Kabod

 

Matthew 17:1-9

The Last Sunday after the Epiphany

When my pilgrim friends and I walked the Way of St. Cuthbert, a 62-mile long trail along the Scottish and English border, we experienced one day which featured every kind of weather imaginable.  We began the day walking in sunshine, but conditions changed dramatically.  By the time we reached the highest elevation along Cuthbert’s Way the temperature had dropped and we were completely enveloped in the clouds.  They swirled around us, seeming to come from every direction, even below as we crossed along the summit.  At one point we couldn’t see more than 25 feet in any direction.  It was damp and it was bone-chilling cold, but it was also a very powerful, moving experience.  It was like being caught up inside something which was alive; all at once disorienting and womb-like (if not for the cold… did I mention it was cold?). 

Today’s readings remind me of that day as God is mysteriously present at two different times on two different cloud-shrouded mountains.  One particular Hebrew word dominates each event: kabod.  It is a word which can be translated in two different ways.  One points to weight or strength or power or ability; the other to honor or glory or magnificence or dignity or splendor.  The first sense has something to do with value, like how a precious stone of great weight is worth more a smaller one.  In this sense, kabod raises the question of who or what matters most.  The second sense is used more to refer to a person’s nature or being.  When used in this way in the Old Testament it almost exclusively refers to God and is most often translated as glory.  It asks us to ponder who or what is most deserving of your admiration and allegiance.

God’s kabod is manifested in the cloud which enshrouds Mt. Sinai.  Moses enters it and will pray to God, “Show me your glory.”  God will answer, “I will make all my goodness (some translations say character, others moral beauty) pass before you.  But you cannot look at my face and live.”  So God will direct Moses to stand in a crag between two rocks and to look only briefly as God passes by.  Even then, Moses will only glimpse God’s back.  (33:18-23).  The cloud is necessary to mask the kabod of God because humans cannot glimpse it fully present and survive (think the ending of Indiana Jones and the Lost Ark).

At the Transfiguration, Jesus is revealed as God’s Son and he radiates with God’s kabod.  In Jesus, God sends a person who can show forth God’s own goodness, character, and moral beauty.  Years later Peter writes of experience on that cloud-covered mountain:

We have been eyewitnesses of Jesus’ majesty.  For he received honor and glory from God the Father when that voice was conveyed to him by the Majestic Glory, saying, “This is my Son, my Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” 

Did you notice in the Collect of the Day we asked as we behold the light of Jesus’ countenance (his kabod) we might be changed into his likeness?  Just as Moses is forever changed by his experience with God’s kabod, so too are we changed as we encounter Jesus’.  It suggests if even a small ray of the brightness of God shines upon us, we will more purely reflect the goodness and moral beauty we are shown.

It occurs to me no generation in history has gained more knowledge and more understanding of the created order than ours.  And sadly, no generation seems to be less interested in the One who created this order than ours.  We are too caught up in the luster of something else—something less than the glory of God. 

C.S. Lewis, in his book The Weight of Glory, contends each person has a deep desire to be acknowledged, but nothing other than God seems to satisfy this innate longing.  The problem, he says, is our desire is far too weak.  We are content to pursue the vanities of this world while the infinite glory of heaven is offered to us.

Lewis goes on to offer this insight:

We do not want merely to see beauty… we want something else which can hardly be put into words – to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.

I hear in this the spiritual experience of being enveloped by clouds on a mountain top.  This is how Lewis describes the deep longing each of us has to be acknowledged.  It means being caught up in something which is weighty and worthy. 

Every day, Lewis says, we have the possibility to live our lives in two different ways.  The choice is ours.  One way is to be known, appreciated, and delighted in by God who will say to us “Well done, good and faithful servant.”  The other way is to be forgotten, shamed, and dismissed by God who will say to us, “Depart from me.  I never knew you.”

Beyond, what the prayer book calls “the changes and chances of this mortal life” – after all, each of us is affected by the ebbs and flows of daily existence (we all have our good days and bad ones) – I suspect our awareness and acknowledgement of God’s kabod is seminal in how we will live our lives and conduct ourselves.  Who or what matters most?  Who or what is most deserving of your admiration and allegiance?