With Unveiled Face  

 

The Last Sunday of Epiphany                                                                       February 14, 2010 Text: 2 Corinthians 3:12 – 4:2                                                       The Rev. Dr. Ross M. Wright

 

 

We all, with unveiled face reflecting as a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory, as from the Lord, the Spirit.  2 Cor. 3:18

 

This is a beautiful verse about what it means to know God personally and, through that relationship, to be transformed.  It is speaks of hope for the kind of change or transformation that Scrooge longs for when he sees his grave and says: “Spirit,  a man may change his ways and therefore alter the future, can’t he?”  It speaks about the longing for change which Dorothy and her companions express as they begin the journey down the yellow brick road: the scarecrow’s longing for a brain, the tin man’s longing for a heart, and the lion for courage. 

 

This verse also expresses the longing for change in St. Paul’s agonizing cry in Romans 7.  To paraphrase: I am a complete mystery to myself, a riddle.  I know what the right thing is, and I want to do the right thing.  But instead, I do the very opposite. The good that I want to do, I do not do.  And the evil that I do not want to do, this is he very thing that I do.  O wretched man that I am?  Who will deliver me from this body of death? I cannot understand why I am so conflicted. 

 

            In this verse, Paul evokes our longing to be more like Christ in our Christian walk, the longing for sanctification, to use the New Testament word.  The longing to exhibit more of the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, self-control. 

 

And then there is our longing for the transformation of the Church, the bride of Christ.   As the bridegroom looks at us, surely he must see things about the church that need to be changed or transformed. 

 

Charles Wesley expresses the different facets of this verse better than anyone, capturing the resonances of this verse: in his hymn, Love divine, all loves excelling:

 

Finish then thy new creation; pure and spotless let us be;

let us see thy great salvation perfectly restored in thee:

changed from glory into glory, till in heaven we take our place,

till we cast our crowns before thee, lost in wonder, love and praise.[1]

 

So, what is the picture in this verse?  Paul describes believers face to face with the living God. It is a picture of intimacy.  And as we gaze into his face, we are transformed – changed, so that we become more and more like Jesus Christ.  To hear Paul in his own words again:

 

And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the gory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.^[2]

 

            Think about what happens when a baby gazes into the eyes of her mother.  The psychotherapist, Alice Miller, describes this phenomenon as a healthy form of narcissism.  We usually think of the term negatively as self-absorption.  But there is a healthy narcissism:

 

Every child has a legitimate narcissistic need to be noticed, understood, taken seriously, and respected by his mother.  In the first weeks and months of life he needs to have the mother at his disposal, must be able to use her and to be mirrored by her. [3] 

 

Notice the striking similarity to the picture Paul paints.  Miller describes a face-to-face encounter, in which the child’s self is mirrored in the face of the other.  This mirroring is crucial for a baby’s healthy psychological development.   Paul describes believers looking into the face of the Lord Jesus Christ, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror.  Walker continues:

 

the mother gazes at the baby in her arms, and baby gazes into his mothers’ face and finds himself therein . . .  provided that the mother is really looking at the unique, small, helpless being and not projecting her own introjects on the child, nor her own expectations, fears, and plans for the child.  In that case, the child would not find himself in his mother’s face but rather the mother’s own predicaments.  This child would remain without a mirror, and for the rest of his life would be seeking this mirror in vain. 

 

            What is true of healthy human development is true of our relationship with God.  We have a legitimate need to be noticed by God, understood by God, taken seriously by God, and respected by God.  We need to know that God is there for us and will always be there for us.  This is the kind of open  the relationship that Jesus has always enjoyed with his heavenly Father. 

See him at his baptism: As he comes out of the water, he hears the voice of the Father: “You are my beloved son; with you I am well pleased.”[4]  See him on the mountain of the transfiguration, as he prepares to enter Jerusalem where he faces certain death: “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him.” 

 

So, you get the picture: knowing God personally is about standing face to face before the Risen Christ, and as we look into his face, being transformed.  But, what does it mean, concretely, in real time, for us to see Jesus face to face.  And what are the concrete changes that result from this encounter? 

 

A face-to-face encounter with the Risen Christ can happen in many different ways – it cannot be reduced to any one experience.  We may see Christ in the face of the poor or in the face of your child or in a faithful marriage.  But there is one place, one experience, where we can expect such an encounter, and that is the Eucharist.  Think about it.  We come and stand in the presence of the Lord.  We tell him that we love him.  We recommit ourselves to follow him as Savior and Lord.  We hold the bread and the cup, his body and blood, and experience his real presence.  True worship is a face-to-face encounter with the living God. 

 

Sunday morning may or may not feel like an intimate and life-transforming experience of the living God.  Sometimes we sense that we are in the very presence of the Holy of Holies. At other times, it just feels like going to church.  Sometimes we feel that God notices us, we sense him speaking directly to us, and saying: You are my beloved daughter, my beloved son.  I delight in you.  At other times, punching our clock.  Sometimes the sermon speaks to us.  At other times we sympathize with the little boy in the church, who was bored to death as the minster droned on: Please, mother – pay the man and let us go home. 

