The Transfiguration of Our Lord Jesus Christ - 6th August 2024
At this feast of the Transfiguration of Our Lord Jesus Christ we celebrate the revelation of Jesus’ glory to three of his disciples. God’s infinity became visible in human form. Moses and Elijah were seen with Jesus, Moses who met with God in the drama of cloud and fire on Mount Sinai and Elijah for whom God was not in the storm and the fire but in a sound of sheer silence. Now in the ordinariness of a human being God is made manifest, the God who created all things is focussed down into the man Jesus.
I keep returning to what Fr John Behr was saying last year, the disciples didn’t ‘get’ it, and few people who saw Jesus saw what was really going on. We like to think ‘if only I could have met with the earthly Jesus then all would be made clear’. ‘If only I could have been on the mountain and seen Jesus transfigured I would have no doubts.’ Yet it was hard for the disciples to understand what Jesus was about and it is hard for us too. This story of the transfiguration has been passed on to us, and although we were not there we are invited in to ponder this revelation of God’s glory in human form.
In our hymn for this feast we sing:
In his prayer light and glory break forth,
Light that conquered of old the dark chaos, the void;
Light that unquenched
Cleaves the Passover night.
Suddenly he was no longer the man Jesus but the creator God, the light that was present at the creation, that brought order out of chaos and gives life to all things. The ordinary has taken on cosmic significance and the veil that separates the earthly and the heavenly is briefly parted. It was similar at his baptism as the heaven was opened, but I wonder how many in the crowd saw or understood that? For most of his life the glory, though present, was not dramatically manifest. In his being he held heaven and earth together yet in the ordinariness of a human life. In him we too are called to this task of cosmic significance, living in both the ‘now and the not yet’, on earth yet holding the divine presence of heaven.
Our hymn speaks of the light cleaving the Passover night, pointing to the culmination of Jesus life in his passion and death. In the synoptic gospels the Passover night is the night of the Last Supper and Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane. Does this light cleave the night in that moment when Jesus prays ‘not my will but yours be done’ and gives himself over to death? John’s gospel has a different chronology and the Passover night follows Jesus’ death at the time that the Passover lambs are killed. For John, the glorification of Jesus is at the moment when he fully surrenders to God’s will for him on the cross. The light shines in the darkness of a sordid and cruel death, the same light that shone in the darkness at the beginning of all things.
In the synoptic gospels the veil of the temple was said to be torn in two as Jesus dies, symbolising the decisive moment when God becomes present to humanity in a new way. God is now fully present in the depths of human experience and all things are transfigured by the divine light for those with eyes to see. Jesus’ death makes it possible for us to join him in our cosmic task of shining the light into the dark places of this world as members of his body. With him we are called to abandon ourselves into the hands of God, to let go our own ideas of success and failure and to allow God’s light to flow through us.
In our very ordinary lives we bring the light of Christ to one another, and as I say that I am drawn to a phrase we pray every evening at the start of Compline, ‘to hold in reverence all that he has made’(1). How would it be to take that to heart, to reverence the light that brought all things into being in each person, each creature, we meet? And, perhaps rather harder, to reverence our own selves as created, loved and enlightened by the light of Christ.
Mother Anne - 6th August 2024
(1) From the prayer of confession: 'Holy God, we confess to you before the company of the faithful in heaven and on earth that we have sinned against you, against one another and against your creation. Forgive us in your mercy; help us to forgive each other and to hold in reverence all that you have made. Amen.'