Shining Faces

The common thread between today’s readings is shining faces.

In the OT reading (Exodus 34:29-35) we heard how the Israelites saw the skin of Moses’ face shine when he came down from Mount Sinai with the stone tablets of the covenant – what we know as the Ten Commandments.

In the NT reading (Luke 9:28-36) Luke tells us how Peter and John and James saw Jesus’s face change – shining, as Matthew tells us - and his clothes become dazzling white, in the event we call the Transfiguration.

So today I want to reflect a little about shining faces and what they mean for us.

First, let’s think about Moses’ shining face.

The background to the story is that this is the second time that Moses came down from Mount Sinai with stone tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments. The first time, he discovered that the Israelites had broken their covenant with the Lord, the God they called YHWH – Moses found them worshipping a Golden Calf made by Aaron. In a fury Moses smashed the stone tablets on the ground and ordered a massacre of those responsible. After Moses pleaded with the Lord not to desert the Israelite people, the Lord had relented. So for a second time Moses climbed Mount Sinai and returned forty days and nights later with another pair of tablets, to a very different reception.

The Israelites were afraid to come near Moses because his face was shining, we are told. I wonder if what happened the first time might also have put them off. He put on a veil to cover his face, which he only took off when he went into the tent pitched a little away from the Israelite encampment where he went to meet the Lord alone, to pray.

What are we to make of Moses shining face? Is this a miraculous light, or had he perhaps got sunburned in the 40 days on the mountain? I prefer to look at it in another way.

Even today we talk about lovers or brides, pregnant women and new mothers looking ‘radiant’ – it is the light of joy in their faces which we recognise by tiny almost imperceptible clues – they don’t glow in the dark, but they do look somehow different to how they looked before their joy.

I think this is the meaning of the haloes that are used in many religious traditions – not just by Christians, but by Muslims and Buddhists for instance – to mark out holy people or saints. Haloes depict the light of joy that comes from a close encounter with the divine, a symbolic reflection of God’s love for his saints.

And I think we should see in Moses’ shining face a mark of his joy at encountering the Lord, a reflection of God’s love for him and for his people Israel.

So what of Jesus’s Transfiguration?

The story is told by Matthew and Mark as well as Luke, in almost identical words – indeed scholars suggest that both Matthew and Luke made use of Mark’s earlier account.

The bones of the common story they tell are these. Jesus took Peter and John and James with him up a mountain. There Jesus was transfigured before them, with his face shining and his clothes dazzling white. And beside him the three disciples saw two other figures, which they identified with Elijah and Moses.  Peter said to Jesus, ‘It is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah’. Then a cloud overshadowed them and they heard a voice saying, ‘This is my Son … listen to him’. And when the cloud cleared they saw only Jesus by himself.

Now a high mountain and clouds are just the circumstances where we can see an unusual optical effect called a ‘glory’. In a ‘glory’ sunlight is scattered back from water droplets in a mist, forming a glowing halo – the technical term is Mie scattering. An example is the ‘Brocken Spectre’, named for the highest peak in the Harz Mountains in Germany. This appears when a low sun is behind a climber looking downwards into mist from a ridge – the spectre is the shadow of the observer projected onto the mist and surrounded by the glowing halo of a glory. You might be lucky enough to see one yourself, as I did, looking down from a plane at the shadow it cast on a cloud, surrounded by a halo of light.

I imagine Peter and John and James close together on the mountain, with Jesus a little bit away, praying by himself as was his custom, as the clouds swirl around them. Suddenly, where Jesus has been standing, they each see a glowing figure – it’s their own shadow cast on a cloud, wrapped in a glory – and two other shadows beside it, which are those of their companions. Peter, always the impulsive one, identifies the three figures with Jesus, Moses and Elijah. When the cloud envelopes them they are terrified, and in a sudden flash of inspiration they understand, as if they had heard God say it, that they must listen to Jesus as God’s Son.

This is speculation, of course, and not just mine. But if it is true that we can understand the effects surrounding Transfiguration as physics and not as a miracle, it should not weaken our faith one jot,  in any sense. Rather it makes it easier to believe the event actually happened, and therefore it strengthens the case that the Gospels are reliable accounts. The Evangelists might not have understood the physics, as we can, but they did not just invent the story to serve their artistic and theological needs.

The real miracle, I suggest, is how the Transfiguration affected the disciples.

They did not tell anyone about their experience, Luke tells us – indeed Matthew and Mark both say Jesus forbade them to. But they remembered it, how important it seemed to them, for they passed their story on through Mark to Matthew and Luke, and so to us.

