Holy. Glory. These words in the first reading and psalm testify to awe at God’s transcendent sovereignty, fearsome majesty, and infinite mystery. No mortal can see God’s face or hear God’s voice and live. The fear expressed in these readings is personal—a living mortal in awe of the living God. In our age, awe at transcendent mystery tends toward the impersonal—at the invisibly small (in physics, quarks and strings) and the unimaginably large (space and time). Does anyone in our age still cultivate the fear of an unmanageable transcendent God, or is the notion too connected to images of a heavenly bully to be useful? Besides, Paul and Jesus each offer a picture of God’s immanence. Paul invites us to revel in God’s approachability, affirming that we can cry, “Abba! Father!” Jesus proclaims the most famous Bible verse of all, telling of God’s great love and desire to save.
But both Jesus and Paul testify that any presumption of easy friendship and comfortable intimacy with the triune God is as out of place now as ever. The immanent God is still the transcendent God! And it is still true: no mortal can see God’s face or hear God’s voice and live—even if the face and voice belong to Jesus through the Holy Spirit. The life God desires for us is accomplished through Jesus’ death—and through our own through baptism. Those deaths are as utterly terrifying as death always is, but with this grace: the death leads to our holy birth from above into a life where “we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him” (Rom. 8:17).