A Face in the Cloud

Tracy Niven
Friday 31 March 2023

Preacher: Revd Dr Donald MacEwan, University Chaplain
Readings: 2 Peter 1:16-21; Matthew 17:1-9

One of the hardest things for me about the Covid pandemic was the masks.  It wasn’t so much wearing one – though I never quite mastered not having my glasses steam up – it was not seeing other people’s faces.  The masks masked people.  I couldn’t really tell what people were thinking, how they were feeling, what kind of relationship we had.  And I really missed that.  More than the 2 metres distance, face coverings reduced our human connection.  It helped, in a small way, to realise how significant it is when someone’s vision is impaired, when they walk into a room, and don’t know if they know anybody there.

Indeed faces are profoundly important to human relationship, for good or ill.  Psychologists in St Andrews have studied human responses to different faces – what aspects do we see as healthier, more trustworthy, more attractive?  After all on dating apps, people make judgments quickly based on people’s faces, then maybe read a little more about the person whose face it is – or so students and staff tell me.  So much is conveyed by our faces – we laugh with our faces, we cry, we smile, we frown, we close our eyes, we kiss.

What of the Christian faith?  Do faces matter in our relationship with God?  Maybe not – for we don’t see God as we see our flatmates, our friends or family.  The Bible doesn’t describe God in physical terms – indeed, one of the Ten Commandments has often been understood as forbidding the depiction of God in imagery – You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath…

And the New Testament never describes Jesus’ ordinary appearance – his height, weight, hair colour, eye colour, or what his face looked like.  Yet very quickly, followers of Jesus started to depict him – on the walls of catacombs and churches, on tombstones and crucifixes, in stained glass and statues.  It seems that we humans longed to have a face for Christ, for God made flesh.  There are two main images of Jesus’ face in stained glass in this chapel – staring out from the cross behind the communion table, and risen in glory in the window behind the pulpit.  And his face appears five times in the mosaics at the communion table – as a baby, when baptised, at the Last Supper, on the cross, and following his resurrection.  These images of a rather chiselled face reflect the European culture in which St Andrews sits, and the time of their creation – the middle of the 20th Century.  There’s a kind of standard long-haired image of Jesus – I suppose that’s why people think they see his face in a cinnamon bun every so often.

But there is one place in the Gospels that does speak of how Jesus’s face appeared, and that’s the story we heard earlier.  On top of a hill, with three disciples around him, we read that Jesus’ face shone like the sun.  Matthew says he was transfigured – something had changed, his face didn’t usually shine in that way.  This shining, this brightness, feels like a sign of glory, a radiance from God.  The image on the cover of the order of service by the Nigerian artist Augustin Kolawole Olayinka gives Jesus, in the middle, a dazzling halo to convey this shining like the sun.  And in the very last chapter of the last book of the Bible, Revelation, there is a vision of heaven in which God’s people will see his face, God himself being all the light they need.

So is this the face of God?  Is the face in the cloud the face for us?  Bright, shining, radiant, glorious?  Maybe partly so – we need this vision of glory.  But the Gospels do not leave us gazing at a face for ever.  Immediately after the transfiguration, we learn that Jesus set his face to go to Jerusalem.  And there, he faced hostility, from religious leaders and political power fearful of his influence.  He prayed in the garden of Gethsemane, falling on his face.  One of his disciples, Judas, kissed his face so that he would be arrested.  The Roman soldiers struck him on his face, they spat in his face.  He was lifted on to a cross, executed as a criminal.  And before he died, sour wine was lifted to his face to drink.

What glory is this?  What radiance?  What shines in this bruised, weary, humiliated face?  The face in the cloud has become a face in the crowd.   The transfiguration face is now the face of Public Enemy No. 1.  This is a face like all the broken, suffering, ordinary, afflicted people of his place and time, of any place and time.  He was one of us, and nowhere was that clearer than in his face, and this is how we encounter God.  The late Pope Benedict XVI, who died in December, put this simply and clearly when he wrote: All through history, people look upon the disfigured face of Jesus and they recognize the glory of God.

We call this Transfiguration Sunday but it goes together with Disfiguration.

So how do we see the face of God today?  I think we hold on to both the disfigured and the transfigured.  There is no shortage of disfigured faces and lives.  Think of the thousands of people in Turkey and Syria, survivors of the earthquake but injured – in body and mind, family members dead, friends dead.  Think of the countless people whose lives are being affected by climate change, reconfigured by heat, changes in rainfall and soil quality, air pollution and economic prospects – risking all on perilous journeys.  Think of friends and flatmates in St Andrews, who struggle with what life throws in their path, from deadlines to doubting their own worth.  Could I suggest that if God is anywhere today, he is found in these faces – exhausted, fearful, isolated, anxious?  He is with them, and in some ways he shares the pain that we see in their faces.  In Jesus he lived these lives, he shared our humanity, he identified with the afflicted.

But in seeing God in the disfigured, we have this marvellous image of the transfigured, the face in the cloud.  God is not only with the suffering: he is an eternal source of light, of radiance, of love and of hope.  As our choir will sing later, Eternal light of this our wintry world.  There is no-one who has made this clearer to me than Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury. During the first lockdown, he wrote a weekly reflection for his local parish newsletter, which were later published.  Writing of the transfiguration, he said:

[The disciples] were granted briefly to see the unbearable radiance of presence and action that streams eternally from God – and to see it in the travel-stained, dishevelled humanity of their friend and teacher. They saw a human face and understood that behind and beyond it was infinite love and beauty – so that when, later on, they looked on that face disfigured and bleeding they should not forget the brightness of the mystery that shone through it. The apostles Peter, James and John saw what a human face could be. They knew that humanity could be the face worn by God. And whatever terrors, crimes and catastrophes might follow, nothing could extinguish that eternal light.

Disfigured and bleeding – yet eternal light.  I believe we need both.  Someone asked me last week why I am a Christian, rather than a follower of any other path.  And of course there are reasons such as my upbringing, my general dislike of change, maybe even my genetic inheritance.  But I also find that only the Christian faith offers to me that God I long to trust.  God who shares in creation, who is intimately involved in the fragile, beautiful, painful, maddening, joyous experience which is life in this world, who shares its troubles in uttermost depth, but who offers hope that there is more than the mess of this material world.  There is eternal light shining in the midst of it all.  There is a not only a human face of God, but a divine face of humanity.  And, for now, I want to trust in that God.

Usually in Sunday chapel services, the sermon leads into a reflection in an anthem sung by the choir.  But today I want the sermon to conclude with a song for us all to sing.  It’s by John Bell and the late Graham Maule, and is a profound meditation on the meaning of the word becoming flesh in Jesus.  And it ends with lines which convey for me what transfiguration could mean for us today:

So did the Word of grace
proclaim in time and space,
and with a human face,
‘I am for you.’

Hymn 317  Before the world began

 

 

 

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