Abstract
A Face in the Cloud
Faces are profoundly important in human relationships, for good or ill. Psychologists in the University of St Andrews have studied human responses to different faces—what aspects do we see as healthier, more trustworthy, more attractive? After all on dating apps, people make judgments quickly based on people’s faces, then maybe read a little more about the person whose face it is—or so students and staff tell me. So much is conveyed by our faces—we laugh with our faces, we cry, we smile, we frown, we close our eyes, we kiss. It’s one reason the masks we wore during the pandemic made it so hard to navigate encounters with other people.
What of the Christian faith? Do faces matter in our relationship with God? Maybe not—for we don’t see God as we see our friends, our family or our flatmates. The Bible doesn’t describe God in physical terms—indeed, one of the Ten Commandments has often been understood as forbidding the depiction of God in imagery: You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath. . .
And the New Testament never describes Jesus’ ordinary appearance—his height, weight, hair colour, eye colour, or what his face looked like. Yet very quickly, followers of Jesus started to depict him—on the walls of catacombs and churches, on tombstones and crucifixes, in stained glass and statues. It seems that we humans longed to have a face for Christ, for God made flesh. Many images of Jesus’ face, found in reproductions in people’s homes around the world, reflect the European culture and the time of their creation. There’s a kind of standard long-haired image of Jesus—I suppose that’s why people think they see his face in a cinnamon bun every so often.
But there is one event found in the New Testament that does speak of how Jesus’s face appeared. On top of a hill, with three disciples around him, we read in Mark that Jesus’ clothes became dazzling white, but according to Matthew, that Jesus’ face shone like the sun. And Paul, in writing to the Corinthians, says that God has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. The Gospels say that Jesus was transfigured—something had changed, his face didn’t usually shine in that way. This shining, this brightness, feels like a sign of glory, a radiance from God. And in the very last chapter of the final book of the Bible, Revelation, there is a vision of heaven in which God’s people will see his face, God himself being all the light they need.
So is this the face of God? Is the face in the cloud the face for us? Bright, shining, radiant, glorious? Maybe partly so—we need this vision of glory. But the Gospels do not leave us gazing at a face for ever. Immediately after the transfiguration, we learn that Jesus set his face to go to Jerusalem. And there, he faced hostility, from religious leaders and political power fearful of his influence. He prayed in the garden of Gethsemane, falling on his face. One of his disciples, Judas, kissed his face so that he would be arrested. The Roman soldiers struck him on his face, they spat in his face. He was lifted on to a cross, executed as a criminal. And before he died, sour wine was lifted to his face to drink.
What glory is this? What radiance? What shines in this bruised, weary, humiliated face? The face in the cloud has become a face in the crowd. The transfiguration face is now the face of Public Enemy No. 1. This is a face like all the broken, suffering, ordinary, afflicted people of his place and time, of any place and time. He was one of us, and nowhere was that clearer than in his face, and this is how we encounter God. The late Pope Benedict XVI put this simply and clearly when he wrote: All through history, people look upon the disfigured face of Jesus and they recognize the glory of God. We call this Transfiguration Sunday but it goes together with Disfiguration.
So how do we see the face of God today? I think we hold on to both the disfigured and the transfigured. There is no shortage of disfigured faces and lives. Think of the thousands of people, survivors of recent earthquakes in Asia and Africa, but injured—in body and mind, family members dead, friends dead. Think of the countless people whose lives are being affected by climate change, reconfigured by heat, changes in rainfall and soil quality, air pollution and economic prospects—risking all on perilous journeys. Think of friends and family who struggle with what life throws in their path, from deadlines to doubting their own worth. Could I suggest that if God is anywhere today, he is found in these faces—exhausted, fearful, isolated, anxious? He is with them, and in some ways he shares the pain that we see in their faces. In Jesus he lived these lives, he shared our humanity, he identified with the afflicted.
But in seeing God in the disfigured, we have this marvellous image of the transfigured, the face in the cloud. God is not only with the suffering: he is an eternal source of light, of radiance, of love and of hope. Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, put this beautifully, writing that the disciples saw God’s eternal presence in the travel-stained, dishevelled humanity of their friend and teacher. And so, when the disciples later looked on that face disfigured and bleeding they should not forget the brightness of the mystery that shone through it. . . They knew that humanity could be the face worn by God. And whatever terrors, crimes and catastrophes might follow, nothing could extinguish that eternal light.
Disfigured and bleeding—yet eternal light. I believe we need both. Someone asked me recently why I am a Christian, rather than a follower of any other path. And of course there are reasons such as my upbringing, maybe my genetic inheritance, and my general dislike of change. But I also find that only the Christian faith offers to me that God I long to trust. God who shares in creation, who is intimately involved in the fragile, beautiful, painful, maddening, joyous experience which is life in this world, who shares its troubles in uttermost depth, but who offers hope that there is more than the mess of this material world. There is eternal light shining in the midst of it all. As the psalmist says, Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God shines forth. And does so in a face we recognise.