The 1st United
Transfiguration Sunday
Scripture
Hebrew Scriptures – 2 Kings 2: 1-12[1]
1Now when the LORD was about to take Elijah up
to heaven by a whirlwind, Elijah and Elisha were on their way from Gilgal. 2Elijah
said to Elisha, “Stay here; for the LORD has sent me as far as
4Elijah said to him, “Elisha, stay here; for
the LORD has sent me to
6Then Elijah said to him, “Stay here; for the
LORD has sent me to the
9When they had crossed, Elijah said to Elisha,
“Tell me what I may do for you, before I am taken from you.” Elisha said,
“Please let me inherit a double share of your spirit.” 10He
responded, “You have asked a hard thing; yet, if you see me as I am being taken
from you, it will be granted you; if not, it will not.” 11As they
continued walking and talking, a chariot of fire and horses of fire separated
the two of them, and Elijah ascended in a whirlwind into heaven. 12Elisha
kept watching and crying out, “Father, father! The chariots of
Gospel – Mark 9: 2-9[2]
9:2Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, 3and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. 4And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. 5Then Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” 6He did not know what to say, for they were terrified. 7Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” 8Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.
They
Saw No One…but Only Jesus.
The story of "The Transfiguration" is one of the
strangest that we read about in the reported events that surrounded the life of
Jesus. What are we twenty-first-century
Christians supposed to make of an image of Jesus in glistening garments,
conversing with the mythic figures of Elijah and Moses? The whole picture stretches credibility. To accept it uncritically as fact is only to
undermine the believability of the whole gospel narrative.
But notice the words that I've already brought into
play: "story,"
"image," "mythic," "picture." I'm using those words intentionally to suggest
a reality far beyond our imaginations that points toward a truth more vivid
than fact – toward a transfiguration of truth itself. I'm suggesting that truth isn't just propositional
but personal – in fact, a person: this
man, Jesus of Nazareth.
Our three "synoptic"[3]
gospels, which do give us a kind of synopsis of the birth, life, ministry and
death and resurrection of the Christ, do so not as a matter of biographical art
but in order to inspire faith in that Jesus.
Especially here in Mark's version, this transfiguration account functions
as a kind of literary fulcrum for the whole story. Those words from the overshadowing cloud, for
instance, "This is my Son, the beloved," where have we heard that
before? It's an echo, of course, of
Jesus' baptism "in the wilderness" where there was also a voice that
said, "You are my son, the beloved."[4] But now their addressed to Jesus' followers,
not just to Jesus. The
"secret" of Jesus' election by God is now "out of the closet"
and in the faith of his followers, the church.
Have you ever asked yourself, "What makes it possible
for a life to be transformed – 'transfigured'?" Love.
Forgiveness. Beauty. The presence of the sacred. God.
So we always need to ask, what does that look like?
Today's scripture readings offer a wide range of divine
entrances, exits, and accessories. At
various points Elijah and Moses make cameo appearances, a flaming chariot
streaks across the stage, a cloud descends out of the rigging, an admonition to
"keep silent" causes us to listen all the more carefully, and we hear
that we ourselves – audience and actors – are bathed in "the light of the
knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ."[5]
In all of this the realm of the Spirit – i.e., "the glory of God" – is
manifested in alternately shocking and subtle ways. But it happens the same way in our own lives,
doesn't it? – in the variation between dazzling sunsets, soft brush strokes,
crashing thunder and devastating moments of silence. How sensitive are you and I to the look and
feel of this transcendent and yet immanent presence? We might do pretty well identifying this
sacred presence on the peaks and in the pits, but what does God look like on
the plain or on the slopes to and from those places?
It's very important, then, to watch for this kind of transformation
in people, especially in those closest to us.
They can change and it zips right past our attention. The person can be a spouse or partner, a
child or parent, a classmate or coworker – we're so used to seeing them one way
that we fail to see it when they've started being another way. That great Celtic poet William Butler Yeats
describes this in his poem, "Easter 1916." When the man changed, so did Yeats' way of
seeing him:
This
other man I had dreamed
A
drunken, vainglorious lout.
He
had done most bitter wrong
To
some who are near my heart,
Yet
I number him in the song;
He,
too, has resigned his part
In
the casual comedy;
He,
too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed
utterly;
A
terrible beauty is born.[6]
We would be wise to look for signs of the sacred – for God
– in our journeying as well as in our departures and arrivals, but in order to
do that we've got to be able to find the blessing in this process unfolding in
our own lives. Too often in our
arrogance as Christians we exalt the notion that we have "arrived,"
but then find that we have to work so hard just to keep ourselves from losing
ground. The difference, finally, between
Jesus' way of looking at the world and the way that his disciples did – wanting
to pitch a tent and make a museum for Jesus, Moses and Elijah – is a lot like
the contrasting perceptions given by another poet of the British Isles, Dylan
Thomas:
Being
but men, we walked into the trees
Afraid,
letting our syllables be soft
For
fear of waking the rooks
For
fear of coming
Noiselessly
into a world of wings and cries
If
we were children we might climb
Catch
the rooks sleeping and break no twig,
And,
after the soft ascent,
Thrust
out our heads above the branches
To
wonder at the unfailing stars.
