Transfiguration • Exodus 34:29–35 • 2 Corinthians 3:12–4:2 • Luke 9:28–36 • 3/2/25
Today is a turning point in the liturgical calendar, a hinge between Ordinary Time and Lent. And so our Gospel looks back to Jesus’ baptism as the Beloved and forward to his final journey through Jerusalem to the Cross. Where our translation has Moses and Elijah speaking of his departure, the Greek calls it his exodus, invoking the Israelites’ forty-year journey through the wilderness. In turn, that journey evokes Jesus’ forty-day sojourn in the desert and the temptations he faced there after his baptism. The divine Voice affirming him on today’s mountain strengthens him for his final temptation, as the Voice at his baptism strengthened him for his desert days.
Meanwhile, Peter undergoes temptations of his own. First, he is tempted by sleep – a common symbol for not being awake to spiritual truths. Then he suggests the three “dwellings.” The response from the terrible cloud, while not quite a rebuke, is clearly a correction. Peter’s error reminds me of one we’ll hear about this coming Ash Wednesday. It’s easier to honor our heroes by putting them on pedestals (or in dwellings) than by following their teaching and example. Rending our clothing in public is easier than rending our hearts in secret, where we risk deep disorientation.
Disorientation hits the disciples when the cloud overshadows them. Suddenly, it’s too dark to find their footing or see what’s coming, let alone build dwellings. The only guidance comes by sound, calling attention not to vision but to hearing with the words, “Listen to him!”
Their previous vision of dazzling light and glory exemplifies what’s known as the via positiva. This “positive path” approaches the divine through qualities that we can know, although with the caveat that divine qualities infinitely exceed their earthly versions. This is a linear approach, building a relationship with God step by forward step.
In contrast, the cloud that descends after the dazzling light, dense with droplets and thick with thunder, brings the via negativa crashing down on the disciples. When we are on the via negativa, the path of negation, where concepts can show us only what God is not, we must seek God in a more circuitous way, unlit by any semblance of understanding. This is something like “losing our life to save it.” We must renounce any claim to know the divine and instead reach blindly toward God through the metaphorical darkness that a 14th-century mystic called the Cloud of Unknowing. For that mystic, our only access to God is through love stripped of all pretence of knowledge.
The cloud and the voice in today’s Gospel, by removing visual knowledge and emphasizing the sense of hearing, draw us, along with the disciples, onto the deeply humbling and disorienting via negativa, along which we travel by love and not by sight. St. Benedict speaks of listening with the ear of the heart. Isaiah (30:21) says, “And your ears shall hear a voice behind you saying, ‘This is the way, walk in it,’ when you turn to the right and when you turn to the left.” A voice not in front, where you might see and understand, but behind, leaving room only to sense and obey.
When I lose touch with that voice, with the ability to find the way by feel, I need to leave town and go up a mountain… or out on the water… or into the woods… where the soil is soaked in snowmelt; where, between bare brown branches, bright cardinals flit, singing sweet snatches of spring melody; where the raised white tails of fleeing deer flare and flap; where, through a jagged crack in the creek’s icy veil, living water appears, alive with sparkle and sound. In such a place, brought to our senses, we may feel ourselves to be offspring of the landscape, and the ear of our hearts may hear, as if through the land itself: This is My Flesh, in which I am manifest. Listen to it.
Can we listen to the life of the land, and to the landscape of our life? Paula D’Arcy writes that “God comes to you disguised as your life.” Our lives bring their own Lenten deserts. We observe Lent to practice, in community, finding our way through our deserts, the landmarks strange and unknown, the trails faint and webbed, doubling back, leading into thickets and marshes, with shelter uncertain and sustenance unfamiliar. Wandering in our own wilderness, our own via negativa, we will be tempted by quick fixes and sham shortcuts. What will the land of this Lent be for you? How will love guide you?
In the wilderness, in the cloud-shrouded unknown, there is disorientation and danger, but also beauty and mystery. The beauty is not incidental. In the scripture Jesus deploys against his first temptation – we live “not by bread alone but by every word of God” – I am convinced that beauty is among those words. Our recognition of beauty is a sign that God’s word is written on our hearts.
Jeremiah (31:31–34) foretold a new covenant, manifest in hearts written on by God. Saint Paul saw his conversion experience as the fruition of this. As scholar Carol Stockhausen explains, the hearts Isaiah called callused against understanding (6:10) belonged, for Paul, to his brother and sister Jews who resisted interpreting the scriptures as referring to Christ. Paul connected Isaiah’s heart-calluses with the veil hiding Moses’ face from the people and transposed that veil to his own time, with Moses represented by his writings: “whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their minds.” To remove that veil was to turn, like Moses, to Yahweh, whom Paul identified with the Spirit that he himself had experienced. Echoing Jeremiah’s prophecy that all would know God directly, Paul envisioned the glory of divine communion shining not just from the face of Moses or Jesus but from “all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Most High as though reflected in a mirror.”
When Paul was writing, as Pam Shellberg reminded me, there was no New Testament yet, no separate Christian religion. Paul was offering, not a competing faith, but a competing vision of Judaism. As a Jewish Christian myself, with relatives faithful to the vision Paul critiqued, I cannot accept a blanket attribution of callused hearts and veil-dimmed minds. I believe that God holds the way open to all who seek in good faith and that the very diversity of seekers is evidence that God’s word is written on all hearts. And I believe there are many ways to God, including both the via positiva and the via negativa.
At the moment of his conversion, when the veil was removed for him, Paul experienced a loss of physical vision – his own disorienting cloud of unknowing. I imagine his former Pharisaical via positiva rounded out with a new appreciation of the via negativa, reflected in his embrace of paradox.
I invite each of us to embrace the paradoxical cloud of the via negativa in our Lenten practice and the Lenten aspects of our lives. As we sense our way forward through the disorienting unknown with love, may we find beauty in the wilderness, and may we hear a voice behind us, telling us we are God’s beloved and guiding us on our mysterious way.