It’s hard to imagine the “Parable of the Prodigal Son” happening today.

For one thing, it’s one of the most powerful stories of repentance and forgiveness in the history of world literature; and we live in a society in which the only thing less popular than taking responsibility for something you’ve done wrong and apologizing is forgiving someone who’s done exactly that.

It’s the details of the story that make it so powerful. This young man asks for his share of the inheritance early, and his father is extraordinarily generous, splitting the family’s wealth between his two sons evenly rather than favoring the firstborn son. And this is no small thing. It’s not a matter of writing a check: the father has to sell half their land, half their livestock, half of everything they have to provide the younger son with his half of the family’s wealth in liquid form. The younger son has written himself out of the family’s economic future, and soon enough its social future. The older brother and the father will continue working the diminished family farm, but Junior’s going to make his fortune alone in a strange land.

Except instead of making his fortune, he squanders it, living so luxuriously that when famine strikes, it turns out his rainy-day fund has gone dry. He’s friendless and alone, a stranger in a strange land, and no one there will help him. Hitting rock bottom, he comes to himself and works up his courage to make his apology: “I will arise, and go to my father, and I will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me like one of your hired hands.’” (Luke 15:18-19)

He comes home, ready to make his apology, but “while he was still far off,” his father sees him, and loves him, and forgives; and he comes running out toward him and throws himself around him, and kisses his dear son. And the son begins his apology, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.” (15:21) But he never gets to finish. The father doesn’t need to hear it. Halfway through the apology, he’s already stopped listening and turned away to give instructions to the servants for the party, overwhelmed with what’s happened: “this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!” (15:24)

And then along comes the older brother, whose unforgiveness is as bitter as the father’s forgiveness is sweet. Coming in from the fields, he hears the sounds of the celebration, and when he’s told what’s going on, he’s outraged. And why not? It’s not just, Dad, that you’re throwing the kind of party for this good-for-nothing “son of yours” that you’ve never thrown for me. (15;:30) He already took his half of our property, and spent it. So that’s my fatted calf they’re eating—without even inviting me! That’s my best robe he’s wearing, my wine he’s drinking. And the father begs him to understand: “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours… But this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found!” (15:31-32) And the story ends, and we’re left hanging: What would the older brother decide to do?

Many of us hear echoes of our own lives in this story. Perhaps you see yourself in the younger brother, desperately needing forgiveness for some offense, wishing that when you had gone astray, your own father (mother, sibling, friend, spouse) had run out into the fields to greet you when you returned, “when you were still far off.” Perhaps you see yourself in the father, wishing you’d had the grace to extend that unconditional, forgiving love to someone before it was too late. Or perhaps, as many of us do, you see yourself in the diligent older brother: hardworking, straitlaced, resentful after years of working hard and smiling nicely while other people reap the rewards.

We may be like the brother who needs forgiveness, or the father who needs to forgive, or the other brother who’s struggling with forgiveness. But God is like that overjoyed parent, forgiving us before he even heard us apologize, running towards us while we are still far off, loving and delighting in us however far we’ve fallen and however far away we’ve gone, striving to reconcile us with one another and celebrating our return whenever it comes, for ever and ever, Amen.

But there’s one problem with this picture. The story never says that the father forgives his younger son. There’s no reason to believe, in fact, that the father has any idea what’s been going on. There is no “Find my Friends” on his son’s iPhone that shows him spending all his time in the bars and clubs of a far-off land. There are no text-message updates to say he’s running low on funds. There are no collect calls home to ask for cash to buy a bus ticket. He can’t send a telegram. He can’t even send a letter, even if he had fifty-eight cents for a stamp, which he doesn’t, because in the ancient world, there was no postal service. To send a letter he’d have to hire a scribe to take dictation, then find a friend who was headed back in the direction of his hometown to carry it for him. This was how writing letters worked. And if you’re living in a foreign land, so poor and alone that you’re craving the slop out of the pigs’ own trough, there’s not much chance you’re going to find someone to carry a letter back home for you. (And by the way, nobody sends a letter home saying that they’ve squandered their inheritance in dissolute living. That’s what Instagram is for.)

