I feel the loss of something great, something precious slipping away, fading like taillights of a girlfriend's car that's left you standing in a painful panic holding nothing but the ring she's just pulled off her own finger and placed into your palm. It's that moment right there of anguish and ache that's the most difficult to live through, not because life doesn't continue around you, but exactly because it does. Because it is, at that very instant, the most difficult to utter any word that would possibly portray the bleeding hurt of a heart ripped and laid bare. And the swirling movements of the world around you spin your head into a seasick dizziness. You are left, alone in the dark, to figure out how life could possibly come to this.
And this is what comes out, this is what is pumped with every beat of a heart desperate to send its life-giving liquid to all the members of the body that supports it. These words that I type here, these words of a man so hungry and so unsatisfied. It's not like the Psalmist who said that his heart burst its banks, “spilling beauty and goodness,” but more like the utter desolation in the face of a vagrant whose last and only bit of food has been swiped right from his hands as he was about to take a sweet bite, stolen away by some treacherous thief now completely out of sight.
Moses saw the backside of Jesus. He did! He got to see the Bright and Morning Star shining in His brilliance as He strolled away from him, and his face shone the color of glory… for a time. But that glory faded from Moses, faded… and finally disappeared completely. My heart breaks reading the account of Moses covering his face, not wanting his comrades to notice the dimming magnificence. So heart wrenching it was for him to lose that radiance, and so deep within his soul he felt it, that he chose to hide the remaining hours of that light from his friends. As close as he had been to his God (a God who knew him intimately as a friend), I wonder if he had felt some piercing sense of abandonment during that whole thing, as if left holding a ring as his dreams faded into the distance.
What am I to do with that? If Moses, who had by himself ascended the mountain to be with his Lord in all His wild fury and violent call, could do nothing to retain the imprint of the Glorious One with him, what hope do I have? What am I to do with my aching memory of a home “ordered,” as Eugene Peterson recalls with me, “by Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” a memory, I need to add, that neither fits well into this world nor is welcomed by it. And all the busyness and drivenness and rationale excuse the loss of that haunting as success, all the while my own heart still loses blood with each virile beat.
Is this the end of the story, then? Is the final word on my heart’s life strictly what I can devise myself, as if I could maybe, working a little harder than Moses, retain the glory upon my face where he lost it? Maybe if I just sinned less, or devoted myself more… Maybe if I wailed louder or understood better…
But this never works. Never. If the rest were up to me, I must certainly lost all hope, and with it all life. I might as well pack up and go home. Huh. Home. As if there were anything else to go to.
In hope beyond hope, though, I sit gaping-mouthed listening to Paul, this man who has also met with the Living God and knows a secret deeper even than Moses’ fading glory, a mystery kept hidden in the heart of God until such a time as this. “Now if the ministry that brought death… came with glory, so that the Israelites could not look steadily at the face of Moses because of its glory, fading though it was, will not the ministry of the Spirit be even more glorious?”
Jesus, that must be it. The glory that is mine to inherit in the ministry of your Spirit is greater even than Moses’ glory. “And if what was fading away came with glory, how much greater is the glory of that which lasts!”
That’s what I hear, then, like blood rushing in my ears. That this is not the end of the story, not by a long shot. That what feels fading is a glory less than what I am made for. That the sentence of death I feel in my heart isn’t the end word (that one has already been spoken: “It is finished.”) That if the law that brought death was glorious, how much greater that which brings life. And of all things my heart both needs and desires, it is life, that life promised and shown and brought to me in the face of Jesus of Nazareth. That, then, is my hope.
Therefore, since we have such a hope, we are very bold. We are not like Moses, who would put a veil over his face to keep the Israelites from gazing at it while the radiance was fading away… we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever increasing glory...
Jesus, I am broken, knowing that You are all I have. I am hopeful, knowing that You are all I need. I am joyful, knowing that You are all I want. Unveil my face, that Your glory may be reflected from it with ever increasing glory – that you would be known by me, in me, and through me to the praise of Your renown. I faint into You.
