The Tearing of the Veil.

February 7, 2016

Transfiguration

2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2

I.

When Jesus dies on the cross, we are told in the gospels that the curtain, or the veil, in the Temple is torn in two.  That veil is a thick blanket of woolen fabric, woven in blue, red, and purple, with white linen, which separates the main interior section of the Temple from the Holy of Holies, the cubical space containing the Presence of the Lord, and holding, at one time, the Ark of the Covenant and some other sacred furnishings.  The tearing of the veil symbolizes the removal of the barrier separating God and humans, allowing a more direct relationship.  It is an image for the reconciliation accomplished by Christ on the cross.  

The apostle Paul remembers from the book of Exodus how Moses also veils his face after his direct encounter with God on Mount Sinai.  Moses goes up the mountain to receive the Ten Commandments, the basis of the Law and all the Hebrew Scriptures.  Paul sees the veil that Moses wears as a barrier preventing people from seeing even the reflection of God’s glory on Moses’ face as it fades away.  And he goes on to say that this figurative veil remains over the minds of those who follow Moses.  They don’t know God directly but only through this obstructing veil or curtain, which Paul suggests is a way of talking about the Law, which is of course the only Bible the people have at that time.  

The written text, says Paul, especially when we take it literally, as did the rabbis Paul was arguing with, becomes a barrier between the people and God.  That which was supposed to connect us to God, instead serves to separate us from God.  That which was supposed to give us life, instead brings judgment and condemnation.  Earlier Paul writes that the “written code,” or the “letter,” kills, but the Spirit gives life.  He says we can adhere to words written on paper, or we can adhere to the Spirit.

Paul is trying to bring the disciples in Corinth beyond a faith that looks only at written texts and demands absolute, literal obedience to them.  He has learned that this is like concentrating on the window rather than on what the window enables us to see.  Or like focusing intently on someone’s pointing finger, while ignoring that to which the finger is pointing.

For Paul is an important voice in the mortal struggle going on in Judaism of that time, between those who want to make it all about the literal keeping of the rules in the Torah, and those like Paul, who want to make it all about following, by the Spirit, Jesus, the crucified Messiah.  Jesus, says Paul, is the One to whom the Scriptures have been pointing from the beginning.  We need to look through them to him.

This is an important  word to hear even today.  I have known people who knew their Bible backwards and forwards, who could recite chapter and verse, yet whose lives offered no evidence that they knew Jesus Christ at all.  And that goes for fundamentalists who use the Bible like a weapon against people they don’t like; as well as for liberal scholars who treat it like a cadaver to be dissected.

II.

Paul himself had been one of those fanatical Pharisees who prosecuted heretics because they did not strictly and literally adhere to what the letter of the Law.  But then what happens is: the One to whom the text points appears to him directly.  The Word shines powerfully through the words.  He sees through the Law to God’s grace.  He sees through the flesh to the Spirit.

And he sees that this is what happens on the cross.  The cross is God’s love blowing powerfully into the world, breaking down our divisions, tearing our separating veils, and exploding our texts.  The cross represents what Leonard Cohen calls “the crack in everything” through which “the Light gets in.” 

Jesus is no longer for Paul a heretical blasphemer whom the religious leaders cleverly got the Romans to crucify for sedition.  Now he sees that this very crucifixion reveals the truth about everything: the powerlessness of Rome, the corruption of the collaborationist religious establishment, and the astonishing grace, goodness, and truth of God.  Paul sees through the veil of Jesus’ humanness, shattered and broken on the cross, to the truth of his unity with God.  He sees in Jesus true humanity as united to God and participating in God’s very nature.

Paul sees that now there is hope because we are not caught in this incestuous circle with no exit, doomed to keeping these many rules which accomplish nothing but to solidify the grip of sin and death on us.  The better and more literally and exactly we keep them the farther we fall from God’s Spirit.  

