St. James Santee Episcopal Church, 26 Feb 2017. Christopher Greenwell, Ph.D
Ex 24:12-18; Psalm 99; 2 Peter
1:16-21; Matt 17:1-9.
My vocation requires me to talk of
Athens more often than Jerusalem, so to
speak, so such an occasion can be liberating, permitting me to speak
plainly without academic neutrality. Of course, today’s readings convey the
Transfiguration, a Latinized approximation of the Greek word we use in more
secular circumstances: metamorphosis. Both terms apply to our Biblical readings
today, but I cribbed Ovid to create the opening prayer. That may serve as a
reminder that Christianity is not the only tradition to speak of a
transfiguration which renders the central character radiant and visibly divine.
The great Hindu epic foreshadows divine change in the form of a glistening god;
Siddhartha’s face, too, shines with enlightenment and divinity. Indeed, many
religious traditions possess something akin to this idea.
Judaism may have a foundational
claim. Moses would descend - twice - with the Law, glowing from standing in the
proximity of a nuclear God, physically changed by the experience, a further
sign of his invested power. Whatever the Biblical imagery, Moses descended from
the mountain transfigured, and the sign of that metamorphosis was a physical
radiance, one of objective blessing, undeniable to all who bore witness. Whether a white-bearded Charleston Heston or
Michelangelo’s Horned Moses, Western Art has sought to immortalize this visual
change - to render belief secondary to the fact.
Yet it is Christianity which has
appropriated the term Transfiguration as a category, codified as a major moment
in the liturgical calendar. Perhaps nowhere in the New Testament does a
believer find a more direct, intentional connection with the Jewish foundations
- well, maybe the dry genealogies by which some Gospels open, but few read
them. In Matthew, we find Christ being identified before the three original
disciples, perhaps Peter mirrors the priestly function of Moses’s Joshua.
Elijah is there, too, likely because the disciples, who knew Jesus best, could
not recognize Jesus as the Christ, often confusing him with the Prophet some
900 years prior. Moses’ presence in the vision establishes the foundation of
the received covenantal Law of the Jews, the Torah; Elijah, in addition to
underscoring that Jesus was something altogether different, represents the
Prophetic tradition. Both represent the two coherent divisions of the Hebrew
Bible. Origen interpreted the gathering in just such a fashion as early as the
third century. In this manner, Jesus, as the unique Christ, emerges distinct,
self-evident. Even Peter needed reorientation - he understood the moment of
Jewish culmination in the person who had ‘fished’ him; he would not yet seem to
have recognized the Messiah- capital ‘M’. It was a revelatory
moment, punctuated by a divine Voice, but an epiphany which Jesus commanded to
remain secret.
At Christ’s Baptism, we may assume
the same divine Voice. “You are my Beloved, with whom I am well pleased”. Jesus
hears this and enters into his forty day desert
duel with Satan. That same Voice
proclaims at the Transfiguration, “This is my Beloved, listen to him”. But when Peter, James, and
John can be sufficiently comforted finally to look up from hiding their faces
in terror, only Jesus remains. For the Transfiguration, the mountain is
shrouded in cloud. For the Baptism, the sky is torn apart. That Greek word -
skizomenous - will appear once again: when Jesus dies upon the cross at the
Crucifixion, the sky again will be rent. Two identities. At the Baptism, Jesus’
human identity comprehends its divinity. At the Transfiguration, it is not the
Christ who is changed, but the perception of those closest to Him.
Jesus would be the culmination of a
greater tradition of God’s unveiling of Itself, the crescendo of the divine
revelatory order before the designed chaos of the Crucifixion. Nativity. Baptism.
Transfiguration. Crucifixion. Resurrection. Ascension. Perhaps those six stages
correspond to the six days of Moses’ sojourn on Mt. Sinai before the Law was
given on the seventh, enshrouded in God’s shadow; it might parallel the six
days Elijah awaited the rain clouds before the horizon darkened on the seventh;
Christ’s own journey towards Transfiguration culminated, too, after six days.
Six days of Creation, upon the Biblical template. The magical six of so many of
the ancients - the only number whose sum is identical with its product; the
creative hexagon of the Star of David, two triangles superimposed, one upon
another. *(explain) If six is the number of creative preparation - Nativity,
Baptism, Transfiguration, Crucifixion, Resurrection, Ascension - then Salvation
must be the culminating seven.
Peter - the great chosen rock, Pope
#1, traitor, bodyguard, confidant, martyr - Peter can begin to bring this
theological heavy-lifting - a necessary meditation - to more pragmatic use. He
reminds us that salvation is not of our doing. It is a gift bestowed. Augustine
would echo the idea with his doctrine of grace alone. What can the story of
Transfiguration mean for us, then, beyond affirmation of the unique divinity
that is the Christ? If Jesus served as the paradigm for what humans were meant
to become, where are we in our own “six day” peregrination? The Gospel of John
assures us that Jesus was with God from the beginning, but the human hands
which transcribed the divine stories are bound by fallibility and idiom - we
are not Jesus, even as given in the semantically compromised Scriptural
portrait.
