Sermon for Zoom Service 14th February 2021: 2 Cor 4, 3-6; Mark 9, 2-9

Fr Leonard Doolan – St Paul’s Athens

 

Masks have always been an inspiration for literature, film, and stage.

Jim Carey starred in the 1994 film, simply called ‘the Mask’. Michael Crawford made the half mask memorable in the Andrew Lloyd-Webber stage production of ‘Phantom’. In the 1840’s Alexandre Dumas wrote his novel about an enigmatic French aristocrat, called ‘Man in an Iron Mask’. The list goes on, and we will all be able to think of examples.

One of my favourite authors on themes of classical history is Mary Reanualt. In her novel ‘the Mask of Apollo’ the setting is the 4^th Century BC. The principal character of her historical novel is Nikeratos, an actor in Greek tragedies who tours with a travelling acting company. Renault offers great insights into the life of a stage actor.

Ancient Greece was famous for its theatre productions. These were normally linked in some way to religious festivals, and the touring groups of actors would move from city to city to coincide with celebrations of the local patron god.

In Greek theatre productions the acting group was small in number, maybe three maximum. There would be the principal actor, the prot-agonist, a second actor, the deuter-agonist, and possibly a trito-agonist. Each would play several roles, and would be enabled to do so by wearing different masks. For principal characters the mask was always very stylized and identifiable. Each actor would change mask on-stage, as it were at the skene, and it was considered shameful if the real face of the actor was revealed during the changing of the mask.

The word used for the mask is prosopeion, a derivative from the Greek word prosopon meaning a face, or countenance. This word is still in use today when a modern Greek refers to the face, prosopo, but it can also mean a person. In a cast list for a play we might be used to the heading dramatis personae. In classical Greek theatre the word would be prosopon, with this rather double meaning of person and literally ‘face’, because the mask identifies the character.

In the city of Corinth Paul the Apostle compares the old covenant, chiseled on tablets of stone, with the freedom that comes through the gift of the Holy Spirit, the sign and seal of a new covenant; he contrasts Moses with Christ, the one trembling on the mountain top receiving the tablets of stone (the Ten Commandments) having to veil his face in order to approach the glory of God, the other removing the veil so that we can gaze on the glory of God.

Developing this in his  letter, Paul picks up on a number of themes – including Christ in Creation, Christ as image or icon of God (which we thought about last week from the letter to the Colossians), the covenantal relationships with God – Moses and Christ – the light shining in the darkness (remember last week we noticed the connections Paul made with John 1, even though he could never have read it as it hadn’t yet been written), then, rather victoriously Paul says, ‘For it is the God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness” who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God’  and here it is, the punchline, ‘in the face of Jesus Christ’. (2 Cor 4, 6).

 

In this great cosmopolitan city of the classical world, with its port, its hippodrome, its temples, an acropolis all of its own, and of course a theatre, Paul mentions the word prosopon. Paul is a master at making connections between his new found faith, and the culture in which he seeks to share it. OK, so it is the normal word for face, or for person, but it is the impact of his use of words that matters.

Paul immediately takes his audience in to the world and culture of the theatre of God’s drama (God’s action) in Jesus. But for Paul this drama is no performance. The skene (the backdrop) is real, challenging and powerful, for Paul had become utterly involved in the drama to the point of conversion. In the face of Christ he sees a new reality, a new world, a new Creation. Nor is the face of Jesus Christ a comedic or tragic mask, that can be changed according to character. There is but one plot, one story, a protagonist, and the story of our salvation in the cross.

This truth for Paul changes his whole understanding of God, thus his theology, but for Paul the new theology is also a new anthropology. The prosopon is not just face, it is person, and so for Paul a whole new understanding of what it is to be human, to be a person, is radically reshaped.

This radical shift is narrated to us in today’s gospel reading. It is St. Mark’s version of an event that happened on Mount Tabor – namely the metamorphosis, the Transfiguration of Jesus. In the Matthew and Luke versions of this event, we are specifically told that the face prosopon of Jesus is changed – it shone like the sun – and his whole appearance is dazzling. This is the New Testament’s equivalent of Moses on Mount Sinai receiving the Commandments, but in place of stone tablets, we have the Jesus- Word- of- God, being revealed to eyes that are able to gaze upon him.

‘Tis good, Lord, to be here!

Thy glory fills the night:

Thy face and garments, like the sun,

Shine with unborrowed light.

 

Thus runs the well known Transfiguration hymn.

 

Paul’s theology and his understanding of the person made in the image of Christ synthesizes in the real life experience he has of the face of Christ – face and person.

Humanity itself is transfigured in Christ – you and I become a new creation in Christ, and our ethical relationship one to the other becomes founded not on observing a set of rules, but in the human regard for the sanctity of self, and the sanctity of others. It is binding on Paul, and it is binding on us. It is, of course, a foundation of faith, hope and love – but we know what the greatest of the three is.

 

Today is not only St. Valentine’s day, so big red hearts to everyone, but also racial justice Sunday. There have been some very high profile racial justice incidents in recent months and years, crystallized perhaps in the Black Lives Matter movement, and this movement has justice on its side, but the pernicious influence of rascism occurs in all manner of situations, sometimes deliberate on the part of those who are proud to be rascist, through the spectrum to those who try hard not to be rascist and actively work for behaviour, attitudes, policies, to be non-rascist. But perhaps the most pernicious of all is when we are not even conscious of being rascist. Let’s say clearly, this is not just a matter of colour. It is a matter of being humbled in the presence of the sacredness of human life.

Our faith is colour blind, and Christianity has no ethnicity – another great insight of Paul; there is neither Jew nor Greek, only unity in Christ as we gaze together on the face of the transfigured Christ.

 

In the 1860’s a German archaeologist was working on excavations at Mycenae in Argos, NE Peloponnese. It was a site famous among other things for its tombs. In grave circle A, grave 5, he discovered something rather wonderful. It was the grave, Heinrich Schliemann the archaologist asserted at the time, as that of King Agamemnon, from around 1600BC. Agamemnon was brother of Menelaos whose wife was the famous Helen who ran off with Paris back to Troy. Agamemnon led the expedition of Greek forces against King Priam’s city of Troy, but he was also a bitter enemy of his fellow Greek, Achilles, King of the Myrmidons, better known to us as Brad Pitt.

As the tomb was excavated they found a body whose face was covered with a beaten gold funerary mask. The mask is now in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. As the golden mask was removed Schliemann was famously reported to have said in a letter to the German king ‘I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon’.  In fact it is later refuted that he said it, but the words have become synonymous with him.

 

As we reflect yet further on Paul’s wonderful discovery of Christ in his life in the first century AD, we ourselves in 2021 are equally directed to reconsider our response to the prosopon – the face, the person of Jesus Christ. As we look to each other, sisters and brothers, can any of us say ‘I have gazed upon the face of Jesus Christ’?