Last week I made reference to Barbara Walters’ fondness for the gauzy filter placed over the camera lens. As the years have gone by, when one watches her interview specials, one has to squint a little more to get focused on the screen. Barbara Walters’ fuzzy filters represent only one strategy aging celebrities use to mask the toll of time – we are also familiar with Joan Rivers’ surgeries, Mary Tyler Moore’s turtleneck sweaters, and William Shatner’s girdle. I hope we have at least a little sympathy for them all. We are, all of us, to varying degrees complicit in propagating the culture of youth-and-beauty in which we enslave our celebrities – it is a culture the Bible rejects (I Peter 3.3-4).
Jamie Lee Curtis did a very brave thing in the November 2003 issue of Vogue. She allowed photographers document the entire process, from start to finish, by which a team of make-up artists and stylists transformed a maturing, slightly out of shape woman into a cover-model. Lon Chaney probably did less to turn himself into Quasimodo. The only word I can think of to describe this sort of bare honesty is “courageous.”
It is the kind of courage that the Bible said Moses was lacking in the days following his descent from Mt. Sinai. Exodus 34.33 tells us that when he initially returned to the Hebrew people, his face radiated the light of God’s presence – and the sight was terrifying. So he had to veil his face. After a while the light began to dim, and Moses kept the veil on so the Hebrew people wouldn’t see the glory fading.
We…are not as Moses who used to put a veil over his face that the children of Israel might not look intently at the end of what was fading away. II Corinthians 3.12-13
Paul goes on to use Moses’ veiled face as a metaphor for post-Jesus Judaism which refuses to look at plain truth. We Christians are not like that. We look at Jesus with “unveiled faces,” and are “being transformed from glory to glory,” (v.18). Moses retained the reflected light of God’s glory, and the people cowered before it. We look straight into the face of God the Son. Because we don’t hide from this glory, but fully expose ourselves to it, we are being transformed by it, and being transformed into it. Moses carried only reflected light, and it faded. We are united with God’s light and become light ourselves:In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not grasp it…there was the true light which, coming into the world, enlightens every person. John 1.4-5, 9.
You are the light of the world….let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father who is in heaven. Matthew 5.14-16.
The New Testament returns again, and again to this theme (Romans 8.28ff, I Corinthians 15. 51ff, I John 3.1). We are not our bodies. We are not afraid of light. We are not meant to fade, but to grow brighter each day.