The voice that Peter, John and James heard told them to listen to Jesus. And that is just what they did. Jesus taught them as they travelled with him the road that lead to Jerusalem, to the Cross, to the Resurrection, to the Ascension, and on to Pentecost, when they began to blossom as Christ’s body, the Church.

I think the Transfiguration was the moment on their long road when their complete commitment to Jesus was confirmed.

And we are surely meant to understand that his shining face and the dazzling light are, in fact, a reflection of Jesus’s joy in his Father’s love, for himself, for all creation - and for us.

The golden calf

The story of the Golden Calf (Exodus 32:1-14) is a strange and ancient story.
The setting is Mount Sinai more than 3000 years ago, at the start of the 40 years that the children of Israel wander as nomads in the desert, after their escape from Egypt and before they arrive in Canaan, the land promised to their ancestor Abraham.

The characters are the Israelite people, Aaron the priest, Moses the prophet who is Aaron’s younger brother – and Yahweh, translated as the Lord. Yahweh, the Israelites were convinced, was the one true God, with whom they had a special relationship.

The story is part of the foundation myth of the Israelites, through which they understood their special relationship with God and its implications for how they should live. But does it have any relevance for us today?

Let me reflect on the characters in the story, before addressing that question.

But before that I must go back a bit to set the story in context.
Three months after Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt they reached Mount Sinai. There Yahweh spoke to Moses and gave him what we know as the Ten Commandments, and a lot of other detailed instructions about how to behave, which Moses relayed to the people. The Israelites confirmed their covenant with Yahweh, saying ‘All that the Lord has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient’.

Moses then climbed the mountain a second time, where Yahweh speaks to him again; this time giving precise instructions for building the portable tabernacle in which Yahweh will dwell with his people, and how Aaron and his offspring are to lead the people in worshipping him. We are told that ‘Moses was on the mountain for forty days and forty nights’.

That's when we come to the story of the Golden Calf in today’s reading.

Turning to the characters, we begin with the Israelites.
Can you empathise with them? I can.

They must have felt very insecure – as refugees surely do today - they had left behind all that was familiar in Egypt, however onerous their slavery had been. And now Moses had left them - perhaps he would never come back? perhaps the messages he brought from Yahweh were an illusion? No doubt they felt a need for the reassurance of something familiar and concrete to focus their hopes for the future on. It is very human to seek something to live for, something to give meaning to life – it is sometimes said that there is a God-shaped hole in every person which must be filled one way or another.

So ‘the people gathered around Aaron and said to him, “Come make gods for us, who shall go before us”’. Aaron went along with them. He took their gold jewellery – their rainy day savings, I suppose – and he made it into a golden calf, just like the familiar idols they had known in Egypt. The people shouted, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt’. And they worshipped the golden calf with sacrifices - and they ran wild in an orgy of feasting.

Oh what faithlessness! The people are breaking the first two of the Ten Commandments they so recently vowed to keep: ‘I am the Lord your God… you shall have no other gods before me’; and ‘You shall not make for yourself an idol’. They are putting something made by human hands, an idol, in place of Yahweh, the God who made all things, to whom they are bound in a covenant.

So what about Aaron?
With Moses away Aaron is the Israelites’ leader. He is a levite, a descendent of Levi, an hereditary priest of Yahweh. Yet he makes the golden calf, an idol, when the people, or some of them, came to demand he do so - because, he later tells Moses, he was frightened of these people.

But I don’t think he joined in the people's idolatry. In fact he seems to have tried to divert the people from it. He declared that ‘Tomorrow shall be a festival to the Lord’ – that is to Yahweh, not to the idol. Perhaps he believed that he could present the golden calf as a symbol to represent Yahweh, to help the Israelites worship the one true God. But if so, he was terribly wrong – they worshipped the golden calf as an idol - and then they ran amok.

Aaron was surely a weak leader, and he displayed bad judgement.

Then there’s Moses.
Moses is a prophet, someone who converses with Yahweh and articulates Yahweh's wishes to the people.

On the mountain Moses receives the insight to see that the Israelites needed something concrete on which to focus their worship. And he also receives a vision, written on tablets of stone by Yahweh, of what would provide just such a focus without replacing Yahweh by an idol.

Moses also receives the insight that the Israelite people are wilful, inclined to ignore Yahweh’s wishes when it suits them; ‘I have seen this people, how stiff-necked they are’. He feared that Yahweh in his wrath would wreak a great vengeance on the Israelites. So he pleads with Yahweh to spare them, reminding Yahweh of his promises to Abraham, Isaac and Israel. ‘And the Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people’, we are told.

