It's only fairly recently that the church has begun to commemorate the transfiguration of Jesus on the Sunday just before Lent. We usually associate it in the calendar with the festival in August. But here we are, before Easter, celebrating, commemorating this story in Luke’s gospel, in a way which, at first, seems rather puzzling. But if you think of it, the effect of hearing and seeing the story of Jesus' transfiguration this morning - just before Lent - has the effect of framing the whole of Lent between two parallel stories, like 2 bookends holding Lent together. The first story is a story of Jesus going into a lonely mountainous place to pray; Luke always adds more detail than Matthew and Mark. He is attended by his three closest friends: Peter; James; and John. It is a story in which Jesus, as he prays in solitude, enters into a mystery so great that His friends shrink from it and have no words for it. So at the beginning of Lent we have Luke’s story of the transfiguration. At the end of Lent there is a second, similar story of Jesus going to pray alone in the garden of Gethsemane. The same story? Yes, but how very different. In both Jesus prays alone; in both there is a revelation of the Father; in both those three friends shrink in terror.
To frame the season of Lent in that way is to tell
us that our Christian life, our journey is always, so to speak, lived between
those two stories, between those two bookends, those two moments of revelation
and prayer. In the first story, on the mountain of transfiguration, as the
Gospel tells us, Peter, James and John see the veil lifted. They see, as it
were, that behind and within the human flesh and blood of Jesus there is an
unbearable light and glory: a radiance better than any light on earth. They see
that in His flesh and blood nothing less than Israel's God who had once
disclosed himself in another transfiguration moment at a burning bush and spoke
his sacred name; they see, that Jesus’ flesh and blood – is soaked through with
a glory and brightness which is the work of God. They see that His human nature
is shot through with God's own freedom.
And then at the other end of Lent the second story
- they see again that radiance, that glory that brightness and liberty, but not
on a Mount Tabor where the transfiguration is alleged to have taken place but
on another mountain, Golgotha, where this glory and radiance is shot through
and made real as Jesus accepts the pain of the cross for the love of humankind.
They see that the blinding power of God is exercised not in crushing and
controlling, regulating and policing, but in the sacrifice of love. Perhaps it
begins to make sense that we live between those two visions, these two stories,
between prayer and revelation; it’s popularly called the circle of life if you
like, that song from the Lion King says it all – “and it moves us all through
despair and hope, through faith and love” – come and listen to my choir sing it
at our Sage Spring Concert March 17th!
We can't understand and make sense of that first
story – that glorious brightness of God unless we see that God's power and
splendour is entirely focused on that sacrifice of love on the cross on that
first Good Friday – a death which sets us free and gives us life. And we can't
understand the darkness and the terror at the end of the second story, at the
end of Lent, unless we see that in the depths of all that pain and suffering is
the glory of God, made visible in the resurrection of our Lord. And that, of
course, is why St John, in his Gospel, where there is no story of the
transfiguration, refers to the crucifixion as Jesus’ final act of glory – Jesus’ glory is made visible on the cross – O with
what rapture do we gaze on those
glorious wounds, we sing in Charles Wesley’s great hymn. And therefore these two stories, the dazzling
freedom of God, the total weakness of God, are bound together, woven together,
in one vision, in one person, in Jesus Christ.
Living between the tensions of
these two stories told before and at the end of Lent might teach us something
of the vision that we need to have as Christians. Things in our world are dark,
Golgotha events threaten us, they are painful. Tsunamis hit Southeast Asia, earthquakes
in New Zealand, fire and floods in Australia, war in Syria and North West Africa,
economic uncertainty here in this country, famine and disease in the horn of
Africa,. And perhaps at a more personal level, a sudden death, a terminal
illness, a pointless tragedy. What do we do, like good Christian human beings
in these dark and difficult times? We panic. Or when things are going well,
things are successful; a lottery win, a new grandchild, foreign exotic
holidays, a promotion - what do we do, like good Christian human beings? We
gloat. But if our lives are lived indeed between those two stories, then both
panic and gloating should be impossible for us. Things are dark and difficult. Yes.
