Sunday Next Before Lent

Sermon Preached by the Revd Anna

Transfiguration, Ivanka Demchuk

On 6 August 1945 the US air force dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. 100,000 people died; many more thousands suffered through radiation poisoning. It was a day that brought a dazzling light, brighter than any human eye could behold, and a cloud that overshadowed the people. In the Christian church August 6 is the Feast of the Transfiguration. The bombing of Hiroshima, and three days later, Nagasaki, is an anti-transfiguration: a festival of death, not life; a vision of hell rather than heaven; the failure of humanity rather than its glory.

Today we hear the story of the transfiguration as the terror of war looms over the world once more. We are faced again with two visions of glory: glory through the will to power and violent force, or glory through the way of Christ. It’s the same sort of choice the devil will tempt Jesus with, as we’ll hear in next week’s reading.

The story of the transfiguration comes at a hinge point in the narrative: when Jesus comes down the mountain Luke tells us that ‘he set his face to go to Jerusalem’ (9.52). Up on the mountaintop, the disciples behold the dazzling brightness of Christ in glory. They see Moses and Elijah talking with him, the fulfilment of the law and the prophets enacted before their eyes. The divine presence overshadows them, as it had come down upon Moses on another holy mountain. And the voice that had been heard at Jesus’ baptism speaks again: ‘this is my Son, my Chosen. Listen to him.’

Up there, on the mountain top, it begins to make sense. They’ve been trying, not very successfully, to work out who Jesus really is, and this vision helps them along: it lets them see the glory they expect a Messiah to have. The voice and the cloud and the light and the vision all give a framework within which they can understand who Jesus is based on all they have known of God’s revelation to his people in the past. Here they see the Son of God in his glory: a foretaste of the future revealed in their midst.

But back down the mountain, when Jesus’ face is set towards to Jerusalem, the disciples will forget. They’ll forget when the soldiers come to arrest him. They’ll forget when he’s condemned in a travesty of a trial, and when he’s scourged and paraded through town. They’ll forget when the soldiers mock him and spit on him and crown him with thorns. They’ll forget as the nails are hammered into his hands and feet. And they’ll forget because they can no longer see the glory and it doesn’t make sense. If Jesus is the Messiah he can’t suffer and die. If he suffers and dies he can’t be the Messiah. It’s only later, when they look back and remember how he shone with the same light that streams from the empty tomb that they begin to trace the glory not just to the mountaintop but through the teaching, the healings, the miracles, the cross – right into their own lives.

And it’s only then, when they begin to understand that this Messiah would undergo great suffering, and die, and on the third day rise again; that the beaten, bloodied, mocked and crucified body hanging on the cross is God – only then do they start to understand what’s been revealed to them on the holy mountain.

And that concerns not just who Jesus is, but who they are. Jesus is revealed as the Son of God, a God who will not leave us in the grip of sin and death but will subject himself to them in all their power so he can shatter it and set us free. The departure or exodus he will accomplish at Jerusalem – the subject of the conversation with Moses and Elijah – is exactly this liberation from the powers that oppose God and our life in him.

And so on the mountain the disciples are also shown who they can be. The Jesus who is revealed on the Mount of Transfiguration is fully human and fully divine. His radiance is what our humanity is made for, what it looks like when lived in union with God. We are made for glory, and through his death and resurrection Jesus brings us to the place where he is, with God. In him and through him we too are transfigured, as we are changed into his likeness.

But that doesn’t mean that, as Peter desires, we just pitch a tent and stay up the mountain. Being changed into Jesus’ likeness also means coming down the mountain, where a sick child needs healing, where the crowds are going to press in, where the road to Jerusalem awaits. I get Peter’s instinct – it’s been mine often enough when I’ve had some experience of God’s love or his presence. I want to bottle it, contain it, keep it so it doesn’t dissipate. I want to stay up the mountain because life is easier without the need and the crowds and the pain and the suffering. But – and this is an important but to people like me who want to take the spiritual life seriously – the test of our spiritual life is not how many or extensive our spiritual experiences are. The test of our spiritual life is whether it is making us more like Jesus.

So we follow Jesus up the mountain: we are made for glory, and on the mountain we see that glory in the face of Jesus Christ. We see who he is and who we are made to be. Humanity is shown in its full dignity and glory. And that vision, that encounter with God – through prayer and worship and adoration – changes us. It opens us to his light, as transfiguration starts to happen deep within us, as our hearts and minds and desires and imaginations and wills are formed after his. And it prepares us to see Christ’s glory not just on the mountaintop but on the cross; not just in his face as it shines with the divine radiance but as it is disfigured by pain and suffering.

Because in this life at least, we have to come down the mountain. But we come down, like Moses, with a shiny face because there we have met with God. We follow Jesus down the mountain because his work is not yet done. Transfiguration is a promise, a hope, a pledge of the future come to meet us in the present: Jesus shows us what humanity looks like when it is freed from the power of sin and death. His transfiguration is a first fruit – it tells us that transfiguration is possible for us, too. We can be changed as God heals and forgives and mends and restores and makes new in all the places in our lives where we are not yet like Christ, or where our humanity has been disfigured. We may think there are parts of us or situations in the world that are beyond repair. The transfiguration is God’s pledge that that’s not true.

And the more we are changed into Christ’s likeness, the more we learn to love as he loves. We respond to need with compassion not because he told us to but because our hearts have become more like his. We see divinity not as something to contain safely up a mountain, but as a person to follow into the pain and mess and suffering of the world holding out the promise that through him there is no person or situation that is untransfigurable. He has defeated death, and all the powers that oppose God’s desire for us. And on this Sunday, at this time, God promises that the peace makers will be blessed. That spears can be turned to pruning hooks. That his glory lies hidden in the human faces disfigured by war or protesting it. Amid all the voices and actions that would deny and destroy humanity, the voice we are bid to listen to tells a different story: it says that humanity is made for divinity. It says that God hides his glory in the faces of the suffering, among whom he is found. And it says ‘come, follow me.’