brilliance beneath God’s feet.”

From this nearness to God, the author zooms out over the course of our allotted Lectionary verses, as though to highlight the distinction between Moses’ experience in the cloud atop the mountain and the view of it from the base, “a long-distance view of God’s presence from the perspective of the people at the foot of the mountain. There is more mystifying occlusion than revelation here: an enveloping cloud, flashes of fire effulgence form within it.” Jesus’ disciples would have been well-schooled in this necessary distance of the people from the direct sights and sounds of the glory of God.  It is no wonder, then, that the three on the Mount of Transfiguration end up with their foreheads to the ground in worship and fear.