The younger son has cashed out and moved away, cutting himself off from the family. The father is so bereft, regrets letting him go so much that he’s apparently watching the road rather than going about his business as usual, watching so intently that while his son was still far off, he spots him. He could just as easily be coming home in great triumph, having quadrupled his wealth. The father has no idea and still he runs to him. His son tries to tell him, “I have sinned against heaven and before you,” but it’s clear the father isn’t really listening. He doesn’t ask what’s wrong. We know the story, but the father’s never heard it, and it’s not until the party’s begun and the servants have heard the tale that the older son understands. The father sees a son who had left his family behind returning, and he is overjoyed, and when asked to explain, he doesn’t say, “This son of mine had gone astray and has apologized,” or “he has sinned and been forgiven.” He says he “was dead and is alive; he was lost and is found.” If there’s a theme in this story, it’s this: not sin and forgiveness, but “lost and found.”

And it’s this sense of loss that shapes the father’s response, and the older brother’s, too.

It was the father’s decision, after all, whether he would give his son his portion of the inheritance or not. It was the father’s decision whether to split the family’s wealth fifty-fifty between his two sons, or to give the firstborn a double portion, as Biblical law suggests. (Deut. 21:17) You might think he should’ve known his children a bit better; he probably could’ve predicted what would happen, after all. If the younger son was lost, it’s because he lost him! And unfortunately, now he’s lost the older son as well; literally lost track of him, forgotten to invite him to the party he’s hosting in his brother’s honor, and lost him metaphorically as well.

It’s the father’s sense of losing his son and finding him again that drives the recklessness with which he ignores his failings and mistakes and celebrates his return, because there’s nothing more important than being reunited with him again. And it’s the older brother’s sense of losing his special relationship with his father, losing his sense of himself as the good one, the special one, the loved one, that drives his unforgiveness, too.

And this is very good news. If we stuck with the first idea—if we stopped with the story of forgiveness and love, without this added element of loss—it would be good news, to a certain extent. It would be comforting to hear that God forgives us even before we the apologies leave our mouths; that God runs towards us while we are still far off to embrace us. But when we find ourselves in the position of the resentful older brother, it isn’t much help. Just be like the father, the story seems to say. Just love, unconditionally, and forgive recklessly, and let someone else feast on your food unfairly in the name of love. But that’s very hard to do, and the story gives us almost no tools to do it.

But the second story reminds me of what I lose when I don’t forgive. The father loses a son, and finds him again. The brother loses a brother—but he, too, can find him again. He can choose to walk into that party. Or he can choose to keep himself out in the cold. But he’s the only one who’ll go hungry if he does. He’s the only one who’ll still be lost, when his brother has been found. And it’s up to him which future he will choose. It’s up to him whether to forgive a brother and a father who don’t deserve it, who’ve wronged him and are at this very moment, as they feast on his fatted calf, still wronging him; or whether to do exactly what his younger brother has done, and cut himself off from the family, as if he were lost and they were dead to him.

And it’s up to us, each one of us, when we find ourselves living in this story, to look for what we’ve lost along the way, what we’ll lose if we can’t bring ourselves to forgive; and what we just might find if we go running toward it, however far off it may be.

Sermon — March 20, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Jesus’ words in our Gospel this morning crack open a debate about what’s sometimes called “karmic retribution.” You’re probably familiar with the idea: if you do a good deed now, you’ll “have some good karma” and the universe will owe you good things in the future. If you do evil now, you may escape punishment for a while, but eventually, you will reap what you have sown; bad things will happen to you.

Now, this is an over-simplified version of the real Buddhist or Hindu idea of “karma,” but in fact, most people believe in some form of it. It’s just the timeline that changes. So, some people really do believe that “what goes around comes around” in this life: if I do good things, good things will happen to me. It may be in a week, or a month, or ten years, but it’s coming. Of course, the various Hindu and Buddhist traditions from which the word “karma” actually comes, have a much more nuanced idea of things, especially when you introduce concepts like reincarnation: I may be repaid for the good or evil I’ve done in this life in some future life, after my death and rebirth. And of course, even most people’s ideas of how “heaven” and “hell” work are variations on the same theme, but again with the timeline changed: God is just, and justice will be served, not in this life, but after death. So no good deed goes unrewarded, and no evil deed goes unpunished; it’s just that it happens in the afterlife.