 

In the end, however, what matters is not what we feel.  What matters is that Jesus Christ, our high priest, is interceding for us at the right hand side of the Father.  The intercession of Jesus Christ is what creates true worship.  True worship is being drawn into the relationship that Jesus has with the Father – and this happens through the presence of the Holy Spirit.  To quote James Torrance:

 

[True worship is] participating through the Spirit in the incarnate Son’s communion with the Father.  It means participating, in union with Christ, in what he has done for us, once and for all, in his self-offering to the Father, in his life and death on the cross. . . . .  The real agent in worship, according to the New Testament, is Jesus Christ who leads us in our praises and prayers, “the one true minister of the sanctuary.” [5]

 

So, the Holy Eucharist is one concrete  experience in which we may expect to look into the face of Jesus Christ and be transformed.  But what about this change, this metamorphosis, which results from this encounter?  What exactly does it mean to be “changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another”?  

 

Listen to John Calvin’s characteristically lucid and vivid commentary on this verse:  

 

Observe that the purpose of the Gospel is the restoration in us of the image f God which had been cancelled by sin, and that this restoration is progressive and goes on during our whole life, because God makes His glory to shine in us little by little. ^[6]  

 

Two concrete examples from interpersonal relationships can illuminate the transformation that Paul is describing here.  Think about Alice Miller’s picture of the baby gazing into the eyes of the mother: the baby sees the mother smile and learns to smile, hears the mother speak, and begins to acquire language.  It is in gazing the mother’s face that the baby becomes fully human. 

 

            Or, think about what happens when you come under the influence of  someone whom you admire and whose life you emulate.   You study the person.  You learn the person’s moves.  And over time, you begin to take on some of the qualities of the person you admire.  This is the secret to having a mentor.  The same thing happens when a person falls in love and is happy to spend hours gazing into the eyes of the beloved.  You might hear a lover say: “I adore that guy.  I worship the ground he walks on.”  Over time, the lover takes on some of the qualities of the beloved.  So, be careful whom you marry, because you will end up being like him or her.  Worship is the posture of contagion: we become like that which we worship.   

 

            You know, it takes real faith to believe that we are being transformed into the image of Christ. ^[7] Is there transformation in the Christian life?  Often, it feels like one step forward, two steps backward.  Can I honestly say that when I look at the course of my Christian life over the years, there has been noticeable progress?  And I don’t mean acquiring more knowledge.  I mean growth in holiness.  Transformation in the vexing areas of life, like our relationship to material things; growing in patience with others; handling anger appropriately .  Has there been noticeable growth of the fruit of the Spirit: more love, joy, peace, kindness, generosity, self-control?  I cannot honestly say that there has been visible progress.  In some ways, I’m worse.  As you get older, you can easily become more set in your ways; old resentments can fester; repeated disappointments with oneself and others can lead to cynicism; hope diminishes. 

 

So, how do we reconcile this apparent contradiction between Paul’s picture of transformation with the daily reality of looking at ourselves in the mirror thinking: I’m not getting better.  If anything, I’m worse. 

 

I am reminded of scene in the movie, The Shawshank Redemption, in which Morgan Freeman plays a man who has spent most of his adult life incarcerated.  Every several years, when he comes up for parole, the parole board asks him if he has really changed.  Can he point to any concrete changes of behavior that indicate that he is no longer a danger to society?  He does his best to convince them that he is a better person, and every case, his request for parole is rejected.  The camera moves from the parole hearing to a file, stamped in huge letters with the words: Parole rejected.   By the end of the movie, he is an old man.  He appears before the parole board and is asked the same questions.  Only this time, he says: I’m not going to try to kid you or tell you what you want to hear.  I haven’t changed.  I have nothing to nothing to point to in my life that indicates that I am no longer a danger to society.  And I guess I’ll stay in this prison for the rest of my life.  The next scene, you see his file, stamped with huge letters: Parole granted.

 

This is the great paradox of the Christian life: the very points when we become disillusioned with ourselves, when we realize that we cannot change and will be like this for the rest of our lives, at these very moments, we become free, by the grace of God.  We are getting older, and yet moving closer to new birth.  Our disillusionment with ourselves, what seems to us like one step forward, two steps backward, is the beginning of transformation. 

 

In the end, what matters is not what we see in ourselves but what God sees in us.  What matters is not how the church looks to us, but what Jesus sees in the church. 

 

Finally, the transformation promised to us will be complete only on the other side of the grave, when we see Jesus Christ face to face in the life to come.  Hear what St. John says:

 

Beloved, we are God’s children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he [Christ] appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.[8]

 

Here also what St. Paul says in First Corinthians:

 

Lo!  I tell you a mystery.  We will not all sleep[die], but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet.  For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.[9] 

 

It takes faith to believe in this final change as you stand at the bedside of a dying loved one.  Often, there is not much to look at.  Everything in us protests: This person is lost to us.  This is not the person I knew and loved.  But faith sees what God sees.  Faith recognizes that the very process of deterioration and death is the way to eternal life.  Faith sees in death, resurrection life; in defeat, victory; in bondage, freedom; in our humiliation, exaltation; and in the cross, the way of life.