Exodus 34.28-end and Corinthians 3.12 -4.2

Today’s lessons are certainly rather puzzling, but they are also fascinating as both concern how God may be perceived and how human beings may relate to him.

In Exodus 34 we have in the background the fundamental biblical idea of the Covenant. This was not seen as a bargain between two roughly equal partners, but as a divine gift, in effect an adoption of Israel by God, and of course it goes back to the stories of Abraham in Genesis 15 and 17. Today’s passage reminds us that while God undertook to care for Israel, she had very clear ethical or behavioural obligations, in short to conduct the whole of life as God wished. The core of these obligations is spelled out in the two tables of the Law, I.e. the Ten Commandments. Thus when Moses comes down from meeting God on Mount Sinai with the two tablets, he is passing on to the people their ethical agenda, the prescription for their response to God’s generous initiative.

However, another element in today’s story is the ineffable nature of God, a Being who is beyond our senses and our comprehension. A common way of indicating this is to talk about the light that surrounds God, and this we can perceive, as Israel in the wilderness could see accompanying them the pillar of fire by night and the pillar of cloud ( a bright cloud) by day. It is this brilliant light of the Unseen which reflected in the face of Moses, so dazzlingly that when he talks to the people about the newly given Law, he has to cover his face with a veil. In this one story we thus have two distinctive features of Old Testament religion, a strong sense of the unimaginable greatness of God, and also an equally strong sense that this God demands not just ‘wonder, love and praise’ but strict standards of individual and group living.

2 Corinthians is perhaps Paul’s most difficult letter, and today’s second lesson is not one of its more lucid passages. Although working out the details of his argument would be a complicated matter, his general drift is easier to identify. What seems to be behind his use of the story from Exodus is his conviction that the Law (represented by the Ten Commandments) was indeed God-given, but it also pointed beyond itself to something—or rather Someone—that lacked its limitations. That Someone is of course Jesus Christ, together with the Spirit and with the human response of faith. Paul’s treatment of the story would certainly seemed perverse to other Jewish interpreters, but he proposes that the veil over the face of Moses was to prevent the people from seeing that the light was already fading, not only from Moses but from what he represented, the Law.

Clearly Paul is not trying primarily to give a balanced account of the Exodus passage, but rather to use it to propagate his belief that the centre of God’s revelation and his light (or ‘glory’) is now no longer the Law, but the person of Jesus Christ.