But unlike Yahweh, Moses is entirely unforgiving. After the passage we heard, we are told of his fury when he came down from the mountain and saw what was going on. He broke the tablets of stone on the ground. He took the golden calf, ‘burned it with fire, ground it to powder, scattered it on the water, and made the Israelites drink it’ – rather like rubbing a puppy’s nose in its own dirt, I suppose. And then he incited the sons of Levi to slaughter 3,000 of the Israelites who had worshipped the idol and were still running amok. There is blood on Moses’ hands, and not for the first time.

And where is Yahweh in all this?
Yahweh worked through Moses to teach the children of Israel, 1st that it is wrong to worship an idol in place of the one true God, and 2nd that the one true God is faithful and will keep his promises.

Moses understood that Yahweh is not like one of the jealous, vengeful gods of popular belief in the ancient Middle East. Yahweh is faithful to his people - Yahweh can be relied on to keep his promises. Yahweh does not go in for collective punishment. But Moses also believed that Yahweh would in the fullness of time individually punish those who disobeyed him; he heard Yahweh say, ‘Nevertheless, when the day comes for punishment, I will punish them for their sin’.

Our Christian understanding of the one true God has moved on from the Israelites’ ideas about Yahweh. In particular we have Jesus Christ’s example of loving self-sacrifice, and we have his message that God will forgive our sins if we only repent. Our God is not just faithful, but also merciful. I believe that Moses probably misheard what Yahweh had to say about punishment. God does not punish his people – we bring punishment on ourselves when we fail to repent

So is anything in this strange story relevant for us today? I think so.
First, surely, we must all recognise that we are not so very different from the Israelites – like them, like all human beings, we are all too likely to be ‘stiff-necked’, to put something we create in place of God. Pleasure, possessions, money - country, class, tribe - party, markets, economic systems – how easy it is to make any of these into a golden calf. When we do, we lose touch with the kingdom of God in which all people can flourish - and bad things happen. Isn’t that what the global crash is about? Isn't that what the gathering ecological disaster is about? That is why God forbids idolatry, I think. We must always be on guard against golden calves, focus our worship and attention on God our loving Father, and work to make his kingdom a reality.

Second, I think Christian leaders should reflect on Aaron. Aaron made an idol for the people to worship - perhaps out of fear, perhaps because he thought people needed a concrete image to help them worship the one true God. He was weak, he was wrong. Is it possible that some Christian leaders today allow the dogmas and rituals of their churches to obscure the God that Jesus shows us? They should take care they do not – and that includes me when I lead MP and talk to you from this pulpit!

Year C, Lent 4, Mothering Sunday, 18 March 2007

1. Introduction

Mothering Sunday is such a lovely opportunity for us to make a fuss of our Mothers, isn’t it? And if they are no longer with us, to remember them, and to recall how much we owe them. We’ll all be doing so today, I’m sure, and it’s right that we should.

I want to start by reflecting a little on how much I owe my own mother:

• I owe her my very life, of course, as we all do our mothers. She carried me safe in her body for 9 months, and nurtured me, from the time when I was just a bundle of cells until I arrived squalling into the world.
• Then throughout my childhood she was there, to love me as only a mother can, to comfort me when I was hurt or frightened, to encourage me to be brave and to be ‘a useful engine’. And still she nurtured me – even when I was away at boarding school, every fortnight I received a fruit cake in a parcel through the post from her.
• As I grew to adulthood she let me go, to make my own way in the world. But she was still always there to love, to comfort, to encourage, and, yes, to nurture me, whenever I needed it.
• And it was she who taught me the first elements of her Christian faith. One of my earliest memories is of learning my first prayer at her knee: ‘Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, bless the bed that I lie on’.
• I am very blessed to have had such a mother, and I give thanks to God for her. Most of us are similarly blessed. But we need to remember that not all children are so blessed. And also that there are women who yearn for children who cannot have them.

In the rest of this address, I’m going to reflect a little on the origins of the Mothering Sunday tradition, and then focus on the mother themes in today’s OT and Gospel readings – the good compilers of the lectionary have of course carefully chosen ‘mother’ readings for the day that’s in it!

2. Mothering Sunday

The 4th Sunday of Lent was not originally a celebration of motherhood. At least from the C16th in England, it was the day when people returned to make offerings in their “mother church”, the main church or cathedral of the area. Hence it came to be known as ‘Mothering Sunday’.

If children had moved to neighbouring towns and villages, this would be one of the few occasions when whole families could get together. Remember, not much more than 100 years ago, very many children would be sent away from home to work at no more than 10 or 12 years old, as an apprentice if they were a boy, or as a domestic servant if they were a girl.

According to historians, this was the origin of the English tradition that children and young people working away from home should be given the day off on Mothering Sunday, to visit their mothers. I’m not sure if this was an Irish tradition too, but I’d love to know whether or not it was. We may just have borrowed it from the Church of England.

