To See The Face Of God

Second Sunday of Lent 2025

If there is a fundamental difficulty with religion, it may be that God, and every attribute of God, does not belong to us. All is naturally out of our human comprehension. We say God is transcendent. As Bp. Barron teaches, we are like two-dimensional stick figures on a plane piece of paper, trying to imagine and relate to a being with three or four-dimensional reality. We are triangles trying to relate to a pyramid. (Yes, that analogy limps, but it may help.)

The awesome implication of this struggle between us who are bound to this material sphere and God whose reality is transcendent and unimaginable is that we must have a fundamental change in our reality in order to see God face-to-face. But that is our destiny, what God intended for Adam and Eve and all their descendants before the Fall.

Today’s Scripture readings struggle to take us into that transcendent world. God is making a covenant with our father in faith, Abraham.

Abraham is brand-new to faith in the One God. He is a refugee from a Mesopotamian culture whose “gods” are like really big, powerful men or beasts or natural forces, not the Creator of all. So God begins relationship to Abraham with material promises: lots of descendants, lots of territory. That relationship is of a covenant, not unlike the covenant between a man and women who marry.

To make (literally “cut”) the covenant, God uses a familiar ceremony in that time: sacrificial animals are cut into two pieces, and the two makers of the covenant then walk between the line of sacrifice, to symbolize their promise that if the covenant is broken, the human makers will be ready to be cut in two. Abraham makes the walk and guards the sacrificial victims. But then God is visualized doing the same, as a flaming torch coming from a kind of oven. It is all very mysterious, but it gives us a transcendent feel.

The psalmist tells us that the Lord is our light and our salvation. Our Gospel will show Jesus as a dazzling light, appearing to his three fearful apostles. This speaks to the transcendent reality of God. Remember that to see the face of God, for OT Jews, was a death sentence. Both Moses and Elijah longed to see God face-to-face, but that had to wait until after their passing into the realm and life of God. All humans, whether they know it or not, are seeking the face of God, so they may be in union with Him.

St. Paul, writing to the church at Phillipi, is contending with Jewish Christians who seem to follow him everywhere, trying to convince Paul’s church members that they need to be Jews to “complete” their identity with the Jew, Jesus Christ. They are enemies of their transcendent destiny. They preach circumcision for all the men, and Paul constantly needs to remind his converts that faith in Christ and a sacramental initiation, baptism, makes for complete incorporation into Christ and the Church. He points his listeners to the transcendent reality, heaven, and the risen, ascended Christ as the true center of our life and practice. Like Him, and in Him, we are promised a transcendent destiny in a glorified body.

Our Gospel begins “about eight days after these sayings.” What sayings? Jesus has just told His disciples about the general Resurrection when He returns in glory. He has also promised that some of them will not die until they “see the kingdom of God.” He then takes His core apostles, Peter, James and John, up Mount Tabor to pray. This should remind us of the prophet Moses going up Mount Sinai to pray, taking with him three priests, his brother Aaron and his two sons. There they have a transcendent experience with God.

Peter, James and John see Jesus in His future glorified body, along with glorified Moses, the Lawgiver, and Elijah, the primo prophet. What are they doing? They “discuss” His exodus—that’s the Gk word Luke uses--to be accomplished in Jerusalem, namely His future as the true Paschal Lamb, being murdered only to rise again in glory and be ascended into heaven. This would be the true touching of the transcendent reality, the God-man glorified and enthroned at the right hand of the Father, empowered to send the Holy Spirit into His earthly kingdom, the Church. What a great gift the Transfiguration is for us, glorifying God in our second full week of Holy Lent!