So what can it mean to be like
Jesus? Should we aspire to be transfigured? A butterfly was never anything but -
except when it was a larva - and then a pupa. Is the woman you are today the
girl you once were? Remember your youth, young man, when the greatest concern
of the day was returning home with holes in your jeans - and the consequences
that would bring. Our tradition teaches that the newborn baby is somehow flawed, an accessory to an original
sin committed in an Eden we cannot locate with GPS. Change cannot be described
neutrally, matter-of-factly. Human transformation must be
to move not only towards
God but also away from our
own nature. Perhaps it should be stated
another way: we should gravitate towards God by moving towards our truer
nature. Who is chronicling this metamorphosis?
A rite of passage is a communal
event. Some event occurs in life which
punctuates the ‘you’; a before and after moment by which we, the
individual and the collective, are judged as ‘changed’. Apparently, simply
knowing who you are proves insufficient, even for Jesus. What would the
sacrifice of Christ be - from His condescension into human form to the atrocity
of the crucifixion - without an audience informed of its significance? Might
not God have forgiven Creation from afar, a benevolent, but mysterious, patron?
Ostensibly, that response is ‘no’. Timing must matter. Witnesses are required.
How else could justification be understood? The theology gets sticky, and the
Early Church could be bogged down by such discussions: was there a time when
Jesus was not the Christ? did He evolve to become the Son of God, identified
only at Baptism? if fully aware of Himself and his Divine Purpose, why does the
Voice address Him only to address his Disciples later during the
Transfiguration?
It is no simpler for us, today. What
is becoming for a human? for a Christian human? Had I shown up glowing today,
your immediate thought may turn to ‘how do I get that app for my smartphone’ or
‘I thought he said he was from Charleston, not near the Robinson plant’. In my
admittedly limited experience, glowing people are more suspect than sanctified.
If we are not to be conformed to this world, how might we be transfigured in
it? Tricky.
There is no snapshot of you. From
cradle to casket, you are you. Some of that portrait lies beyond your control -
tall or short can be comparatively measured, but what is the metric for beauty?
Think yourself clever? Someone is smarter. Do the people at Title Max car title
loans know you by name? Would you trade the misfortune of your bank account for
that of a street vendor in Somalia? Let’s update our Facebook status. Some of
us become heavier - if you are lucky enough to reside in a nation where the
Center for Disease Control cites obesity as one of the principal health
concerns. We move through the stages of
our lives, growing older. Society paces the moments of relative import: your
first dance, your first kiss, reach 16 and drive - 18 and vote, graduation,
divorce, death of a parent, birth of a child, audit. We must earn some of our
Faith’s recognition - baptism - but somethings happen without our full
comprehension - christening. To move from stage to stage, measured by years or
salary or marital status, is not to live. Time is a ruler, and lives
‘unexamined’, those of ‘quiet desperation’, do not meter the moments in a
transformative fashion. But what defines you at any point on this timeline?
Though the Voice first addressed
Jesus directly in the Jordan, it came from Christ Himself - as if from a Sacred
Ventriloquist - at the Transfiguration. What had changed? Can Jesus ‘grow’ into Himself? Was
the boy astounding the Rabbis in the Temple not
the man standing before Pilate? It is a quandary relevant to our own
existence. Do we accumulate experiences like vocabulary words from diapers…
well, to diapers… hoping to hear the Voice? Would that divine Announcement be a
press-release, a heavenly endorsement fortifying our self-worth as well as
validating our existence to our fellow humans? Does our election become
self-evident, an aura readily visible? Or perhaps Elijah’s ‘still, small Voice’
might call to us - should we be able to distinguish it in our daily passage
from small screen to smaller screen to larger screen to the television screen.
Whether you understand Life to be a
culmination of well-intentioned events, guided by Peter’s outward morality, or
whether you hope to strip away the superfluousness from each living moment,
unveiling that potential, fully-realized
human trying to respire beneath the ‘spirit’s mask’, it is worth
remembering that this is no competition. Salvation may not lie within our
power, but the God that accords it has no quota. Christ’s uniqueness lies not
in his Transfiguration - that has occurred before - nor does His assumption to
Heaven set him apart with complete exclusivity. However, upon being
Transfigured, the stuttering Moses could be wrathful with the apostates.
Elijah, unmerciful to those who defied the One True God, waited in vain for a
grand sign, finally finding God
modestly, without fanfare. Christ, however, upon becoming known, with the
heavens sundered as he was consecrated, as he was recognized, as he was
crucified, gave himself to others with empathy and forgiveness. We can attempt
to emulate those outward signs.
Perhaps being is becoming. There is
no anniversary date by which we can measure the passage of our lives, nor
should we passively await an epiphany that is not ours to conjure. Thomas
Merton once prayed along these lines: ‘O God, let me be employed for You, or
let me be set aside by You’. Our power is limited. Yet we may embrace the
metamorphosis, emerging - or unveiling - in the trust and hope that the Divine
Audience will vivify our persons with the brightness which is the inclusion of
all known colors. We were anointed to witness, charged with the task of
learning our evolving place; we may hope to mount onto the scene and into the
spotlight. Until then, we shine as we might, permitting others to see the God
of torn space-time and of whispered revelation in us, out of gratitude for the
life we are given. Change will come, and we can but control our perception of
it: that change must be a metamorphosis towards a comprehension of God… or back
to It. That bestowed perspective remains ours to embrace.