Christ breaks us out of that lethal dead-end, and instead sets us free.  We are free from the letter of the Law, and able to follow the Spirit.  We are able now to see beyond and through the letter of the Law, to the true meaning and purpose of the Law in the first place, which is God’s love revealed in Jesus Christ.  Because if we’re reading the Scriptures and we don’t see Jesus, we don’t get it.

“The Lord is the Spirit,” he says, “And where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.”  So instead of an opaque text, we see God directly, through a transparent Spirit, wind, or breath, which is itself God.  The Spirit becomes the medium communicating the truth of God’s love to us.  The thing that was keeping us in bondage, the Law, has been removed.  Now, because we can see clearly, with unveiled faces, we are free.  

And freedom, remember, is never the ability to do whatever we ourselves want.  That would be bondage to the self-centered ego.  Freedom, for Paul, and for all followers of Jesus Christ, is the ability to do what God wants.  It is the ability to live in truth and love.

III.

Then Paul talks about how now “all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.”  So, without the veil of the letter of the Law getting in the way and obstructing our vision, Paul says that disciples of Jesus now see God’s glory directly.  That is, we see the love of God shining in and over all things.  

And he says we see it “as though reflected in a mirror.”  I had to think about this.  This is a powerful and remarkable statement.  When we look in a mirror, what do we see?  We see ourselves.  We see our own image looking back at us.  It reminds me of that famous quote from Irenaeus of Lyons, one of the great teachers of the early church.  He says, “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.”  

When the veil is removed, and we take away all the ego-centric clutter, grime, and dirt from our consciousness, and we are able to see God’s Presence in the world in Jesus Christ directly, through the Spirit, it is like looking in a special kind of mirror.  When we look in this mirror we see ourselves…  Not our sinful, broken, confused, fearful, angry, ashamed, and addicted selves; not the selves projected by our personalities or egos; not our wrong-headed, small-minded, hard-hearted selves.  No.  What we see emerging in this mirror is our true, deeper, higher self; we see the coming of the full and original humanity we share with Jesus; indeed, we see Christ in us.  When we look in this mirror we see the Image of God in us.  We see ourselves becoming fully alive and therefore we see the glory of God.

And this is not a static and completed image.  Because Paul knows that none of us are fully realized and fully alive right now.  All of us are, in this existence, somewhere in transition, on the journey, making the change; all of us are, as Luther says, “at the same time sinners and justified.”  We see ourselves in process.  We see ourselves “being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.”

I read something the other day by someone named Jason Zahariades, that sums it up.  He says, “As a follower of Jesus, I truly cannot say, ‘I am saved.’ I can only say, ‘I am being saved.’”  On the one hand, God’s salvation is a done deal, won for us by Jesus on the cross, once for all and forever.  On the other hand, it can take a while for us to realize this truth in ourselves.  That’s why Paul, in Philippians, urges us to “work out [our] salvation with fear and trembling.”  “Salvation,” says Zahariades, “Is something that is worked out progressively with God.”

Salvation, or at least our realization of it, is being transformed into God’s Image “from one degree of glory to another,” by the power of God’s Spirit.

IV.

Ultimately, of course, it is God who is in control.  God’s mercy covers us and permeates us, and God calls us together into the church and into God’s mission in the world.  And by God’s power we live into the truth we see revealed for us in Jesus.  We live into the Image of God, which in him is also the Image of True Humanity.  And by God’s power we renounce the kind of behaviors we undertook while we were in bondage to darkness and fear.  

One thing that trying to live by the letter of the Law does is cause us to invent technicalities and devious ways around it.  We can hide behind the facade of our strict observance, doing in secret things that certainly transgress the intention and spirit of the Law.  In doing things like this we falsify God’s word; we make God out to be a liar by keeping the letter and disregarding the spirit.  

Paul has been shown a way out of that box.  He has been shown that in Christ the veil is torn open and removed.  And now we see him face-to-face, like we see ourselves in a mirror.  And in him, the face we see in the mirror is our own face, being changed always by the power of grace, from glory to glory, into the face of Christ.    

+++++++