Sunday, February 11, 2023, The Transfiguration of Our Lord

“The Veil”

Psalm 2:1-12; Exodus 34:29-35; 2 Corinthians 3:7-18; Mark 9:2-9

Divine Service III (without Communion)

Hymns: #414 “’Tis Good, Lord, to Be Here”; #507 “Holy, Holy, Holy”; #415 “Jesus on the Mountain Peak”; #575 “My Hope is Built On Nothing Less”

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

Grace, mercy, and peace to you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus.

Jesus, on the holy mountain, gave His disciples a look through the veil that separates heaven and earth, to show His chosen disciples who He truly was. St. Paul writes in our Epistle reading about the veil that still covers people’s hearts when we talk about God’s Word, and salvation, and faith in Jesus. How do we get through all that, to bring people we love back to grace?

This morning we’re talking about veils and curtains. The first veil we need to talk about is the veil of sin that separates sinful people from a holy God. In the beginning, God the Father in all His glory walked and talked with Adam and Eve in the garden, and

they were OK with that, and able to do it, because they were still sinless and perfect themselves. They were made in the image of God, and had His image in them. As our Catechism explains it, “Adam and Eve fully knew God as He wishes to be known, and were perfectly happy in Him.”

Sin changed everything. Sin put up a veil, a curtain, between sinful people and a holy God. Adam and Eve had to leave the garden, because they couldn’t stand in God’s perfect light anymore. The reason sinful people can’t look upon God, or bear to be in His Presence, isn’t because God is angry or hateful or out to terrify us or do us harm; quite the opposite. God is love; God is pure love; God is the essence of love, everything that love is, love so pure and brilliant and radiant and white that no human being can bear to look upon Him, unless God should call them near. God is the One who “lives in unapproachable light,” the One “no one has ever seen or can see.” He is perfect love, and we are imperfect, corrupted, and ruined by sin. We’re creatures of the darkness, cockroaches, bugs beneath a log, who run from the Light because it burns our eyes. St. Paul says we’re children of darkness and “enemies of God,” whose every inclination is

to run from Him and His light always; God on one side of the holy veil, you and I on the other side, expelled from the garden forever.

Now let’s talk about happier things. Let’s talk about what God did to open the curtain, to take away the veil. God – the God of love – was not willing to give up on the children He loves without a fight; one of our hymns says, “He pursued us as we ran.”

Before God sent Adam and Eve out into the world, He gave them a promise to send them a Savior. He set an angel with a flaming sword, to guard the entrance to the garden, and to the tree of life; but still He was with them always in the world their sin had broken.

He gave them a word of hope to pass on to their children, a light in the darkness for them to walk by; and some of them, at least, kept the light alive. Even when Noah and his family were the only ones left, even through the flood, they kept the light alive.

Then after that the light survived through Father Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob and his sons. The light of faith and hope survived through all the years of slavery in Egypt, and then through the Exodus, and the forty years in the desert. The God of love was always there for His people, in a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.

In the wilderness, at Mt. Sinai, Moses was called up to meet with the Lord, face to face. He was able to do that, because the Lord called him near. The children of Israel stayed down below, at the base of the mountain, because the light and the fire and the glory of God’s love was too much for them to see. They told Moses, “Don’t make us look on the glory of the Lord anymore, or we’ll die.”

Moses brought down God’s good commandments to them, commandments given in mercy and love, commandments that, if they’d do their best to keep them, would bless their lives and make them good. Moses came down from the mountain with his face so a-glowing with the glory of God that he had to wear a veil to speak to the people. Moses was God’s intermediary, His go-between. God was merciful in sparing them from having to look on His full and terrifying glory, so they could hear the Good News about how much God loved them.

Our Gospel reading, on this Transfiguration Sunday, is all about the veil of sin and what God has done about it. God in His mercy, in the person of His beloved Son Jesus, came to this world with a veil on. Jesus stepped through the curtain that separates heaven and earth and came here to be with us, to walk with the sinners, to live in this world that sin has broken. If He had come in all His heavenly, loving, shining,

unadulterated glory, no one would have been able to get close enough to Him to hear what He had to say. Imagine if a ball of heavenly light came to stand on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, trying to convince a band of simple fishermen to come and follow God. They’d have died of fright.

So He came “veiled in flesh,’ so we say. He had all that loving power inside Him, but He chose to keep it covered. Most of the time, anyway. When the time was right, and the reason and purpose was good, He’d let that love and glory flow through His holy fingertips, and miracles would happen, for broken people to be healed, and for people looking on to see and believe. But in appearance, He was a man you could see and hear and touch, and talk to.

