02/25/01 Transfiguration 01/05

"It is the same God that said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ who has shone in our minds to radiate the light of the knowledge of God’s glory, the glory on the face of Christ."

2 Corinthians 4:6

"As he prayed, the aspect of his face was changed and his clothing became brilliant as lightning."

Luke 9: 29

Today is the festival of the Transfiguration of Christ. Our gospel lesson tells us that he flashed like lightning before his disciples, Peter, James and John. On recent Sundays we have meditated on the teaching of Jesus, "Blessed are the poor," "Love your Enemies." Today we focus again, as we do in all the great Christian festivals, on Jesus himself, prompted by an event in his life, by something he did rather than by something he said. We return from the teaching to the teacher, and more particularly to the doer of the work of our salvation. In this way our Christian calendar keeps us concentrated on the center of our faith, which is the person of Jesus himself rather than his moral or theological teaching. Not that the teaching is unimportant, but we are never allowed to forget that the teaching only has authority because of who the teacher is, and that his identity demands not only obedience to his teaching but also and primarily adherence to his person, love, loyalty, and faithfulness. Christian faith is to love Jesus with all our heart, soul, strength and mind, and to be in as close a personal relationship with him as our faith can achieve.

The Transfiguration is one of the events, like the Resurrection, that warrant this absolute surrender of my self to Jesus himself, and the absolute obedience to his teaching that his authority deserves. The two texts I have quoted above indicate Jesus’ absolute authority over us. The light on his face is the same light that God called into being with his first creative word, "Let there be light." The light on Jesus’ face repeats the first and most essential step in the creation of the universe, and so Jesus is the truth of the creation. Jesus is the meaning of it all in the sense that when we identify with him in faith, hope and love, we are one with the deep rhythm of the universe, in tune with all things rather than at odds with them. We are in touch with the creativity of the creator.

There is an old gospel hymn of which I know only fragments, and one of those fragments goes, "Turn your eyes upon Jesus,/ Look full in his wondrous face,/ and the things of earth will grow strangely dim,/ in the light of his glory and grace." I don’t remember whether the hymn has our texts deliberately in mind, but they are marvelously apt. By the light of his glory and grace, which streams from his wondrous face, we see the truth of ourselves and of our world, and can begin to align ourselves with truth, to live truly and authentically. To look into the face of Jesus is the true desire of every Christian and the goal of every human life. Our creation is our coming from the darkness of the womb into the light of this world, and our recreation, also known as our resurrection, is our going from the dim light of this world into the perfect light of Christ’s eternal presence. To look into the face of Christ is the purpose and goal of human life, and when our faith achieves it we are aligned with the grain of the universe, in touch with the power of creation. This light of Christ is the "light perpetual" that shines on the sanctified dead, the "true light that enlightens all people" (John 1:9). As John’s gospel says, "All that came to be had life in him and that life was the light of men, a light that shines in the dark, a light that the darkness could not overpower" (1:4). This light is life; to see it is to live, to be blind to it is futility and emptiness.

All of this and more is contained in the message of the Transfiguration of Jesus, and that is why all the law and the prophets are fulfilled in him. Moses and Elijah appear with the praying Jesus and the voice from heaven transfers the authority of law and prophecy from them to Jesus. This means that if by faith and the obedience of faith we attach ourselves to Jesus we fulfill all the will of God expressed in the revelation of the old covenant.

But there is more; the Transfiguration of Jesus affects not only the minds of the disciples but the body and the clothing of Jesus. This light is not only a subjective experience of the disciples but also an event in the person of Jesus. His flesh and clothing are transformed so as to shine with light and in this way the Spirit of God impinges on flesh and fabric not just on imagination and ideas. The event and the account of the Transfiguration teach unequivocally that the Spirit of God is not alien to matter nor vice versa, and that the work of God in our lives affects body and soul.

I know that this is hard for us to believe, that we would prefer to stay in the realm of the ethical, to marvel at the love and courage of someone like Emily Hobhouse, and to be inspired by the story of the Gulag survivor Shurkin, as told by Martin Booth, (to recall our two last sermons), but the supernatural foundation of such ethics is the creative power of transformation as demonstrated by Jesus Christ in his Transfiguration. We cannot sustain selfless ethics without the divine grace, which suffuses and transforms all things, and supports and transforms us so that we are enabled to sustain a more than natural moral commitment. To do the truth we must be integrated into the truth, by faith in the Jesus the incarnate truth.

Now some people think that the divine is literally light and that to see the aura of light around the faces of the saints is to see the divine himself, but that is a mistake. The self-revelation of God in this world is not the abstract and impersonal light, but the concrete and personal Jesus Christ. The shining of his person is a witness and a sign that he is indeed the revealer and the revelation, and that his flesh is the very substance of the divine, accommodated to the limitations of this world. God is not light as such rather light is a sign of the divine presence. The saints have an aura of light around them; Jesus is entirely transformed by the light that shines through him. Light is a sign of the divine presence not the presence itself; the person of Jesus himself is the divine presence. God is present as a person not as a phenomenon of physics.

This transfiguration of Christ’s flesh by the divine presence means that we must expect the Spirit to affect matter, that we can pray for physical healing, that there is a significant relation between our spiritual and our physical states, that transfiguration is possible for the whole person, soul, mind and body. So we find ourselves in the realm of the miraculous, and many of us feel uncomfortable there, because we want our religion to stay within the bounds of reason alone, (to quote a title by the philosopher Immanuel Kant), concerned not with miracle but with morals, with ideas rather than visions. But the fact of the transfiguration of Jesus demands that we expect the divine to work not only via ideas, metaphors, and morals, but also through matter.

So we are in the realm of the miraculous and we look for the miraculous in the physical part of life as well as the mental; indeed, it is not wise to separate the physical and the mental but to view both as aspects of each other. Jesus’ whole physical being was transfigured by light. The divine presence in him worked this transfiguration. The divine presence in us works similar changes, and so we pray for physical healing, and many prayers are answered. After all, as we have seen, that light is the same creative power as began the creation and where it is present, there we are aligned with the creative force in the universe, aligned along the grain of things, in touch with the divine power to heal and to create.

Jesus Christ is the light of the world and through faith in him and prayer centered on him we walk in that light, which not only keeps us from stumbling but also heals and recreates because it is the light that first shone in the darkness and began the creation of the world. Let us enter that light by faith and prayer, and there expect healing and recreation. There is so much more that Jesus wants to give us than we are willing to receive. He wants to take us up a mountain and show us who he is, and so put us in touch with the simple, majestic power of the creator, the God who said, "Let there be light," who will also shine in us.

Amen