Life Transfigured
A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Last Sunday After Epiphany, February 14, 2021 by Holly Huff (Postulant for Holy Orders).
In the gospel’s telling of the life of Jesus, the Transfiguration is a pivotal moment. It is a turning point, poised structurally as a hinge. The revelation of Christ in radiant glory on the mountain points backto baptism and points forward to crucifixion, both the beginning and end of Jesus’s earthly ministry. At Jesus’s baptism, the same voice was heard from heaven, saying “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” The Transfiguration comes just after Peter has first confessed Jesus as Messiah, and Jesus tells the disciples that he must suffer and die before he is raised. This mountain-top vision is a preview of the glory of the resurrected Christ and of the kingdom of God, and a definitive revelation of the true identity of Jesus as the Son of God. Elijah, the quintessential prophet, and Moses, the giver of the law, make a dramatic appearance, further witnessing to Jesus’ identity and mission. Together Moses and Elijah represent all the law and the prophets of Israel, which have pointed toward the hope and promise now fulfilled in Jesus. He is the perfect, complete lived expression of both law and prophets. Only love can fulfill the law, and he is love embodied. In Luke, it is immediately after the Transfiguration that Jesus sets his face toward Jerusalem, embarking on the final journey that moves inevitably, purposefully toward the crucifixion—and three days later, the empty tomb. So the Transfiguration is bookended with baptism on one end and the Passion and resurrection on the other.
On our church calendar, we are about to make the same turn Jesus makes after the Transfiguration, walking through to Holy Week. Lent begins with Ash Wednesday in just a few short days. The liturgical calendar of the church year is one way we enter into scripture, seeing our lives through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. As Christians we read scripture with the open-hearted faith that through these ancient words God speaks to us in our contemporary moment. It’s not trapped in a dusty past but the living Word. Year after year, we walk through this story again, and it is etched deeper into our hearts. We come to see that the arc of our own life always takes place within and in connection to the story of the one who is Life itself. So when we come to this the last Sunday after the Epiphany—the last Sunday before Lent—and we hear about the Transfiguration, we are listening not just to the remembrance of a past event that happened to other people in another place long ago. We listen trusting that Jesus is alive and that this story says something about your life. The Transfiguration gives us a glimpse of the glory to be revealed, in Christ and in each of us.
The Collect for today highlights this connection: “O God, who before the passion of your only-begotten Son revealed his glory upon the holy mountain: Grant to us that we, beholding by faith the light of his countenance, may be strengthened to bear our cross, and be changed into his likeness from glory to glory.” Witnessing Christ’s glory is strengthening and sustaining, this collect tells us. As we make this turn into Lent, it is beholding Christ’s glory that will strengthen us to bear our cross, to follow Jesus on the journey through the wilderness.
Perhaps this is somewhat surprising. After all, Peter, James and John, beholding Christ’s glory on the mountain, were afraid. “They did not know what to say for they were terrified.” Icons of the Transfiguration show the disciples collapsed at a distance below Jesus, Moses, and Elijah. They, along with their assumptions about self and world, are thrown to the ground. And fear of God’s awesome glory shows up throughout scripture. The Israelites were relieved to send Moses up the mountain in their place, saying “If I hear the voice of the Lord my God any more, or ever again see this great fire, I will die,” and they made Moses cover his shining face when he returned from speaking with the Lord. Today’s psalm says of God’s glory, “Before him there is a consuming flame, Round about him a raging storm.” Or as the letter to the Hebrews puts it, “Our God is a consuming fire.”
Beholding Christ’s glory on the mountain, the disciples are first afraid. Standing as we do on this threshold of Lent, I think many of us carry latent or sometimes blatant associations of Lent with terror. We associate repentance and discipline with fear and a shaming negation of the self before a god we can never please. As a teenager unfamiliar with liturgical Christianity, my first understanding of Lent was that this was the time when high school girls stopped eating lunch and started checking the scale every day. God got coopted by self-loathing. The spiritual discipline of fasting became an attempt to literally disappear. How convenient it would be—and how awful!—if God turned out to hate all the things about you that you hate about you!
But God hates nothing God has made. God has plans to do you good, and not to harm you. God loves us—exactly as we are. This is a rock solid, secure, stable love, without condition. You didn’t earn it, and you can’t lose it. This is the steadfast love we are restlessly searching for in every person and every thing until we find it in God. This steadfast love is like manna in the desert, daily bread, new each morning, sustaining and nourishing us for whatever lies ahead. To behold Christ’s glory is to recognize him as the image of God, to recognize him as Love embodied and given for us. Beholding Christ’s glory, recognizing him as the image of God, we come to trust God.
The invitation to a life of holiness does not mean the annihilation of the self! The dazzling, transfigured Jesus, the consuming flame calm at the center of a raging storm, is the same Jesus who said he brings us his peace. “Do not let your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.” God gently draws us in to the divine life, refines us and purifies us so we can stand to perceive that radiant glory.
Yes, our God is like a refiner’s fire, a consuming flame—but not all is consumed. Our pretensions and hurts, our traumatized conditioned fearful responses, our habits of lashing out and shutting down, yes, these are slowly but steadily washed away in that flame as the Holy Spirit does its work on us. Like precious metal our true essence is revealed. Spiritual disciplines are not meant to erase us or make us disappear but to slowly, steadily give us back to ourselves. We are refined in flame but not annihilated. The ashes are real, but so is eternal life. God who created the world, who said “Let light shine” also created each of us, called us into being, and called us Good. The essential core of your self—your own unique refraction of the face of Jesus Christ, the light shining in your heart from the beginning, that light remains and is purified and magnified through you. As Mary sings triumphantly, “My soul magnifies the Lord!” An iron left in the fire eventually takes on the burning quality of that flame, as long as it remains in the fire. Living water springs up in the soul that is connected to the gracious source of all. Rooted in the vine, the branches flourish.
There’s a great little story from the desert fathers demonstrating the purpose of spiritual practices and disciplines: “Abbot Lot came to Abbot Joseph and said: Father, according as I am able, I keep my little rule, and my little fast, my prayer, meditation and contemplative silence; and according as I am able I strive to cleanse my heart of thoughts: now what more should I do? The elder rose up in reply and stretched out his hands to heaven, and his fingers became like ten lamps of fire. He said: Why not be totally changed into fire?”
The purpose, the end of Christian life is to be transfigured ourselves. We are baptized into a death like his and raised to a life like his. Beholding Christ’s glory, trusting our loving God, we don’t just believe things, or do things, but we become something, become Someone. The face of Christ shines through our own, and we are freed to give our lives to others and to God as an offering in grateful response. “This is all the law and the prophets: to love the Lord your God with all your heart, might, mind, and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself.” Only love can fulfill the law.
So why not be totally changed into fire? Lord Jesus, “grant that we, beholding by faith the light of your countenance, may be strengthened to bear our cross, and be changed into your likeness from glory to glory.” Amen.