Moses and Elijah in Glory

Here is one more thing you ought to be thoroughly ashamed of: you let him appear on that lonely mountain in the company of Moses and Elijah — the very men he had come to destroy. Oh, of course: this was supposed to be the point of the voice out of heaven, “This is my beloved Son; listen to him” — him, that is, and no longer Moses or Elijah. But then the voice by itself was enough, without putting Moses and Elijah on show. By naming the one they were to listen to, he must have barred everyone else, whoever they might be. Or was it Isaiah and Jeremiah and the rest, the ones he did not put on display, who were to be listened to — since it was the ones he did display that he was forbidding? And even supposing they had to be there, they certainly should not have been shown talking with him, which is a mark of intimacy, nor sharing his glory, which signals respect and favor. They should have been shown in some kind of filth, as a sure token of their ruin, or else in that darkness of the Creator which Christ was sent to break up — a long way off from the glory of the one who was about to cut their words and their writings out of his Gospel. [a]

So this is how he proves they belong to another god: by keeping them in his own company. This is how he shows they are to be dropped: he takes them along at his side. This is how he destroys them: he floods them with his own glory. And their own Christ — how would he have behaved? Perversely, I suppose, in the manner of heresy. He would have put them on show exactly as Marcion’s Christ was obliged to, or at any rate would have had anybody at all beside him rather than his own prophets. But what could suit the Creator’s Christ better than to be shown among the men who announced him in advance? To be seen with the men he had appeared to in visions? To be talking with the men who had talked about him? To share his glory with the men who used to call him the Lord of glory — and with those two chief servants of his in particular: the one who once shaped his people, the other who afterwards reformed them; the one who opened the Old Testament, the other who is to finish off the New?

So Peter does well. He recognizes his Christ’s companions, bound to him inseparably, and he proposes an arrangement: “It is good for us to be here.” Good — which plainly means good to be where Moses and Elijah are. “And let us put up three shelters, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” “But he did not know what he was saying.” Did not know — how? Was his ignorance a simple mistake? Or was it on the principle we maintain in the cause of the new prophecy: that ecstasy, the loss of one’s own mind, comes along with grace? For when a man is caught up in the Spirit, above all when he is looking at the glory of God, or when God is speaking through him, he must lose his ordinary awareness, because he is overshadowed by the power of God. And that is the very point at issue between us and the men of the soul.

Peter’s ecstasy is not hard to prove. How could he have recognized Moses and Elijah, except by being in the Spirit? Nobody could have owned pictures of them, or statues, or likenesses; the law forbade that. So how, unless he had seen them in the Spirit? And therefore, because it was in the Spirit that he had just spoken, and not in his ordinary senses, he could not know what he had said. But suppose instead that his not knowing came from a mistake — from wrongly supposing that Jesus was their Christ. Then it is plain that when Christ had earlier asked who people took him to be, and Peter answered, “You are the Christ,” Peter meant the Creator’s Christ. Had he known by then that Jesus belonged to the rival god, he would not have gone wrong here. And if his mistake here came out of a mistaken opinion he already held, then you may be sure that up to that very day Christ had revealed no new divine being; that Peter had so far made no mistake at all, because Christ had so far revealed nothing of the kind; and that Christ was therefore to be reckoned as belonging to nobody but the Creator — whose whole arrangement Peter in fact laid out here.

He picks three of his disciples as witnesses of the vision and the voice that are coming. That too is exactly the Creator’s way. “By the mouth of three witnesses,” he says, “every word shall stand.” He withdraws to a mountain. I see a great deal of meaning in the kind of place. It was on a mountain that the Creator first formed his ancient people, with visible glory and with his own voice. It was only right that the New Testament should be witnessed on ground as high as the ground where the Old Testament had been drawn up, and under the same sort of covering cloud — a cloud which nobody will doubt was condensed out of the Creator’s air. Unless, of course, Marcion’s god brought his own clouds down there, having forced a way through the Creator’s sky in the first place; or else the cloud he used was the Creator’s, borrowed on sufferance. So this time, as before, the cloud was not silent. There was the familiar voice out of heaven, and the Father’s testimony to the Son — exactly as he had said in the first Psalm, “You are my Son; today I have begotten you.” Through Isaiah too he had asked about him, “Who among you fears God? Let him listen to the voice of his Son.” So when he presents him here with the words “This is my beloved Son,” the clause “whom I promised” is of course to be understood. For if he made a promise once and afterwards says “This is he,” that is how a man behaves who is delivering what he promised: he speaks up to prove the promise he made earlier. It does not fit a god who is open to this reply — what right have you to say “This is my son,” about someone you gave us no notice of beforehand, any more than you ever let us know that you yourself existed?

