Sermon — February 27, 2022
The Rev. Greg Johnston
As somebody whose mood mostly revolves around the weather, I can’t stand the kind of overcast skies we’ve been having recently. But as a college newspaper photographer, I loved them. For three years in college, I was a staff photographer and then a photography editor for The Harvard Crimson, an amateur managing amateurs shooting photos for the only daily newspaper in Cambridge, and I very quickly learned about the paradox of light.
In low light, of course, the camera can barely capture anything. If you’re taking candid photos of some visiting scholar at a dimly-lit evening lecture, you can’t just use a flash like a paparazzo. Your only options are to reduce the shutter speed to let in more light (and making your photo blurrier) or to increase the film speed to capture more light (and make your photos grainier). And while printing photos onto newsprint gives you a certain amount of wiggle room—ink bleeds, after all—the digital era takes it all away.
Outdoor events are much better. You have all the light you need. In fact, it’s often too much light. A sunny day is hard for photographers, too. The rays of the sun, coming from a single point, tend to cast harsh shadows. The nose creates a black triangle across the cheek. The bags under the eyes deepen. And the range between the bright highlights and the dark shadows can be hard to capture. Hand the newspaper over to a bunch of freshman photographers on a sunny day, and it looks like The Phantom of the Opera; half the subject’s face is covered in a white mask of over-exposure.
But a cloudy day is photojournalist heaven. A cloudy sky acts like the celestial version of one of those white umbrellas you’ll see in a studio, diffusing the power of the sun. You no longer have a single light source shining down and casting shadows. In fact, on a really overcast day, when the sky’s not just filled with clouds but uniformly grey, it’s as if your subject is illuminated from every direction at once with a soft light, giving you crisp, glowing photos with absolutely no skill required.
This, by the way, is why you’d never want to go on a first date in an airport bathroom. (Well, there are several reasons.) The harsh overhead lights show you exactly as you are; and then some. But the gentle glow of a romantic restaurant, with soft lighting from above and candles from below, shows you in, quite literally, your best light, better than you looked ten years ago on a good day.
Well, you have come to church, not to a photography class (or an airport bathroom), and you’re presumably here to hear about God, not mood lighting. So let me put it this way: while there are many ways to understand who Jesus is and what he does, one school of thought is to say this: Jesus is “the light of the world”; (John 9:5) and he shows us in two very different lights.
One of them is like the harsh light of the sun: beautiful and necessary for our life and growth; unflattering and dangerous to behold with our bare eyes. This is the divine light that shines out of Moses’ face when he comes down from Mount Sinai, fearful to behold. It’s a light so brilliant that you might almost describe it as “sharp.” Indeed, the Book of Exodus literally says something like “his face sprouted horns of light.” (Ex. 34:29) It’s an odd phrase, and indeed it’s the source of a misunderstanding in medieval art, because while every other ancient translator of the Bible ignored the image and simply translated “his face was shining” or something similar, Jerome, who translated the Bible into Latin, included the bit about horns. He was fluent in Hebrew, he understood that it was just a poetic turn of phrase, but his later readers did not, leading to a thousand years of Western art that depicts Moses with little goat horns on his head. Which is not the point.
The point is that Moses doesn’t just glow with a peaceful, heavenly light. He radiates light in beams so sharp they piece the soul. It’s a symbol of the soul-piercing power of the Law, which he delivers with his face uncovered, the Law whose perfect precepts show human beings exactly as they are. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your might,” (Deut. 6:5) shines forth, and the shadows begin to appear; and “you shall love your neighbor as yourself,” (Lev. 19:18) and our imperfections become clear. In the bright light of God’s word, none of us look very good.
And indeed, it’s with such light that Jesus appears when he is transfigured in prayer. “The appearance of his face changed,” Luke writes—get the reference?—“and his clothes became dazzling white,” (Luke 9:29) and again (not to make this an ancient-language seminar) the literal sense of the words is important: “his clothes were white,” Luke writes, “flashing like lightning.” What sharper beam of concentrated light could there be than a bolt of lightning?
And like the Law given to Moses, Jesus’ life is full of love so perfect as to be unflattering for the rest of us. It’s a self-sacrificial, unconditional, patient, peaceful love; a love that loves not only its friends and neighbors but its enemies, as you may recall. This love is an ideal to which we can all aspire, but by whose measure we inevitably fall short. And so Jesus’ light, like Moses’ light, illuminates our flaws. His brightness deepens our shadows. The lightning that flashes from his very clothing stuns his closest followers; even the most holy saints can’t stand before it.
But Jesus shows us in another light, as well, because he is not only the bright sun, but the cloudy sky; not only the shining Word of God, but the veil that softens its radiance. He doesn’t just dazzle Peter and James and John with his light, he brings them into the cloud that buffers it, and they hear the voice of God speaking to them from within. (Luke 9:34-35)
In Jesus, God became human. He faced temptation, and pain, and he knows what it is like to be a human being suffering, and has nothing but empathy and compassion for us. Jesus chooses to become the veil or the cloud or the umbrella that softens the harsh light of his own perfection, and the light of God’s law of love that highlights our flaws by contrast becomes the soft and loving light of God that shows us at our best.
People sometimes say that when God looks at you, God sees Jesus. And this is meant to be a reassurance about divine judgment and divine mercy: God doesn’t see and condemn your imperfect self, God sees and loves Christ in you. But of course, God sees us, God knows us, and God loves us. It’s just that God has chosen to see us in the light of Christ: in the bright light that shows how far from Jesus’ sacrificial love we really are, but ultimately in the soft light that shows us at our best.
And that light, if you take St. Paul’s word for it, not only shows us at our best; it begins to transform us into our best.
I’ll just say up front, be careful about Paul’s interpretation of the veil and the reading of the Law in this passage from Second Corinthians. It deserves a longer aside than I’m going to give it about inter-faith relations. If you read it a certain way, you can draw out some implications about Judaism that are condescending or even dangerous. I’ll just say now that it’s helpful to remember that Paul isn’t a Christian criticizing Jews; he’s a Jewish author, writing to the leaders of a mostly-Jewish religious community, about the way other Jewish religious leaders read the Bible they all share, and he writing without knowing the legacy of Christian violence against Jews that would eventually come.
What interests me, though, is Paul’s idea that seeing this divine light transforms us into that light; that seeing the image of the glory of God, as if it were reflected in a mirror, transforms us into that same image. That it’s not just that God has chosen to see us in our best light, that God chooses to see us at our best and therefore forgives us. It’s that seeing us at our best is what begins to transform us.
It’s almost like the romantic lighting on a first date in that dimly-lit restaurant, which has the power not only to show us in our best light, but—by bringing us into a relationship with someone who will bring out the best in us—has the power actually to make us better. (And, to be clear: I mean it makes us better people, not better-looking people.)
This kind of light doesn’t work by hiding our flaws, but by revealing the goodness of our true selves beneath the exterior. And it’s that light that God chooses to shine on us, not only seeing us in our best light but by making us into our best selves. “Therefore,” Paul writes, since it is by God’s mercy that we are engaged in this ministry, we do not lose heart.” (2 Cor. 4:1) Since it is by God’s mercy that we, all of us, are engaged in this ministry—in this Christian journey of love—we do not lose heart, because we know that God sees us in that loving, forgiving, transforming light. “And 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; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.” (2 Cor. 3:18) Amen.