Transfiguration transfigured
If we are, as is often argued, created in the image of God, then embodied in this creation is an potential to experience all that God is.
In essence, when God became flesh in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, everything that He was in Himself, and displayed to the world, is in-built in us. And that includes transfiguration.
If we have viewed the transfiguration as recorded in the gospels as a ‘one-off’, abnormal, unique experience not only in time and space, but restricted to the Son of Man, perhaps we should re-assess transfiguration?
To begin, we must realise that as much as the three disciples permitted to be with Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration, were not transfigured, it was not Jesus alone whose clothes appeared to be whiter than white, but those belonging to Moses and Elijah also.
Could, therefore, anyone be transfigured? The answer surely is Yes, but it is not in our power to transfigure ourselves. The more recent misuse of the word ‘manifest’ has caused disarray among limited, broken, frail men and women who cannot accept the limitations of their own humanity.
The point is not whether we can switch transfiguration on or off as if we’re in control of our destiny – destiny measured in these next few minutes or as in life’s destiny in fulfilment of dreams or the grave. The point is that we carry in our ‘in-the-image-of-God-nature’ the normality of transfiguration in the same way that gentle poppy plants explode their seed pods, or Rousseau’s philosophy allowed him to moralize about children yet abuse his own, or that atheistic communism led to the rivers of blood of all who dared to oppose their dictatorships, or that the telescope led to Neil Armstrong’s ‘One small step for man…’ quote in 1969.
we carry in our ‘in-the-image-of-God-nature’ the normality of transfiguration in the same way that gentle poppy plants explode their seed pods
My contention is that we human spirit-mud-pies encounter transfiguration in the mundane. We have an unquenchable ability to glorify even the most cruel and tragic events in our history. Somehow, we recreate suffering as poetry, art, sculpture, song, and literature…in ways that please us to the core. Money changes hands and queues form at art galleries, theatres, or the daubed walls of the next Banksy.
This is as disturbing as it is it is not.
What is disturbing is, surely, that disturbance is displaced by beauty or pleasure, even exultant feelings and emotions and love. This morning, for example, the sun streamed through a twisted array of light brown branches stripped clean of buds, flowers, and fruits by winter. Somehow, my mind saw the twisted branches illuminated so beautifully as the crown of thorns pressed into the scalp of Jesus by Pilate’s aggressive guards during his arrest and interrogation. Even though the sun and the branches transported me to those terrible moments of pain, the sight itself was unexpectedly beautiful, and its beauty displaced the abhorrent cruelty.
I feel this has something to do with transfiguration – at least from our very human end of the telescope.
A similar example – and one well-worn argument – is decorative silver, platinum, gold, or wooden crosses worn as a necklace. A crucifix, of course, is an instrument of terrible public shame and grotesque torture…and yet we seem able to transform its evil, barbaric reality into an attractive object sold by the million.
There are limits to this innate transfiguration. It would be repellent and shocking if we wore models of silver or gold gas ovens of the Third Reich as mere trinkets.
Somehow, we have ‘unseen’ the equivalent cruelty of crucifixes.
When the two jets slammed into the Twin Towers on September 11th 2001 at 8.46 and 9.03 killing 2753 persons in New York, I watched a tv screen, like millions of others as the tragedy unfolded. I was teaching at the time and word rapidly spread amongst the staff. At break, we gathered in the staff room. No one spoke a word. And yet, I couldn’t remove the blue sky, the sunshine and the Manhattan skyline. A beautiful morning. I have never spoken about this. Why? Shame? Yes, a little. Did these feelings of beauty diminish my sense of the horror? Not at all. But when I remember 9/11 I cannot separate the colours from the killing.
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Perhaps we can make sense of this as we return to the New Testament accounts of the Transfiguration in Matthew 17, Mark 9, and Luke 9.
Whereas Matthew and Mark’s account infer the nature of the conversation between Jesus, Moses and Elijah, Luke’s states it plainly:
‘Two men talked with Him, Moses and Elijah who appeared in glory and spoke of His departure which He was about to accomplish in Jerusalem.’
In Matthew and Mark, Jesus speaks to Peter, John, and James – the disciples he took with Him to the mountain:
‘The Son of Man is…about to suffer at their hands’
We are presented with a juxtaposition of glory and suffering. The whiter-than-white glory and the utter defeat of death itself in resurrection rammed up against the impending cruel death on a cross at the hands of the Romans. The New Testament does not permit us to separate the glory of the Transfiguration from the nails hammered through the wrists and feet of the Son of Man.
Anglicans recite these words every Sunday:
‘I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ…who for us men and our salvation came down from heaven…and was made man, and was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, He suffered and was buried and the third day he rose again…and ascended into heaven’
What God did in the Transfiguration of Jesus, Moses, and Elijah and the resurrection and ascension of Jesus none of us can ‘manifest’ by an act of our will. Nevertheless precisely because God did, it follows that there are at least some echoes of Transfiguration in our human make-up, created as we are in the image of God.
The New Testament does not permit us to separate the glory of the Transfiguration from the nails hammered through the wrists and feet of the Son of Man
So we should not be surprised to find suffering and glory closely related. Nor should we dismiss their co-existence by resorting to condemnation or guilt. That desire to convert a crucifix into jewellery is perhaps a mirror image of God’s willingness to transfigure Jesus prior to His suffering and the death He was destined to accomplish…His ‘departure’.
Lastly, perhaps another important lesson from all three accounts is to come to terms with the contrast between the Transfigured Jesus, Moses, and Elijah and the stumbling, awkward reactions of the other trio – Peter, John, and James.
This side of death, moments of transfiguration will always – it seems - take us by surprise.