Jesus dives right in to this debate. It’s clear that he rejects the most simplistic version of “karmic retribution,” the idea that “good things happen to good people” and “bad things happen to bad people,” because this amounts to a kind of victim-blaming. Jesus names a couple of recent news stories to make the point; we don’t know anything about them, but you can probably understand without much context. Think about those Galilean pilgrims, he says, whom Pilate killed in cold blood at the very Temple itself, mixing their blood with the blood of their sacrifices. Think of those eighteen poor souls killed when that tower collapsed. We might say: Think of those families huddled in subway stations in Kyiv, of that friend who’s sick and fighting so bravely, of that family member who was bullied at school for years. Is their evidence of some hidden wrongdoing? Is it simply that “what goes around comes around”?

Jesus dismisses that idea out of hand. Do you think they suffered in this way because they were worse sinners than all the rest of us? “No, I tell you,” he says—“but…” (Luke 13:3)

There’s an old saying that preachers ought to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” and Jesus knew it well. To those who are worried that their suffering is a sign of God’s wrath or vengeance, Jesus simply says: Be not afraid. It’s not your fault. You’re not being punished for anything.

But to those who are comfortable, who have the leisure to come to him with speculative questions about the cause of human suffering and the problem of evil, Jesus says, “No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish, just as they did.” (Luke 13:3, 5)

“Repentance” is such a church-specific word that it’s sometimes not obvious what it means. Our English word “repent” comes from the Latin verb repenitire, a verb which means “to feel regret.” It’s tightly tied to ideas of punishment: the pen in repent or penitence is the same Latin word as in penalty or penal; in fact, it’s an alternate spelling of the pun in punish. To “repent” is to “feel really bad,” because to “punish” is to “make someone feel really bad.” But Jesus didn’t speak Latin. The Greek and Hebrew words for repentance have slightly different connotations. You may have heard a preacher quote the Greek word metanoia, the word used in the original language of the New Testament for repentance. Metanoia doesn’t mean “punishment” or “regret” but “transformation of the mind,” a reorientation of a person’s values and beliefs. And the Hebrew and Aramaic word for repentance is even clearer about that reorientation: it’s teshuvah in Hebrew, “turning” or “returning.” Not feeling guilty, not being punished, not even changing one’s mind, but turning away from a path that’s leading to destruction, and returning to God.

It’s this “turning” that Jesus is talking about, I think. Jesus is speaking to people living under foreign occupation in the decades before an explosive, failed revolution that will end with their defeat and the destruction of their city. Pontius Pilate isn’t a generic bad guy. He’s the Roman official charged with maintaining control of this part of the empire. Those Galileans were probably killed for resisting Roman rule, one way or another. And when Jesus turns and addresses the crowd, he’s begging them to resist the Romans in a different, non-violent way, because the rebellion they are planning will lead them to their destruction. To be clear: Jesus is not claiming that unless they repent from their personal sins, whatever, God will destroy them as individuals. He’s claiming that unless they practice teshuvah, unless they turn aside from the path they’re on, they will be destroyed; by Rome or one another or.

We are living in a different place and time. But we nevertheless sometimes find ourselves walking paths that lead us toward destruction. Perhaps it’s a personal path of destruction, an addiction or an obsession or simply an unhealthy way of relating to another person that’s destroying you, day by day. Perhaps it’s something bigger, like the path that’s leading us inexorably toward environmental catastrophe. But it is as true for us as it was for those Judeans and Galileans long ago: Unless we repent, unless we turn aside, we will all perish. This is the sense in which “what goes around comes around.” Not as the result of karmic retribution or divine justice, but simply as the consequence of our own actions. Jesus doesn’t tell these people that they’re going be suffer forever in hell. He tells them that if they don’t turn, they will perish. But what if they do turn and look to see what’s on the other road?

Like many of the heroes of the Bible, Moses isn’t much of a hero; at least not to begin with. This first reading comes from Exodus chapter 3. So far, Moses has been born into an enslaved people under the threat of violence. His fantastic escape down the river in a basket is a testament to his mother’s ingenuity and to the compassion of Pharaoh’s daughter, but we can’t give any credit to baby Moses himself. That’s chapter 1. Chapter 2 mostly tells the story of Moses as a hot-headed and violent man. Raised a prince of Egypt, he’s nevertheless killed an Egyptian man and fled, leaving behind his family and his homeland and all his privilege to tend the flocks of Jethro, the priest of Midian. It’s not a great start.

