The Transfiguration of Our Lord Jesus Christ
St Peter’s Eastern Hill, July 12th, 2023
They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish in Jerusalem.
I would like to approach the subject of the Gospel with you today from slightly left of field. I would like to begin by speaking with you about the body of Jesus of Nazareth. I often find myself a little impatient with icons and paintings of Jesus. In them the image of him is usually adapted to the culture: whether it is the rosy-cheeked infant, or the pale and tortured figure that emerged from the centuries of plague in Europe; or the sleek, wavey hair of our Lord in Latin America. Such images offer something valuable, of course—they show all of humanity reflected in our Lord. But they don’t allow us to peer into the depths of history and make out his ‘own’ particular person.
Late last year I visited the site in Jerusalem traditionally identified as his empty tomb, in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Inside, typical of first century tombs, is a limestone burial shelf meant for the body. The thing that really struck me, when I squeezed in and knelt down beside the shelf, is how short and narrow it is. I’d been told before that people were shorter and smaller in the first century: but I had not seen it. That shelf was made for a body shorter than almost any of ours. It left me with a real sense of the physical meekness of Jesus. Nothing exceptional, I’m sure, compared to other people of his time. But all the same: it is quite something to imagine our Lord looking up at you. Just like it’s quite something to imagine his hands calloused, or his feet blistered from all his travelling, his face lined from squinting in harsh sun. Our Lord had a perfectly mortal body, a body entirely vulnerable to being weathered, even broken.
Now, to the subject of our feast day... The Transfiguration is the name we have given to the mysterious moment in the life of Christ when that vulnerable human body was transformed before the eyes of his first disciples. And he shone with a radiance which they could only conclude was the glory of God. The glory of God—that great phenomenon of Hebrew history and scriptures—the revelation of God’s radiance and power in the midst of the world—appeared in person. What’s more, not in the majesty of the man of war nor earthly king nor a beacon of affluence. In the body of the poor man that would one day lie on the shelf of the sepulchre.
According to the Gospels, the mystery of the transfiguration happened a few days after our Lord first predicted his execution. There is a connection here. He warned his disciples he was going to suffer, leaving them perplexed and profoundly disturbed, and then he drew three of them up a mountain to pray with him, and revealed this radiant glory. Michael Ramsay, a former Archbishop of Canterbury, makes a lot of this. He points out how in the testimony of Luke in particular the glory and the death are drawn together. You might have noticed it is said the figures of Moses and Elijah appeared “in glory” and were speaking with Christ of his “departure”. The word in Greek is “Exodus”, and there is little doubt that it is an allusion to his execution. Here are Moses and Elijah calling that horrifying prospect an exodus – that is, a passage from bondage to freedom, an act of liberation and redemption.
They can see it in that light, because of who it was who was entering into the suffering. The mystery of the transfiguration revealed that, as Jesus approached suffering and death, he was already in glory. Glorification was not a reward waiting for Christ on the far side of the horizon. It was something innate to his Person and his life in this world. In him, God was “reaching out” to take on the mortality and fragility of our existence. The glory of God was being ‘smuggled in’ to all the vulnerability and even the pain that lay ahead. And this, in order to redeem our existence. Redeem it from the pain, suffuse it with his own unquenchable Light.
This is how God works, too, in our lives. It is a bit of a cliché, but it’s true: faith in him doesn’t remove the obstacles or suffering in our lives. He doesn’t take them away. He takes them up. Indeed, God reaches out in order to take us up, as surely as he took Peter and John and James up that mountain. He takes us to himself and transfigures even the prospect of our deaths in light of his glory. Because now, we can see beyond them. So long as we continue to seek life and God and redemption, pain, death, failure, they all become part of our Exodus, our life’s journey from bondage to freedom.
I like to think we as the Church are a bit like the clothes that Christ was wearing. The clothes are not an intrinsic part of him, so they are not innately glorious. Yet you might have noticed that they, too, are changed. They also radiate with dazzling light. The Church is like those clothes.
Whether clean or dusty, elegant or tattered, is sort of beside the point. It is contact with the Body of our Lord that suffuses us with divine light. We enter into glory through his Body, and through making of our own lives a loving Sacrifice in the midst of our world. We might only be conscious of the glory for a moment in our whole lives, just as the glory of Christ was only made visible for a few moments. But it is always there. It is there in his loving Sacrifice. In perfectly innocuous forms, in Bread and Wine. Our Lord continues to smuggle his own radiance into our lives. It’s a bit like how sunlight entering into a plant enables it to grow: so the divine glory nourishes the fabric of our lives as a people; it has become part of our very being.
The wonderful thing about our faith is that it is in a God who is willing to “enter in” to every moment of our lives. Even in the ones of illness or frailty or even simply boredom, the glory of God only radiates the more brightly from our faces when they turn to him in love.
Mthr Kathryn