The Figure Above the Sapphire Sea

It’s about 2am, and I must write down the journey I had through Exodus tonight.

The long office reading in Liturgy of the Hours today is Exodus 24 where Moses and the elders “see” the one who brought them out of Egypt. It makes note of the clear sapphire floor beneath the figure’s feet, a detail I always found odd. It drove me into a tailspin of parallel research in Revelation and other books to double check some things.

And it got me wondering: who exactly, and I mean very precisely, was sitting atop the sapphire sea? God is ambiguous. John clearly tells us that no one has seen God. Is this another preincarnate Theophany, whatever that is? That feels a bit hand-wavey and vague. Is it a symbolic vision, a type of visual storytelling, as I’ve always understood it? Also hand-wavey, as it doesn’t answer the question precisely.

We know that God resides in the Eternal Present, the “static” reality of eternity (by static, I mean in the programmer’s sense: unchanging and uncreated). Time is an artifact, a creature. The realm of eternity exists above it. This is the biggest mental hurdle to jump for creatures of time like us. It’s easy to say God is not bound by time, and another to stop yourself from thinking God waits for anything. From God’s vantage point, all things are present and at once. He is present at all moments in time and therefore does not wait for anything to happen.

So what about events in time that supposedly happen to God? We say, for example, the Word was incarnate of the Virgin Mary and became man. Did God have to wait for Mary to be born? Before Jesus was conceived, was the Logos in a kind of preincarnate state? If so, what is that state, and how does he, say, walk with Adam, or wrestle with Jacob, or stand with Daniel in the Babylonian furnace?

And that’s when I realized that from God’s vantage point, the incarnation, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus are simultaneous. They are already written. In a sense, they are already true and have already happened. God has decreed that he would become man. So from an eternal perspective, God is in some sense always incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and has always been united to man’s nature in the God-man, Jesus.

If Jesus is God in the eternal act, this gives weight behind Paul’s statement that all things were created by Jesus (Col. 1:16). Jesus is the invisible God’s visible image not simply after he was born, but in eternity. That is, when God penned creation by eternal decree, he had fully intended the life of Christ as the representation of himself. God cannot be fully visible by any other image. From our vantage point in time, we are merely awakening to what is already true in the eyes of God.

If we should conceive of Jesus as the eternal image of the Son as we say in the Nicene Creed, are we to believe that, prior to the birth of Jesus, God fashioned a human body for himself to inhabit that is not Jesus? This seems to open more questions. What sort of body or form did he create? What does God do with that body after he’s inhabited it? Was it actually a human body or something else? In what sense did he inhabit it, if he inhabited it at all? This is no way to answer who Moses saw atop Sinai.

Since we know the visible icon of God is Jesus, we should assume, like Paul, this is true throughout time. But isn’t the birth of Jesus in the future from Moses’s vantage point? Yes, but again, Jesus is united to the Logos in the eternal decree of God (the Now). Therefore, in the Now, Jesus is already the lamb slain before the foundation of the world, since those time-bound events are already true in the Now. And therefore, in the Now, Jesus, the carpenter from Nazareth, is God.

So who did Moses see atop Sinai? He saw Jesus. He did not see an ephemeral vision of the Godhead, an impossibility for man, but the image of God, the risen Lord Jesus. The resurrection of Jesus happens in the future time of the Romans, yes, but, once resurrected, the glorified body of Jesus is no longer constrained by time in the same way we are. We know that he is no longer bound by physics because he is able to walk through a locked door, transform his appearance, and appear in multiple places at once. He is also no longer bound by time. We have a very well-known example of a future reality inbreaking into the present: the Transfiguration. It occurs prior to his resurrection, but is the display of his glorified body post-resurrection. This is a Chekov Gun that is dropped midway in the Gospels to demonstrate the mechanism of Jesus’s forward-and-backward ministry. He is now not simply the Lord of heaven and earth, but of time itself. We might call this bilocation or sacramental presence. By virtue of the Hypostatic Union and his resurrected body now ascended, he can miraculously participate in history retroactively.

To put it another way, the one who said, “Let there be light” is rightly identified as the resurrected Jesus. The one who walked with Adam and Eve in the garden was the glorified Jesus. And if Moses had been able to look at the true form of God and had asked to see his hands and side, I speculate that he may have seen nail-pierced hands and a wounded side. The God-man has been and always will be the image of the Creator. And hence, Jesus can rightly tell Phillip that anyone who has seen him has seen the Father, as if it should’ve been obvious by now.

That Christ occupies a preeminent position in time explains the patterns of the universe better: nature’s cycles conform to the Passion rather than the Passion being conformed to nature’s cycles. The author of creation is in fact Jesus. It should therefore be no surprise that everything in creation is a kind of emanation of the Gospel story rather than the Gospel story being one emanation of life. For example, the “circle of life” is patterned after the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ, the concept of “other” and family/friends is patterned from the Trinity, the suffering of life is designed from the cross, and so on. These are emanation of the eternal decree of God from the mind of the author, Christ. It is confusing to us in time because we see the life of Christ happen after creation, but in eternity, the life of Christ logically precedes creation!

One implication of this is that we should see the cosmos as a series of hieroglyphs encoded and revealed only by its Rosetta Stone, the life of Christ. This is why Christ is rightly called the Archetype. The marriage of the eternal (God) and matter (man) is eternally decreed because Christ wills to draw creation into the wedding chambers of divinity. This is in fact why we have creation at all. As Paul says, from him and through him and for him are all things.

I want to describe the implications this has on the Mass, especially the Eucharist, where we find the resurrected body of Christ hiding in the same way he hid from the disciples in the garden of Emmaus and where he consecrates a better Mt. Sinai and meeting place of heaven and earth. But that’s for another night.