In our Gospel, Jesus took Peter, James, and John (as He would do on other occasions) up on a mountain with Him, as they’d write later, to “see Him in all His majestic glory.” And “there He was transfigured before them,” our Gospel says. (The Greek says He was “metamorphosized,” completely changed in form and appearance).

All so that for those few wonderful moments, they could see behind the veil. So they could see and know and believe that heaven was real, and that Moses and Elijah were real, and not just figures from a story book, and that Jesus truly was more than a man; that He truly was the God of love who made the earth and the moon and the stars and every living thing.

And naturally they were terrified; Peter stuttered like a fool in the Presence of God; and who of us wouldn’t do the same? The glory cloud that came and covered them was a mercy. They heard the voice of the Father Himself, telling them who Jesus was - the beloved Son, who’d they’d do well to listen to. Like any other miracle, this Transfiguration miracle had a purpose. Peter, James, and John were there alone, so it was done for them alone. It was one for their memory banks, something to remember that would help them later when times were hard. Because when they walked down from that mountain again, they were going to have to pass through the fire, and follow with Jesus along the road that led to the cross. Only after Jesus had been raised from the dead would they truly understand what had happened, and what He’d done for them.

At the bottom of the mountain, the rest of the disciples were being yelled at by the father of a boy they’d tried but failed to heal, while the Pharisees and the crowd stood there mocking and laughing at them. Jesus said, “Bring the boy to Me,” and healed

him. And there were others in need of healing, many others, this world being the place of hurt and suffering that it is, and awful as things can be on this side of the veil. And the leaders of the Jews, and people who hated Jesus, because they had no love in them, got louder and angrier and more hateful as time went on. And the road Jesus took them down led them finally to Gethsemane, and to a cross.

And when Jesus died for their sins and your sins and my sins and the sins of all the world, the curtain in the Temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The curtain in the tabernacle, and later in the temple, had always separated God’s holy place and the Ark of the Covenant from the eyes of God’s people. Only the priests, chosen by God, could go behind the curtain to offer sacrifices, and then only once a year, and then just one of them, with shaking knees and scared to death. That curtain was there to separate sinful people from a holy God.

When Jesus died, and our sin was paid for, the curtain was torn forever. The temple curtain was, no doubt, replaced or sewn back together, but it didn’t matter anymore.

The point God was making by the demonstration was that there was no longer a need for a curtain or for sacrifices, because the only sacrifice that mattered had been made – Jesus, the Lamb of God. Jesus was our way through and past the curtain of sin; it’s the curtain of sin that separates people from God that was torn when Jesus died. Putting our faith and trust and hope in Jesus is the way we can look in the brilliant, shining face of the God of love, and never have to be afraid. Paul says that only in Christ is the veil of sin that separates us from God taken away.

Now, the thing we have to remember, as we go about the work our Lord has given us to do, and tell the world around us about Him, is that the veil of sin is still very much a thing in this world. Paul says about his fellow Jews that they still had a veil that covered their hearts that kept them separated from God. Even though they had God’s Word in a book, and read it every day, it did them no good if they couldn’t see that Jesus is the Word, and the Word is all about Him. Like the Israelites at Sinai, the only God they could comprehend was the One whose glory was terrifying, One they were afraid to look upon, or approach, even though all God wanted to do was call them near and love them.

It’s the same in our world today. How many times have you tried to talk to a loved one or a relative or a friend about Jesus, and you just see the veil come down at the mention of His name? People have gotten the idea that God is all about judgment, and

that all we want to do is judge them. They’ll call us bigots and haters and all those other names they call us, even if all we’re trying to do is speak the truth in love. Sometimes it’s hard to get through – like talking to the wall. In the end, all we can do is tell the truth God gives us to tell, and pray to our Lord to provide the miracle that will take the veil away. “Because we have this hope, we are very bold,” Paul says; and “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.”

Father in Heaven, You who spoke from the cloud and pointed us to Jesus and revealed His glory, we thank You that by His grace we can stand in Your loving Presence today. Help us, Father, to have the right and good and loving words to say that will reach through the veil of sin and doubt that covers the hearts of those we love and pray for. May Your Spirit, O Lord, bring freedom, that we and all the ones we love may see the glory of God in the face of Christ, and never have to be afraid. We pray in Jesus’ name; Amen.