The Transfiguration (of Moses) | Exodus 34:29-33

*Preached by John R. Mabry at Grace North Church March 26, 2001.*

When I was in fifth grade, I had a teacher named Mr. Mobley. Mr. Mobley was as tall as Lurch in the Addams Family TV show, and just as lovable beneath his gruff exterior. One day he was reading an assignment I had written while he hovered above my desk. He put his hand on top of my head and playfully examined my skull with his fingers while he read. I was enjoying this rare display of affection, until his fingers were suddenly arrested in their exploration. At the rear of the top of my head, on either side were two pronounced knots. Once his fingers found them, they distracted his attention from the paper he was holding, and he spent the next several moments examining my head with great interest. Finally, he looked at me like I was from Mars and announced, "You're going to sprout horns, soon."

I panicked and felt at the top of my head. Sure enough, two little raised knots were back there, and every day for weeks I checked to make sure the pointy tips of horns had not yet broken through the skin.

Frightened as I was of being branded a biological freak, I was terrified of what horns might mean. Did it mean I was a devil? Did it mean I was going to hell? I told my best friend Mickey about it, and he offered helpfully, "Jews have horns, you know. That's why they wear those little beanies, so you can't see them."

"Wow!" I thought. Sure enough, one of those beanies would exactly cover up my emerging horns. But how could I be Jewish? I decided there was something my mother wasn't telling me.

I never asked my mother about this, mostly because we were devout Baptists, and I didn't know what it might mean if I were to be found out as a closet Jew. To this day my mother tells me that as a child I often told her I would become a Jew, but I never did confront her about my horns.

Now, in truth of course, it is much more likely that those knots were the result of being dropped on my head as an infant than indicators of some clandestine Semitic or demonic heritage, but to my fifth grade imagination, they posed quite a crisis of faith.

This notion that Jews have horns derives from a mistranslation of our first reading where Moses comes down from Mount Sinai. The Hebrew word translated in our reading as "shining" is qaran (kaw-ran) Other translators render this "rays of light," but in some early translations, the phrase was erroneously rendered "horns of light" or simply "horns." Now since they are both conically shapped you can see how "rays" and "horns" might be confused, especially since the same Hebrew word is used for both.

It is due to this mistranslation that the medieval tradition of Jews having horns came about. One little shift of meaning that revealed the demonic--not in Jews, but in Christians, as it supported centruies of genodice and cruelty against the Jewish people. A tiny, one-word shift changed Moses from the hero of the story to a suspected devil in the of Christian readers..

In this case, a shift in meaning created a shift in perspective which brought about damnation-a hell on earth for Jews, and perhaps damnation proper for the Christians who persecuted them. But in many religions, just such a shift in perspective can also bring about salvation.

One of my favorite groups of early Christian heretics is the Gnostics, about whom you have heard me preach before. According to the Gnostics, this world is the creation of an inept and misguided demiurge, who suffers under the delusion that he is God, and wants us to believe it too, so that he can keep us captive on this prison planet, perpetually reincarnating and worshipping only him. The Gnostic insight is that he is not God at all, but only a pretender to the throne, and that the real God exists beyond the demiurge, and in fact, beyond our universe, where the fullness of the Godhead dwells in ineffable light. There is a spark of that true divinity in us, which seeks to be free of this earthly prison, and to rejoin the fullness of the Godhead.

This shift in perspective, from worshipping the creator to worshipping the true God beyond the material plane constituted salvation for the Gnostics, and freed their souls to fly beyond this world upon their deaths and to once again know communion with true divinity.

Jung saw this story in less cosmic, more personal terms. In his transpersonal psychology, the goal of all spiritual practice is the recognition that, like the demiurge, our individual egos are simply pretenders to the throne. My ego, according to Jung, is not me. It does not begin to describe the fullness of who I am. For who I truly am exists within and yet beyond the confines of my body. According to Jung, and nearly every mystic in every religious tradition, there is but one great being in the universe, and that is who we really are. Call it God, call it the dynamic ground of all being, call it Brahma, or the Body of Christ, or the Pleroma, there are many names, but there is only one person inhabiting the cosmos, and we are all limbs of that one great body.

And this realization is, for the mystics of all ages, salvation. When the Sufis were condemned because in their ecstasy they called out "I am Allah!" they were only stating the truth. Their perspective had shifted through their practice. They no longer fixed their identity to their individual egos, but experienced themselves as part of Allah himself. This body will die, but Allah cannot die. Flame burns, water drowns, old age withers, but Allah is touched by none of it. In this realization, the existential dread felt by all of us is lifted, because who we really are is infinite, immortal, and indestructible.