….
That,
then, is loveliness, we said,
Children
in wonder watching the stars
Is
the aim and the end.
Being
but men, we walked into the trees.[7]
That great bishop of the ancient church, Irenaeus of Lyons,
was once heard to exclaim, "The glory of God is a human being fully
alive!" I understand that. We need to be reminded that our human spirit
doesn't automatically unfold with time, much like our body grew in our mother's
womb. The kind of "becoming"
that we're talking about this morning involves at least as much creative play
as it does work – that is, if our transformation is to be aligned with the
things of creation and not of destruction.
So, in what context do our emotional and spiritual
transformations happen? They're hemmed
in by crucifixion experiences in the same way as our story in the gospel will
be. Our suffering and very humanity –
our experiences of failure, confusion, and rejection – profoundly imprint
us. Who we are, who we would become,
includes who we are not. As Paul put it,
"For it is the God who said, 'Let light shine out of darkness,' who has
shone in our hearts"[8] as
well. Because of that we're able to see
the world around us differently: it
becomes a transfigured world. Clay pots
will of course remain clay pots, but now we're able to see the treasure that
they carry – a life, a light, that we've seen in one Jesus of Nazareth.[9] The environment around us might bear terrible
scars from human abuse, but we're still able to see signs of sacred beauty – even
in wounded nature. As Wendell Berry writes
at the end of his poem "Sabbaths: 1985 III":
The
dark
Again
has prayed the light to come
Down
into it….
So
what was still…wakes up,
…names
Itself
by hunger and by kind,
Walks,
swims, flies, cries, speaks or sings.
We
are all praising, praying to
The
light we are, but cannot know.[10]
So this fantastic and oddly anachronistic vision of Jesus
on a mountain in splendid array and among impressive company, also calls us to
remember the pain, the treachery, the loss and death that all three of these
figures faced. All of that too is to be
transformed. It's how the future shapes
the present out of the past, which is always a compound of happenings, hope,
and remembrance. It's all about how
promise and disillusionment, celebration and suffering, joy and pain,
forgiveness and guilt, renewal and failure, all transfigure the human condition
and are transfigured from within it.[11]
It's not just in the Bible, our own lives tell us that the
realm of the sacred – God – often appears in empty and isolated places. And yet our experience also tells us that
we're all "on the way" – neither hiding with Elijah in a cave or
soaring into the heavens with him in a chariot, nor standing on top of mountains with Moses and Jesus. The reality is that we know we're incomplete,
and so we long to be made whole. We hope
that in seeing "the glory of God" in great and even small glimpses,
our lives, too, will be transformed.
* * *
[1] Our readings for today direct our attention to people who not only witness but also come to participate in the preeminence of their mentors. The question about just what exactly that means is important because, like Elisha and those who were said to have witnessed the "transfiguration" of Jesus, we too have been changed forever by our powerful encounter with the Holy Spirit.
This reading
from 2nd Kings gives us the opportunity, then, to reflect on the
relationship between disciple and teacher in terms of the relationship that we
see represented between Elisha and Elijah.
In keeping with the prophetic tradition,
[2] That
tradition – of Elijah's fiery elevation into the heavens – led to the belief
among the people that Elijah himself would appear again, as the prophet Malachi
puts it, "before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes"
(Malachi 4: 5). Both Palestinian Jews
and early Christians, then, looked for his appearance as a sign of the end of
the world (cf. Mark
[3] This adjective, meaning "to be seen together," is a way of describing the accounts of Mark, Matthew and Luke (vs. the Gospel According to John) because of their marked similarities.
[4] Mark
[5] From
that portion of the lectionary not read today:
2 Corinthians 4: 6c.
[6] W. B.
Yeats, Selected Poems and Plays (New
York: Collier Books, 1962), pp. 85-85.
[7] Daniel
Jones, ed., The Poems of Dylan Thomas
(New York: New Directions Publishing Co., 1952), p. 31.
[8] Again,
from Paul's second letter to the church at
[9] In this
allusion to "clay pots," of course, I am recalling the pot and potter
imagery of Isaiah 64: 8 – but not the father-God image there, which is
portrayed as far too angry, even vengeful as far as I'm concerned. I think, instead, of the gentle imagery in
the hymn "Have Thine
[10] In Upholding Mystery: An Anthology of
Contemporary Christian Poetry, ed. by David Impastato (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1997), p. 133.
[11] This
based on the musing of Paul Lehmann in The
Transfiguration of Politics (New York: Harper & Row, Pub., 1975), p. 7.