Refraction.
As light passes from one medium to another, it bends and scatters, causing all sorts of optical illusions.
For instance, fill a clear glass with water. Put a spoon in it, and put it on your kitchen counter. Look at it. The spoon in the water looks slightly bigger, and it has shifted to the side. This is due to refraction.
The same thing happens to light from the sun. As the sunlight passes through the clouds, the light bends and scatters, causing the sunbeams to form some pretty dramatic angles. It's gorgeous, but in no way does it suggest the sun is any closer than it is. If you follow the angles of sunbeams from the image above, the sun appears to be just a few kilometers above those clouds, when even in FET the sun is supposed to be at least 3000km high.