For this to happen, however, for this shift in perspective to really take hold, the ego's greatest fear--that it will someday die--must be realized. The ego must die to the idea that it is king, that it is in control, that it is immortal. The ego must step aside and allow the One who is truly immortal and infinite to occupy the throne of the heart. The ego's illusions of grandeur must die, and in that death, a new being can emerge.

This is symbolized in our own tradition by Jesus' determination to go to Jerusalem. He knows that the divine agenda can only be fulfilled if he dies, and so he sets his face towards the holy city, in spite of his disciples'--and no doubt, his own ego's--protestations. And what happens there? He is tried and condemned, and he is put to death. But what happens then? Only upon his death is the fullness of his divinity revealed. His resurrected body is indestructible, infinite, and immortal. Jesus' genius, according to Jung, was that he saw through the illusions of the ego, and found his identity in his Father, into whom he was eventually absorbed, even in our theology. "Very truly," Jesus tells us, "unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit."

In the Gospel of Thomas we are told that we are supposed to be Jesus' twin: to mirror him, to realize that the same shift in perspective he made can be made by us as well. We, too, are invited to see past the limitations of our own individual egos and embrace God as our true home, and indeed, our true identity.

This paschal mystery is played out not only in our personal journeys, but in our corporate life, as well. This little church, which identified itself so much with one fine tradition--the faith of the Pilgrim fathers--had first to die, in order to be resurrected as a community that embraces all faiths and honors the universal truths that defy all sectarian boundaries. We meet here today to celebrate this death and resurrection, and the truth that only after this transfiguration is embraced can we truly own our own lives, or in the case of our congregation, our own building. Jung calls this "individuation," Fr. Richard calls it "virginity," I call it "now that we know who we are, let us get on with the adventure of really living."

The problem with making this perceptual shift is that it inevitably comes at great personal cost. The church does not want to fold. The ego does not want to die. The disciples do not want Jesus to go to Jerusalem. The "old man" as Paul calls him does not want to let go of his status, his identity, his life. The images attending this shift in our many mythologies are universally cataclysmic. The Book of Revelation in our own tradition depicts the shift as a great cosmic battle. For Hindus it is known as the Maha Bharat, the great war. For Moslems it is Jihad, holy war. For Christians, it is Armageddon. For you and me, however, we might just call it a spiritual emergency.

Even though it really takes place internally, the mythologies depict it as a great cosmic battle, and it feels cosmic indeed; it feels huge, it feels like the end of the world. And indeed, for the ego, it is.

But our traditions give us comfort, as well. For we do not go through this catastrophic shift alone. In the Hindu scripture the Baghavad Gita, Arjuna quails at the scene of the Battle, but Krishna, the incarnate God, is with him to encourage him, and to assure him that since everyone is just a part of him, and he never dies, no one in reality dies, and nothing is ever lost. The disciples are comforted by Jesus even as he marches toward death as he assures them that "I and my father are one."

No divine comfort is sufficient to alleviate our anxiety, however. Until that great battle is fought, it is the scariest thing that we--or should I say our egos--will ever face. But we are promised that on once the battle is fought, we will have victory, that on other side of the crucifixion is resurrection.

And this is another result of the shift in perspective: that which had previously been fierce becomes friendly. The God of terrible aspect that so threatens or egos, becomes our loving Father who embraces us in love, and that which we most fear is transfigured into our surest hope.

Jung tells us that God, the great Self that embodies all of being, is constantly trying to break into our consciousness. This inbreaking always seems violent until we catch on and cooperate with the process. Through mythology, tradition, the unconscious, and dreams, the truth of who we really are is trying to impress itself upon us, if only we have ears to hear.

The Gospel of Thomas promises us that if we bring forth what is within us, what we bring forth will save us. But if we do not bring forth what is in us, what we fail to bring forth will destroy us. The ground of all Being is within us, whispering the truth of our divine origins to us at all times; as Revelation tells us, God stands at the door and knocks, seeking entrance to our conscious, waking life, and acknowledgment as the ground of our being. What will our answer be? Will we quail at the sight of the battle, or will we rouse ourselves to the charge? The fate of the universe may not hang in the balance, but the fate of our souls certainly may.

So, did the little knots on my head point to a satanic or sacred ancestry? Is Moses coming down from the mountain angelic or demonic? Is God a misguided demiurge, or the source of infinite life and light? Is our end the grave or resurrection? It all depends upon your perspective. Let us pray...

God of both shadows and light, you stand at the door of our lives and knock. Truly you tell us that whosoever will save his life must lose it, but this losing is hard. Comfort us with your Holy Spirit even as you whisper to us the truth in our dreams, that your will for us is wholeness, the awareness that the ground of our very being is in you, that it is in you that we live and move and have our being, and that apart from you nothing is made. Give us the courage to put on Christ, to see ourselves as a part of you and of one another, and when this war is won, to find our rest in you. Amen.