“Listen to him,” then — the one whom the Creator had from the beginning declared entitled to be heard, under the title of a prophet, since it was as a prophet that the people had to regard him. “The Lord your God,” says Moses, “will raise up for you a prophet from among your sons” — by an ordinary line of descent, that is — “and to him you shall listen, as to me.” “Everyone who will not listen to him, his life shall be cut off from among his people.” Isaiah says the same: “Who among you fears God? Let him listen to the voice of his Son.” And this voice the Father was himself going to commend; for, he says, he “confirms the words of his Son,” when he says, “This is my beloved Son; listen to him.” So even if the duty of listening is transferred from Moses and Elijah to Christ, it is not transferred from another God, or to another Christ, but from the Creator to his own Christ, because the old covenant is going out and the new one is coming in. “Not an envoy, and not an angel, but he himself,” says Isaiah, “will save them” — for it is he himself who is now announcing and fulfilling the law and the prophets. The Father, they say, gave the Son new disciples, once Moses and Elijah had been displayed alongside him in the honor of his glory and then dismissed, their duty and their office fully discharged. Very well — and the display was staged for exactly this purpose, to state for Marcion’s information that Moses and Elijah had a share even in the glory of Christ.

We have the whole shape of this same vision in Habakkuk as well, where the Spirit, speaking in the person of some of the apostles, says, “Lord, I have heard your report, and I was afraid.” What report, if not the words of the voice out of heaven — This is my beloved Son, listen to him? “I considered your works, and I was astonished.” When could that have fitted better than when Peter saw his glory and did not know what he was saying? “In the midst of the two you shall be known” — Moses and Elijah, that is. Zechariah saw the same two under the figure of the two olive trees and the olive branches. They are the ones he means when he says, “They are the two anointed ones, who stand beside the Lord of the whole earth.” And Habakkuk again: “His glory covered the heavens” — with that cloud — “and his splendor shall be like the light,” the very light his clothes were flashing with.

And if we call to mind the promise made to Moses, we shall find it kept here. When Moses wanted to see the Lord, he said: “If, then, I have found favor in your sight, show yourself to me, so that I may know you.” The sight he wanted was of the condition Christ was to take on as a man, which Moses as a prophet knew was coming. About the face of God he had already been told, “No man shall see me and live.” “This thing that you have spoken, I will do for you.” Then Moses said: “Show me your glory.” And the Lord answered, with the same reference to what was still to come: “I will pass before you in my glory.” And at the end, “Then you shall see my back parts.” It was not loins, or the backs of legs, that Moses wanted to look at, but the glory that was to be revealed in the later times. And the Lord had promised to make himself visible to him face to face in just this way when he said to Aaron, “If there is a prophet among you, I will make myself known to him in a vision, and in a vision I will speak with him; but that is not my way with Moses. With him I will speak mouth to mouth, plainly” — in the human form, that is, which he was going to take on — “and not in riddles.” Now Marcion would not have it that Moses is shown here speaking with the Lord, but only standing there. Yet since he stood “mouth to mouth” with him, he must have stood “face to face” as well: not far off, but in the Lord’s very glory — not to say in his presence. And with that glory Moses came away lit up from Christ, exactly as he used to come away from the Creator: then to dazzle the eyes of the children of Israel, and now to strike the eyes of the blinded Marcion, who has failed to see that this argument too tells against him.

I put on the part of Israel. Let Marcion’s Christ step forward and shout: “You faithless generation! How long shall I be with you? How long shall I put up with you?” He will have to take this protest from me on the spot: “Whoever you are, you who have come upon us out of nowhere — first tell us who you are, where you come from, and what claim you have over us. So far, everything about you belongs to the Creator. If you come from him, of course, and are acting for him, we will take your rebuke. But if you come from some other god, then I should like you to tell us what you ever entrusted to us out of your own stock, which it was our duty to believe — seeing that you charge us with faithlessness, you who have never yet revealed your own self to us. How long ago did you begin dealing with us, that you should complain of the delay? On what points have you borne with us, that you should put your patience to our account? Like Aesop’s donkey, you are only just out of the well, and you are already filling the whole place with your braying.” [af]

