The Transfiguration
Second Sunday in Lent, 16th March, 2003
The Rev'd Dr Colin Holden
Assistant Priest and Archivist, St Peter's, Eastern Hill
This morning's gospel, the Transfiguration, is an incident that is well attested in Lenten cycles of readings as far back as the fifth century of our era – in other words, some of the Christian faithful were contemplating this as part of their Lenten devotions at a very early point in our history. Its appearance in the Lenten cycle is appropriate for a variety of reasons. It is there to recall us to an ultimate goal in the midst of a season when sometimes preachers and the faithful can focus narrowly in terms of the importance of whatever discipline, whatever rule or resolutions we have adopted for Lent. It focuses us on what might be called 'final results' by presenting us with the glorified Jesus as a focus for worship (partly verbalised in Peter's response – it is good for us to be here – let us build three booths). But theologians, particularly in the traditions of the Orthodox and Oriental churches, have also validly drawn out the implications of this incident even further. It is not only about who Jesus really is, and the offering, in no matter how stumbling a way, of a response to what is truly experienced as a revelation. It is also about our ultimate goal – the transfiguration, the transformation of our humanity, our calling as disciples, as worshippers, as turning and returning followers, to also become vessels through which the light of God is clearly visible. The Transfiguration, interpreted in this way, is seen to be about something that is possible in part (but only in part), in this world; we are called here to be vessels of more than just our own life and our own egos, just as we are called to respond to a variety of experiences and signs of God's presence. It is something that begins here, but does not realise its fulfilment here. Our sense of God's presence and revelation is often partial for many different reasons and our responses in worship and many kinds of action are likewise in this life partial. The completion and fulfilment of that calling is in a greater and new life. The Transfiguration is an anticipation in this world of the Vision of God in the world to come – a situation in which our own involvement – inasmuch as we can make any statement at all about it – is to be that of worshippers, and at the same time, to be ultimately free from those things that currently hinder our carrying out of the calling to be bearers of that light, completely transformed by it. You might well say, as I am sure that many early Christians understood it in this way, that the Transfiguration gospel is one that is appropriate to a Lenten cycle of readings and for our reflection at this time because it is really about the same essential truths to which we are recalled by the Resurrection and the life it proclaims.
It is also appropriate for us to look at this Gospel in another context, formed by placing it alongside the Temptations in the Wilderness that are the subject of the readings of the first Sunday of the cycle. The desert was no end in itself for Jesus, but a preparation for something larger – almost a peculiar retreat before going public with the ministry of proclaiming the Kingdom and dramatising its presence through acts of healing and forgiveness. Our deliberately chosen deserts, our disciplines, are unlikely to achieve anything long-term if we envisage them as ends in themselves. They are means, not ends. There is little place in a mature Christian understanding for such things undertaken as mere formal restrictions to please a God who is envisaged as emotionally disturbed by any enjoyment on our part. They need to be approached as ways of helping us in our attempt to reshape our humanity so that it might more effectively do the things we believe God intended it to do – to have a growing capacity for love, forgiveness, responsiveness to God and each other, much of which we can describe as both worship and healing.
At present, it has another appropriateness of a peculiar and grim kind. It recalls us – and there are other reminders of this for those beyond the major Christian traditions – that if we do not allow for transfiguration, change and growth in many directions, we are likely to face the opposite – not just diminution instead of growth, but disfiguration. The Transfiguration Gospel itself has nothing to say explicitly or implicitly about this, but one ironic historic circumstance can remind us of this. The Transfiguration is celebrated outside Lent with a feast day on August 6, a date derived from the consecration of a basilica on the supposed site of this revelatory moment (the church clearly hadn't taken to heart the implication of St Peter's response). On August 6 1945 the first atom bomb was dropped on Japanese soil. Light brighter than a thousand suns was generated, but its effect was to disfigure humanity in many ways, rather than transform it.
