This is the Sunday of the Transfiguration, the Last Sunday of the season of Epiphany. Epiphany is a season that sheds light on who Jesus is and what he means to our lives.

For the last few Sundays we have been following along in Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians. For Paul everything began for him when he met the risen Christ and was blinded as he was travelling to Damascus to persecute Christians. The gospel writers are famous for using blindness as an illustration of insight rather than simple seeing. Paul in today’s second lesson uses similar language when he uses the word veil and unveil.

Paul, before his conversion thought that he saw clearly. But it was not until God blinded him that he was able to see God in Jesus Christ and understand the law properly. Most often in the bible people who are blind have a clear knowledge of God and people who think they can see are confused about God.

So at the end of Epiphany on this Sunday of the Transfiguration, I would like to ask the question: What do we mean when we say that we see God? I will try to answer that question using some of the things Paul says to the Corinthians. Paul speaks of the veil over the face of Moses. He goes on to continue the image saying that when Israel reads the Law, it does so with a veil over its mind. I would suggest that much of modern Christianity also does this when we look at God. The veil is a veil of ignorance. But, those who turn to Jesus can take off the veil and see Jesus’ Father face-to-face because we have seen the son.

Paul’s words to the Corinthians are beautiful. “All of us with unveiled faces are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another, for this comes from the Lord and the Spirit.”

According to Paul the law was a good thing because it created a prohibition against being God’s rival. Think back to the Adam story. God wanted Adam to trust him. God created us without the knowledge of good and evil. We were made to trust God and not to be envious of his ability to discern good and evil. We were created to live by faith. We were made to be dependent on God and his good intentions for us. We were made to trust God. The law prevents us from transgressing this boundary between being a created being and becoming God’s rival. The Law guards our innocence and mortality. It is in this sense the Law is good and holy.

Any other use of the Law is hijacking the law by sin. Romans 10:4. The crucifixion and the resurrection makes the Law unnecessary for everyone who has the faith of Christ. Again in terms of the Adam story. The prohibition “do not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil”, was to insure that Creator and Creature would live together in a relationship of trust. Before eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we were shut up in innocence. All we could do was to trust. To use gospel language, we must accept the Kingdom of God as a little child. This makes it clear that the purpose of the Law was Faith.

Adam and Eve misused the Law and became envious of God. The death of Jesus makes it possible for us to fulfil the law by sharing Christ’s faith and relationship with the Father. Those who are in Christ Jesus realize that we do not have the capacity to know good from evil and we allow that to be revealed to us by the life of Jesus.

We go from working our way through life onto faith and by the faith of Christ we fulfill the original intent of the Law.

To continue to make our own efforts through the works of the Law is like looking at the glory of God through a veil. Through Christ the veil can be removed and we can see as trusting children. Since we no longer see God as a rival, we return to our innocence and we live life by faith, which puts things right with God apart from the works of the Law. Life lived in the cross is trust in God and the rejection of doing, knowing and living by our own power. We no longer grasp at life but live in it endlessly as a pure gift from God. So Jesus is the fulfillment of the Law and the end of the Law in the sense that our efforts to fulfill the Law are rejected as a sin in itself.

This is how the cross removes the veil and lets us read the Adam story clearly. The shining face of God reveals the original light of creation and gives us the new creation. As Christ’s church we are the people and the place where this new creation begins. That is why we are different.

Love is the fulfillment of the Law. Love and Faith are a rediscovering, through the cross and resurrection, of God’s original creation, Paul calls this the New thing “Creation in Christ.” The church is the place where we live in a relationship with God based on knowing the God who came into the world at Christmas to remove the vail and show us the face of God.

1. What caused Paul to turn from a persecutor of Christians to a follower of Jesus?

2. What are the veils that we wear over our faces/

3. What is the difference between a relationship based on Law and one based on Love?