I imagine that as they walked along the country roads, the boys would stop and pick a bunch of violets or other flowers as a present for their mother. And equally the girls might bring their mother a present of a cake. Hence the old traditions of bunches of flowers, and the delicious Simnel cake.

That was the ancient tradition, at least in England. Like so many other old traditions, it was just about extinct after WW1: killed off by social changes and industrialisation. But it got a new lease of life, under the impact of the American invention of ‘Mother’s Day’, which was designated by US President Woodrow Wilson in 1914 to be held on the 2nd Sunday of May. It has now become something of a commercial opportunity, to sell cards and flowers and boxes of chocolates, but I think it’s rather nice that we have managed to retain the ancient traditional Church day for it, on this side of the Atlantic.

In East Anglia, where I spent my childhood, the resurrection of Mothering Sunday is said to be due to the impact of all the American airmen on the bases established there during WW2. I certainly remember it as a living Church festival in the 1950s – my parents would take me and my brother into the woods to pick nosegays of primroses and wood anemones, which would be blessed and given to children at a children’s service to take back to their mothers.

3. The Mothering Sunday traditions, and the emotions they evoke, are warm and tender and comforting. But in case we are in any danger of getting carried away by sentimentality, today’s scripture readings provide the antidote. They serve to remind us that being a mother is not just about flowers and cakes and loving hugs. It is also about heartbreak, and separation, and even death. Even today, being a mother can be a dangerous thing: you may, like me, have seen or heard the news about 10 days ago of Tania Corcoran, a Garda Sergeant, who died giving birth to twins in Drogheda. One of her babies died in the womb, and the other is desperately ill. She was a relative of my sister-in-law and I ask for your prayers for Tania and her family.

a. In the OT reading from Exodus 2:1-10, we heard the strange little tale of Moses in the Bulrushes.

• The background to the story is that Pharaoh decreed that Hebrew boys should be drowned at birth in the Nile, because he feared the Hebrew minority becoming too strong in his kingdom. The girls were allowed to live: no doubt they would have been married off to Egyptian men, and their children would be Egyptian. A rather nasty ancient case of ethnic cleansing.
• Moses’ mother saved him from this fate by hiding him, until he was too big to hide anymore, and then she made a little boat for him from a basket, and left him to be found in the rushes by the river-bank. He was found by Pharaoh’s daughter, who took pity on him, and decided to adopt him. Moses’ own mother was employed to nurse him, but when he was weaned, she had to give him up to Pharaoh’s daughter.
• Two things strike me about this story:

1. how completely torn the emotions of Moses’ natural mother must have been, to be compelled to give away to another woman the child to whom she had given life, and whom she had saved and nurtured. But she knew that was the only way to show her love for him.
2. the strength of the love of Pharaoh’s daughter for this little Hebrew boy. She no doubt risked the wrath of the state to save his little life, even though he belonged to a hated minority. The love of a foster mother, or of an adoptive mother, is just as valuable in God’s eyes as the love of a natural mother.

b. In the Gospel reading (John 19:25-27) we heard John’s poignant story about how Jesus, even in agony on the Cross, expressed his love for his mother, and the disciple he loved.

• Public execution is an ugly thing, but the prolonged torture of crucifixion must have been particularly gut-wrenching to watch. Yet Mary his mother found the strength to stay close by Jesus in his agony. How torn she must have been, too: repelled by his ghastly death, yet drawn to be near her beloved son in his last hours. In Mary at the Cross we see an image of the eternal love at the heart of motherhood.
• Mary the mother of Jesus was supported in her vigil by four others: her sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene, as well as someone not named, but described as the ‘disciple whom Jesus loved’. Scholars have identified Mary’s sister as Salome, the mother of James and John, the sons of Zebedee, two of the twelve called by Jesus. She, you may remember, was rebuked by Jesus for asking him to give her sons the chief place in his Kingdom. The ancient tradition of the Church is that the disciple Jesus loved was Salome’s son John, the author of John’s Gospel. If scholars and tradition are right, this John too, like John the Baptist, would be Jesus’s cousin.
• I find it very moving that on the brink of his death, Jesus should think to commit Mary his mother to the care of John his cousin, and John to the care of Mary, to look after each other, and to comfort each other’s loneliness when he was gone. A truly practical example of the love of God at work in evil times.
  

4. So, to conclude, it is surely very right for us, on this Mothering Sunday, to thank God for our mothers and for their love for us, whether they are our natural mothers or our foster or adoptive mothers. But let us also remember those mothers whose hearts are broken by death or separation from a child. And let us not forget all those women who long to have a child but cannot, nor all those children who for whatever reason cannot give thanks for a mother’s love.