Next I take on the person of the disciple, whom he has jumped on: “You twisted nation! How long shall I be with you? How long shall I put up with you?” That outburst of his I could of course throw back at him, and with perfect justice, in words like these: “Whoever you are, stranger, first tell us who you are, where you come from, and what claim you have over us. So far, I take it, you belong to the Creator, and that is why we have followed you, recognizing in you everything that is his. If you come from him, we will take your rebuke. But if you are acting for another, then tell us, please, what you have ever bestowed on us that is simply your own, and that it had become our duty to believe — seeing that you reproach us with faithlessness, though to this moment you have shown us no credentials. How long since did you begin to plead with us, that you should charge us with delay? Where have you borne with us, that you should even boast of your patience? The donkey has only just got out of Aesop’s well, and already he is braying.” Who would not throw back an unfair rebuke like that, if he took the man delivering it to belong to a god who had no standing yet to complain? Except that even the Creator’s own Christ would not have laid into them like this, if he had not lived among them long before, in the law and by the prophets, with mighty deeds and many mercies, and had not always found them faithless.

But look: Christ loves infants, and teaches that everyone ought to be like them if they ever want to be greater. The Creator, on the other hand, let bears loose on children, to avenge his prophet Elisha, whom they had jeered at. That antithesis takes some nerve, since it throws together two very different things — infants and boys, one age still innocent, the other already old enough to know what it is doing, old enough to jeer if not to blaspheme. So, being a just God, he did not spare irreverent boys; he requires honor at every age, and above all, of course, from the young. And being a good God, he loves infants so well that he blessed the midwives in Egypt for protecting the Hebrew newborns who were in danger from Pharaoh’s order. Christ, then, shares this kindness with the Creator. As for Marcion’s god, the enemy of marriage — how can he possibly be taken for a lover of little children, when children are simply what marriage produces? A man who hates the seed is bound to loathe the fruit as well. In fact he ought to be reckoned more ruthless than the king of Egypt. Pharaoh forbade infants to be brought up; this god will not allow them even to be born, and robs them of their ten months in the womb. How much likelier it is that kindness toward little children belongs to the God who blessed marriage for the increase of the human race, and who wrapped into that blessing the promise of marriage’s own fruit — and the first of that fruit is infancy.

The Creator, at Elijah’s request, brings down the stroke of fire from heaven in the affair of that false prophet of Baal-zebub. In that I recognize the severity of the Judge. And on the other side I recognize the severity of Christ’s rebuke to his own disciples, when they meant to bring down the same visitation on that obscure Samaritan village. The heretic may even discover that this gentleness of Christ was promised by that same most severe Judge. “He will not wrangle,” he says, “nor will his voice be heard in the street; a bruised reed he will not crush, and a smoking wick he will not put out.” Being that sort of person, he was of course all the less inclined to burn men. Even back then the Lord said to Elijah, “He was not in the fire, but in the small quiet voice.”

Well then — why does this most humane and merciful god turn away the man who offers himself to him as an inseparable companion? If it was out of pride or hypocrisy that the man said, “I will follow you wherever you go,” then by judicially condemning an act of pride or of hypocrisy as fit to be rejected, he was doing the work of a Judge. And of course the man he rejected he sentenced to the loss of not following salvation. For just as he calls to salvation the man he does not reject, or the man he invites of his own accord, so he consigns to ruin the man he rejects. And when he answers the man who pleaded his father’s burial as an excuse — “Let the dead bury their dead; you go and preach the kingdom of God” — he plainly confirms two laws of the Creator. One is in Leviticus, which concerns the priest’s office and forbids priests to attend even their parents’ funerals: “The priest shall not go in where there is a dead body; and for his father he shall not defile himself.” The other is in Numbers, which concerns the vow of separation; there the man who dedicates himself to God is told, among other things, not to go near any dead body, not even his father’s, or his mother’s, or his brother’s. So it was for the Nazirite’s vow and the priest’s office, I take it, that he intended this man he had been schooling to preach the kingdom of God. Otherwise he must be judged irreverent enough to order sons to neglect the burial of their parents, with no command of the law standing behind it. And in the third case before us, when he forbids the man who wanted first to say goodbye to his household to look back, he is only following the Creator’s line. Looking back was exactly what the Creator had been against, in the people he rescued out of Sodom.