Exodus 34:29-35; Psalm 99; 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2; Luke 9:28-36, (37-43)
Preached by Jane Barter Moulaison, February 18, 2007
Every Saturday afternoon kids and I scramble to find the Magic Eye in the weekend Free Press comics. How many of you look at the Magic Eye? How many of you can figure it out fairly quickly?I like looking at it, because I have just recently learned how to do it. I used to be like Elaine Bennis’ boss on Seinfeld, agonizing for hours too see what everyone else did.“Look through the picture,” Mr. Pitt. For years, the fun of Magic Eye was lost on me. But once I got the hang of it, I was able to find the hidden picture immediately.
This morning, I would like to think of the gospel reading, and in particular Peter’s experience, as a bit like that experience of seeing things clearly, and more than seeing something new, Peter was directed to a dimension of reality that he did not think possible. For, although Peter was able to see Jesus, he was not able until the transfiguration to see the full depth of his significance for himself, for the world, for time, until, Christ was transfigured, until Jesus his glory fully. And once this is done, nothing for Peter, or for us, for that matter, could ever look the same. Nothing could be surveyed as merely two dimensional, as flat, as without a greater, fuller meaning, because Peter, in a way like me, has been trained in the gift of seeing Christ as the centre and focal point for all things.
Now obviously, my analogy breaks down in several places. Knowing Jesus is not a trick we cajole our eyes into performing through simply looking at things the right way. But more than this, my analogy breaks down too when one considers that the focus of the transfiguration story is not chiefly Peter, James or John, the onlookers. Rather it is Christ himself who is the centre of dramatic revelation. The focal point is him and what occurs to him.
The particular significance of Jesus as displayed in this morning’s readings can be understood in light of both “mountaintop” readings. The story from Exodus is an important background to the revelation that occurs in the transfiguration narrative. In this reading, we are drawn into the moment after the Israelites’ first transgression against the law given to Moses. Moses had broken the tablets containing the ten commandments, in anguish over the Israelites idolatry of the golden calf. God was angry that the people had broken the commandment against creating idols, but nevertheless forgives his people, and tells Moses to return to the mountain to receive a replacement set of tablets. When Moses goes back down to his people, his face was glowing, because he had just encountered God’s glory. Moses’ radiance was so great, it was difficult for the Israelites to look at him, and so Moses places a veil upon his face.
Why does Moses veil his face? Why must he shield this residue of radiance from his people? Why can they not look directly at him?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great German theologian, speaks of the veil of shame that we all wear as a result of our transgressions. Just after the fall in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve clothe themselves because they are ashamed, the ancient Israelites find that the holiness of God is so great that it threatens to consume them in their impoverished state. This wound of shame is something that we all have experienced from time to time. It is what keeps us from being fully vulnerable to the other. It’s that part of us that becomes self-protective, suspicious, that erects boundaries and walls that shield us from others.
For the Israelites, as perhaps for us, their transgressions weigh heavily on their conscience, and God’s graciousness, the return of the Law, was more than they could take. So the Israelites could behold God’s glory, but only through a veil. Think about this as we consider the view from the perspective of the disciples, and of Jesus’ followers.
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In the second mountaintop story, Peter and James and John accompany Jesus to pray. And as the disciples prayed alongside Christ, suddenly, Christ is transfigured. His clothes become dazzling white, and Moses and Elijah, the Law Giver and the Prophet, are at his side. The fullness of time hangs heavy like fruit upon the tree and Jesus appears at the centre, revealed here as the fulfillment of the great traditions of Israel. Whatever the disciples thought they knew about their own faith and about God, was entirely reoriented as Christ appears as the world’s centre.
Rowan Williams, commenting on the transfiguration, puts it this way:
The whole history of God’s dealings with his people is involved in this: Moses and Elijah are also driven toward us by the same energy. But Jesus alone stands in the very heart of it; it flows through him and in him and from him. It is the light that comes from him and that is reflected on the robes of his companions.And the disciples are stunned. They do not know what to do—they do not sleep, although they are tired, but they also cannot run away. They behold the glory of God, through Moses, through Elijah, and consummately, through Christ, and they are not consumed, but remain awake. Peter, like Moses, would construct a veil of sorts, by pitching a tent, wants to hold on to this special time; he wants to honour these most incredible guests. Anything, so that he might contain this experience, and anything so that he might flee it; and no sooner does he utter his disoriented speech, then God swallows them in a great cloud, speaks to them, commands them to listen to Christ. When they return to their ordinary view, of one another and of Christ, they find they do not need a veil on their faces, although the have touched God’s glory directly. In Christ, they have heard and they have seen God , yet and they continue to live. The veil between them and God has been lifted, and from through him, their past, present and future are given their proper orientation.