But no spiritual journey ever starts with our good behavior. It starts with God’s unprompted, undeserved calling. And so the “angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush,” and Moses noticed. (Exod. 3:2) And Moses said to himself, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight,” and “when the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see,” God called to him by name: “Moshe! Moshe!” (3:3) And Moses replied, Hineni, “Here I am.” (3:4)

It is not because Moses’ mother sets him afloat down the river in a basket that God calls him to stand up to Pharaoh and lead his people. It’s not because he’s particular good at nonviolent resistance, which he’s not. It’s not because he’s a good public speaker—in fact, he’s such a bad public speaker that God gets his brother Aaron involved to help him out. It’s because when he sees God’s glory flaring out from the bush, he turns aside to see. And when God saw that he had turned aside, God called to him.

Moses turns away from the path of destruction, the path that had led him from the royal court to a lonely wilderness, from his life being saved from Pharaoh’s violence to ending another man’s life by violence, and he turns onto another path, a path of freedom and of life. And while that path is not always easy—while Moses suffers much along the way—there is never a sense that he’s getting what he deserves, there is never a sense that what goes around comes around, there is never a sense that God is punishing or will punish Moses for this inauspicious and violent beginning, in this life or the next. Because as soon as he turns aside, he has left the path that leads to destruction, and he is safe.

God calls us each by name, as good or bad or ordinary as we are. And the God whose name is “I Am Who I Am,” calls each of us as we are, and we respond, “Here I am.” Here I am, as I am. There’s no one else I can be. And if we turn aside—no, since the moment that we turned aside to look—God will and God is and God has been leading us down the paths of life and love and peace, whatever may happen along the way.

As we walk along that path, may God indeed “keep us both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul,” this day and for ever more. Amen.

Sermon — March 6, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

As people have followed the news from Ukraine recently, I’ve seen a number of different ways to try to understand what’s happening by telling the stories of the past. It’s something we often do. Is this, one might wonder, closer to what Germany did to Czechoslovakia in 1938, or is it closer to what Germany and the Soviet Union did to Poland in 1939? Is it more like what Russia did to Georgia in 2008, or what Russia did to Ukraine just back in 2014? Or, if you’re not so familiar with the dates and times of 20^th-century European history: Is this, as one headline said, a “David and Goliath story”?

It’s interesting, the way we try to understand, as if picking the right story about a situation can tell us something about the way it will unfold. “David and Goliath” is the perfect example. After all, nobody ever claims to be Goliath, because “David and Goliath” doesn’t just distinguish between “small and big,” it separates those who are small, scrappy, and untrained, but righteous from those who are big, powerful, incompetent, and wrong. And “David and Goliath” aren’t just characters, but a story. We know the beginning, the middle, and the end. And we know that it’s not the story of a small but righteous child slowly crushed, despite his best efforts, beneath the inexorable power of a giant. It’s a story in which the determined, innocent boy overcomes the hardened warrior by the grace of God and by the power of his goodness. To claim the David and Goliath story for oneself is to claim that one will have victory, as unlikely as it may seem; and in fact, by giving courage to your friends and attracting compassion from the world, the telling of the story itself shifts the plot of reality toward the victory. It’s not a magic formula. It doesn’t guarantee you’ll get what you want. But it’s a legitimate strategy, and it sometimes really works.

We often call Lent a penitential season, a season in which we repent, as one of our liturgies puts it, for “the evil that enslaves us, the evil we have done, and the evil done on our behalf,” and we try to repair the damage. It’s also a season of fasting, which is something different. Fasting—whether from certain foods or from alcohol or from anything else we choose to give up during Lent—is not a form of repentance. We don’t give up chocolate or wine or whatever because they’re evil, but because they’re good. And it’s not a punishment, a way of somehow making amends for our sins by forsaking something we like. It’s a workout for the soul, a way of practicing our resistance to really serious temptations by resisting things that aren’t actually bad to do. Along with repentance and fasting, Lent is also a season of preparation: not only of our preparation for the joy of the resurrection on Easter, but, traditionally, a season in which new Christians were formed in the traditions of the faith as they prepared to be baptized at Easter.

