The Cloud of Unknowing

Exodus 34:29-35; Psalm 99; 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2; Luke 9:28-43a

“When they had come down from the mountain,” Luke writes, “a great crowd met him. Jesus rebuked the unclean spirit, healed the boy, and gave him back to his father. And all were astounded at the greatness of God.”

In this gospel text, two events are happening at the same time, two stories that run in parallel until they eventually intersect. Jesus goes up a mountain to pray, and takes some of his disciples with him, where they have a powerful experience of the presence and the glory of God. An experience that is difficult to explain or put into words, and in fact the disciples remain silent about it for a long time. Meanwhile, the rest of the disciples of Jesus remain at the foot of the mountain, where a man comes to them with a child who is having a powerful experience of the presence of evil. An evil force of some kind that mauls him, never leaves him alone, that shrieks and convulses him. An evil force that the disciples cannot explain and – more importantly – are unable to drive away.

One group of disciples, at the top of the mountain, experiences the presence of God and a vision of glory, but they don’t know what to do with what they have seen and heard. Another group of disciples, at the foot of the mountain, experiences the presence of evil and a vision of suffering, and they don’t know what to do about it either. It might seem that these two groups of disciples couldn’t have had more different experiences, yet their common confusion comes, I suspect, from the same source.

The disciples on the top of the mountain have something that is easy for us to identify as a “religious experience.” They see Jesus transformed before their eyes, they glimpse something of what resurrection life looks like, they hear the very voice of God. I don’t know if you have ever had an experience like this, where God is almost tangible, when you feel like you are in tune with the universe, when you are overcome with wonder and awe and peace. If I think about it, I can identify a couple of times in my life when I’ve perhaps felt something like this. But those moments were brief, difficult to explain or put into words. And looking back I wonder if they really meant what I thought they meant at the time.

The disciples at the bottom of the mountain are having something that would seem to be very far from a “spiritual experience.” They are confronted with a profound evil – a suffering child, a desperate father, and as hard as they try, there is nothing they can do that will help. There is nothing uplifting or joyful or peaceful about being feeling helpless in the face of pain and suffering and just plain evil. And unfortunately these experiences are a lot more common, at least for me, than the “mountaintop” experiences of God’s presence. If you want to feel helpless in the face of evil, you only need to turn on the news. Today in particular, of course, but just about any day, really. Or run through your list of friends and acquaintances – how many of them are suffering, in ways that you know and in ways that you can’t begin to imagine, and how little there is you have the power to do to help. It’s not a good feeling, and yet we experience this all the time.

Now, perhaps you will expect me to give some advice, some tips, on how to have more transfiguration spiritual experiences of God and fewer experiences of powerlessness in the face of evil. Some pointers about how to have more powerful experiences of God’s presence and fewer powerful experiences of God’s absence.

But, you know, the Biblical tradition has never thought of direct, unmediated experiences of the presence of God as something to be sought. The more common reaction is that the direct presence of God is terrifying. As we see in the first reading today, when Moses goes up Mount Sinai to speak with God, this experience visibly transforms him, and even seeing the face of Moses after he's talked with God is too much for people to handle. They beg Moses to put on a mask so they won’t have to see his transfigured face.

Why? What’s so scary about the presence of God? Isn’t God full of mercy and compassion, isn’t God absolute love and light and grace? Well, yes, but. We know this about God because that’s what God’s word says about God – the word that came through Moses on Mount Sinai, through prophets like Elijah, and finally through Jesus, the Word of God made flesh. And on the mountain of transfiguration, when Jesus is in prayer, when the disciples see Jesus transfigured in the Father’s presence as Moses was, when the disciples overhear Jesus in conversation with Moses and Elijah, what are they talking about? Luke tells us they discussed his coming “departure,” in the Greek literally his “exodus” – that is, the cross.

Because the cross is where the love of God is most completely revealed. In the place of humiliation, weakness, and abandonment – exactly the least likely place for us to find God, this is where God reveals to us God’s true nature. Where we see the most important truth about God: that loves the world so much, that God loves you so much, that God will bear any burden and pay any price to set you free from evil and death. That God would rather accept suffering than inflict it. That God will remain full of compassion and mercy and forgiveness even to the end.

Peter, James, and John, with Jesus on top of the mountain, hadn’t yet experienced the cross. All this talk about dying and rising again was frightening and overwhelming to them. Not until they had gone through the cross and Easter, not until they had failed as disciples and abandoned Jesus and then received forgiveness and new life at Easter did they even begin to understand what they had seen. And the disciples at the foot of the mountain understood even less about how God’s power works. But Jesus knew, and his method of dealing with evil – God’s method for dealing with evil – is the only method that actually worked.

We see the results of the power of God to bring life out of death, like the crowds that saw Jesus finally heal this child and drive out the evil, and we are astounded by the goodness of God. And then, we are told, Jesus begins his final journey to Jerusalem – to show the disciples, and us, where the goodness of God comes from and how it works, in dying to self and letting God raise us to new life.

This is why Paul says in our second reading today that Moses might have needed a mask, but we who have come to know Jesus go out into the world with unveiled faces. Because we have seen what God is really like, and have learned that this is a God we can trust completely, no matter what.

On top of the mountain, Jesus was glorified as he prayed and talked about the cross – but the cross feels to us like the bottom of the mountain. The cross feels like the place where evil triumphs over good, where the innocent one suffers, where the powerful call down violence, and no one can do anything to stop it. But this is just what makes the cross the best place for God to hide. And for those of us who have been called into this story, for those of us who have come to know the God revealed and glorified in Jesus the crucified and risen one, we now have seen that with God we have nothing to fear. Neither Pilate nor Putin, not the powers that shriek and convulse our bodies, not ancient hatreds or novel viruses, nothing has the power to separate us from the God who is pure love, pure compassion, pure light, pure peace.

A good story for us as we enter the season of Lent, as we together focus for a time specifically on the dying and rising of Jesus, on the dying and rising that each of us is called to share. A good story for us at any time.