They lived hundreds of years before him, but what makes them radiant, what makes them agents of God, is the light coming from Jesus. …
And so what do they do? Jesus and his disciples return to their ministry. The experience of the mountaintop has not changed their pattern of their lives together, but it changes the ways in which they understood the pattern. No longer can they see their past, their present with Jesus, or the future that leads them ever closer to Jerusalem in the same way, as a simple and straightforward progression. The shame, the fear of vulnerability, the need to protect themselves, all those can recede into the background, for Christ’s true nature has leapt out for them, and thus the world can never be the same again.
The gospel of Luke is often called the gospel of the poor or the gospel of women, the latter being some of the poorest and most marginalized of Jesus time, and so it is no surprise that Jesus and his disciples do not linger at the foot of the mountain, but immediately move into service and healing. Jesus’ transfiguration does not carry the disciples away from their work and witness, but it refers them back to the very things that the did before, but the things they did before can never have the same significance for them.
***
So what does this story from long ago mean for us? We are told, in effect that our commonplace assumptions about reality and about time are not quite accurate. We live our lives thinking of time as an uninterrupted sequence of events, some more interesting than others to be sure, but generally as a line of progression, where we grow incrementally toward maturity. The transfiguration teaches us to look at life and our time very differently. The centre of our time, our existence is not what we think it is. The two-dimensionality of our existence, in which we are constrained by our sense of boundary, of convention, of propriety, all of those are reoriented in light of Christ’s coming. We can no longer say that Jesus was a man who lived two thousand years ago, but rather that, according to scripture, Jesus is the one who is the centre of all time, and whose presence with us still continues to redeem our ordinary time. What we do as we participate in the eucharist together, as we hear the scriptures, as we care for those who are in distress, all those things are best understood as shot through with the glory of Christ. It is for this reason we can never say with ultimate certainty that the meanings of our lives are transparent to us. It is for this reason, we can never pretend that we can fully apprehend the mission of our church, for Christ has entered into our midst, and works through the ordinary stuff of our lives to transfigure us. As Williams writes:
We thus begin to understand how our lives, like those of Moses and Elijah, may have meanings we can’t know in this present moment: the real depth and significance of what we say or do know won’t appear until more of the light of Christ has been seen. And so what we may think is crucially important may not be so; what we think insignificant may be what really changes us for good or evil. Christ’s light alone will make the final pattern coherent, for each one of as for all human history. And that light shines on the far side of the world’s limits…
Perhaps one of the difficulties of our present situation in the church is that we have lost the knack of looking at our lives as that which is only understood through the lens of Jesus Christ. We have lost the confidence that Christ’s light still shines forth, illuminating, us even here and even now. And so we place veils over our eyes, or we pitch tents in order to shield ourselves from the great mission that we have been given, or perhaps we are afraid, because we know that to look upon Christ as the centre of our lives will involve great risk, great vulnerability, that it will lead to the cross. Or perhaps we feel ourselves to be unworthy of a God who is willing to show himself to us, because we think that we will dissolve in our sinfulness and in our shame before him. I was once with a woman as she was dying, and she was thinking about her own transgressions. She had been an alcoholic all her life, and could not face the fact that she would have no more time to try to repair the damage she had done to her family. And she kept saying, “I just can’t get clean; I need to feel clean.” I prayed for her and with her, but I do not know if she ever received and accepted the grace and peace that God offered her. I pray she did. Christ’s transfiguration means that there is no place so dark, there is no limit to the light which radiates from him. The ancient Israelites, no sooner than receiving the Law, break it. And yet God radiates upon them through Moses and the Law he restores. The boy with a demon, who once was thrown to the ground in his pain, is granted peace. The once-terrified disciples become healers. And as for us, there is not one of us for whom the possibilities of our lives are closed. Our lives take on new meaning and new possibility because Christ is at work in its very centre. Let us keep in mind this possibility and this promise as we journey in the weeks ahead toward Christ’s cross.
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