Lent is a season of repentance, and of fasting, and of preparation; but it’s also a season of wandering in the wilderness. The forty days of Lent symbolize the forty days of Jesus’ fasting and temptation in the wilderness, which are themselves an echo of the forty years the Israelites spent wandering in the wilderness generations before. And this is the part of Lent I’m really feeling the most this year—not repentance, or preparation, or even fasting (although, ask me in a few weeks)—but that story of the wilderness.

The wilderness is an interlude in the story of the ancient Israelites. It should just be a couple days’ journey from Egypt to the Promised Land, and yet this wilderness stretches on for a long, long time, the Promised Land always tantalizingly just around the bend. Much like the last two years. We’ve left behind an old way of living, and we haven’t quite reached the new one yet. And it turns out that this wilderness time hasn’t just been empty time. It’s been a time of transformation and change and reimagination. It’s not just the gap between Point A and Point B—it is, itself, point B in a much longer alphabet of change.

The Book of Deuteronomy is written as a speech by Moses at the end of this wandering time, forty years after he parted the Red Sea so they could escape slavery in Egypt. Moses reminds them of the law that God has given them, and tells them what to do when they finally make it there: “When you have come into the Land…and you possess it, and settle in it, you shall take some of the first fruit of the ground…” and go to the altar of God, and say, “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor,” and retell the story of their people, of their ancestors’ own ancient wanderings, of their enslavement, and of their liberation. (Deut. 26:1-2, 5)

Immediately after Jesus’ baptism in the same river Jordan, he is led out into the wilderness to be tested, and stays there for forty days, a miniature version of their forty years. And each one of his responses to the devil’s tempting offers is a quote from that same Book of Deuteronomy: “One does not live by bread alone,” and “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him,” and “Do not put the Lord your God to the test” all come from that same moment in the people’s story. (Deut. 8:3, 6:13, 6:16)

Jesus’ wilderness time is at the beginning of his ministry, not the end. But it comes while his people are still enduring another wilderness, not forty days or four decades but four centuries and more of foreign rule, of occupation and oppression. And when the devil tempts him with offers of bread, and power, and safety for himself, Jesus quotes Deuteronomy, recalling the whole story of the people’s time in the wilderness and their entrance into the Promised Land. The devil offers a single hungry man a loaf of bread; and Jesus calls forth the story of the God who fed his people with manna from heaven every day. The devil offers him power over the kingdoms of all the world, and Jesus recalls the story of a people who’ve had enough of being ruled. The devil offers him protection, but Jesus calls forth the God who parted the sea and dashed the chariots of Pharaoh, the tanks of the ancient world, into bits.

These words have power. When we quote a beloved text, or we give a ritualized address, when we recite ancient prayers or we write a news headline about a “David and Goliath” struggle, we write ourselves into the story, and that story becomes real in our lives.

Paul writes to the church in Rome that “if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” (Romans 10:9) It’s not a magic formula. It’s the retelling of a story. Like the Eucharistic prayers that evoke the story of salvation, like the Great Litany that echoes with five centuries of the prayers of the past, it draws upon the strength of the experience of Christians in ages past, and their stories begin to shape our lives and our choices as we live the remaining chapters of our stories. And in fact this retelling doesn’t just call forth the stories of our ancestors; it’s brings God to us. When we tell those old stories, Paul quotes Deuteronomy to say, “The word is near [us], on [our] lips and in [our] heart.” (Rom. 10:8, Deut. 30:14) The uppercase-W Word of God is near us. The Word who became flesh is near us. When we tell these stories, and pray these prayers, Christ is near us, whether we can sense him or not, and he is writing the rest of the story for us as leave this place today.

Only a few words of this service today came from me, or from you. More came from the generations before us, fifty or five hundred years ago. And more still came from generations long past, from those who lived in a far-off live two or three thousand years ago. But their stories are our stories. Their God is our God. Their wilderness is not our wilderness, but their wandering is our wandering, and it feels like we’re getting awfully close to the Promise Land. We don’t know what God has written for us in the next chapter of our story, but we do know where God’s story has brought us in the past: from a wilderness of spiritual fasting to a land flowing with milk and honey; from enslavement to liberation; from the cross to the empty tomb; and together with all those who live among us, we can give thanks to God and “celebrate with all the bounty that the Lord [our] God has given to [us].” (Deut. 26:11)

Amen.

Sermon — February 27, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

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.