The choice that has been contemplated now for some time in connection with Iraq, and which may yet be made, is one that reminds us of another dimension of transfiguration, and also reinforces some fairly basic, even conservative Christian doctrine. Human failure is not simply, or even primarily individual, but something social and corporate – negative and destructive values and attitudes are embodied not only in individuals but also in nations and beyond them, in whole empires and cultures; and destructive or negative attitudes from beyond us, whether the pressure of individuals or of groups, are at work helping to shape each of us before we ever develop the capacity to try to be and act differently.
When it comes to the transfiguration, the transformation of human beings is not just for individuals – even though the Gospel is often understood in terms of conversion/transformation of the individual – as much as of whole societies. Not enough to change unforgiveness, anger, desire for revenge in individuals, when whole societies may allow or promote these responses, often in the name of freedom, upholding own rights or rights of others – and this is a problem that doesn't have a particular religious, economic face. It crosses the clashes and barriers of race, religion and culture (qualified approval for revenge is a value of traditional Middle Eastern culture; violence likewise underlies militarism and imperialist attitudes that are basic components of American nationalism).
How do we pray and act in the face of uncertainty about international future, especially a possible choice that for many of us might not appear so much to be a liberating of the oppressed as the exchange of violence from one source with violence from another? A supposed solution that involves as much if not more disfiguration than transfiguration?
[I have no simple answer and I confess to a degree of frustration and anger as I think of people from several Middle Eastern countries whom I came to know well, whom I might never see again if a war were to be declared, not to mention many caught up helplessly in the larger communities of which they are a part.] Yet I have to fall back on a fundamental answer that might seem to be illogical, and can at least fairly be called supra- logical, and that is an attitude that is at the core of our Judaeo-Christian roots, namely to try to continue giving thanks. I do not suggest this lightly, or want to sound as though I am referring to something said glibly. Enshrined in the Jewish tradition is the celebration of the deliverance from slavery and the entry into a promised land of freedom, embodied in the Passover, celebrated every year, seen as God's deliverance from darkness, oppression and misery. The first Passover was celebrated as it were 'on the run', as all those who celebrate it still are reminded in parts of the ritualised treatment of it since then. Thanks was said by the first, real celebrators, virtually looking over their shoulders, not quite sure that it couldn't all be taken away again. Resonances of this great thanskgiving can be heard in the component of thanksgiving in the prayers said at virtually every meal throughout Jewish history to the present. Let us give thanks . . . . Jesus wasn't just looking over His shoulder as though something might be snatched from His hands when He celebrated the first eucharist. He offered thanks, looking a future in the face that can only have seemed the absolute end, the situation in which there might be little or nothing for which to be thankful.
It is even more daunting to reflect on one possible interpretation of His cry from the cross with the opening line of Psalm 22 (My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?) – the possibility that he was not only expressing his sense of desolation and isolation, but attempting to recite a whole psalm that moves towards praise from a situation of complete abandonment.
Here is none of the triteness of which people are guilty when they proclaim to others in grave circumstances that every cloud has a sliver lining. Nor is it the same as the conclusion of Fairy Blackstick in Thackeray's The Rose and the Ring that the best present she could give to anyone would be 'a little misfortune'.
What Jesus invites us to do is to continue giving thanks in those situations where we see absolutely nothing to do this for, because the very fact of doing this in itself has the capacity to transform some element or elements. It is of a piece with His injunctions to do the opposite of all conventional wisdom: 'love your enemies; bless them that curse you; do good to them that hate you and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you'. As I apprehend the possibility that war will produce a dark crop of newly damaged individuals and groups whose anger and frustration will fuel further violence, a very dark future indeed, even as I and many others are apprehensive about this as the only future that lies ahead, Jesus holds out approaches unlike any others – to turn worldly wisdom and logic upside down, and even now to give thanks because this in itself unlooses a power for change whose reality is no less in spite of our inability to comprehend or rightly estimate it.
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