The world is a terrible place, full of the threats of violence. Yes. But
somehow living between these two stories, the story of glory and sacrifice we begin
to look into the depths and see how the freedom of God is there even in
failure, even in crisis, to bring life and love, to overcome evil with good. David
Attenborough illustrated it beautifully in his recent Africa series on
television when he describes the Resurrection
plant. Scorched to death, blown around the Sahara for decades, the plant still
carries seeds whose green blade rises again when rain returns. There is hope
and possibility. Out of something dormant, parched and withered new life
emerges.
And like the resurrection plant we start to look for the vision of glory and
sacrifice in one another, the quiet transforming revolution that is at the
heart of the gospel, of people overcoming despair and sacrifice with positive
optimism and good wishes, bringing new sustainable hope and life.
And this freedom to bring life
and love into our daily lives is the quiet revolution of God’s grace and
forgiveness in action. In this quiet revolution, against all the odds, light
begins to shine, glory is revealed. In 1955 Mrs Rosa Parks in Montgomery,
Alabama decided she was tired of giving up her seat to a white person on a bus,
but her small act of defiance became an important symbol of the civil rights
movement. A few days later after her arrest a mostly unknown church minister,
Dr Martin Luther King was elected president of the Montgomery Improvement
Association and the rest is history. Desmond Tuto says that the biggest
defining moment of his life came through an unbelievable simple act of courtesy
he witnessed when he was a young boy of nine. “I saw this tall white priest in
a black cassock doff his hat to my mother who was a domestic worker.” The priest
of course was Trevor Huddleston, a dedicated anti apartheid activist. That pure
act of kindness and respect help produce one of our world’s greatest Christian
leaders.
More transforming light begins
to shine. In May 2008 a sixteen year old school boy Jimmy Mitzen was murdered
by another teenager in a bakery in South London. Speaking about the killer, his
mother Margaret Mitzen refused to respond with hatred and anger. “I don’t feel
anger because I know that it was anger that killed my Jimmy and I won’t let
anger ruin my family.” Two years later the Mitzens in 2010 announced that they
were buying the shop where his son died to open a Cafe of Good Hope. The cafe, “a community hub,” serves sandwiches
and handmade chocolates made by Jimmy’s older brother, who is a trained patissier; two other brothers also run
the cafe and the profits go towards charitable projects. In a similar vein,
Susan Retik, who was expecting her third child when her husband David was
killed in the 9/11 attacks, refused to be eaten up by grief and bitterness, and
Susan with another 9/11 widow established a foundation dedicated to
transforming the lives of thousands of Afghan widows who are some of the most
poorest and destitute women in the world. “Beyond the 11th” the two
women say, is an initiative that transcends acts of hate with acts of humility,
acts of despair with acts of ingenuity and acts of fear with acts of
self-reliance
These are remarkable stories
of love, peace, forgiveness. These stories tell us not only of how glory and
sacrifice are blended together, woven together in Jesus. They tell us how to
understand His church and His world, how in our discipleship we have to weave
together the vision of glory and the call to sacrifice. Black armbands and
champagne are equally only a part of the story. The full story is told in the
mystery of Jesus Christ when that glory is fully opened up, its depths revealed
and, in the very darkest moment of Jesus' self loss and self sacrifice, all of
that infinite power which is God's is directed like a laser beam, to the
welfare and the healing of you and me and the very weakest and most forgotten
of God's children.
I love the specsavers television adverts, the
Scottish farmer who shears his sheepdog instead of one of his sheep, the three
astronauts who arrive at provincial airport to collect their luggage from the
conveyor belt, the couple who arrive on the deck of an aircraft carrier looking
for the duty free shop. I think
sometimes we Christians need spectacles to see the Christian life in new ways.
And what we need to see, to observe however fleetingly is God's presence at the
heart of all human life, enacted in and between these two stories. Christ
playing in people like you and me, in ten thousand human faces, a world charged
with the grandeur of God as the poet put it.
On Holy Island Lindisfarne which will be in the
news later this year, they talk of ‘thin places' where the world is more
transparent to the presence of God. This I think is how Luke wants us to read
his transfiguration story: as inviting us to see creation as ‘thin',
sacramental, alive with the divine, and in all circumstances a vision of beauty
and grace open to us all. If you ask me what religion is, I say that it is a
new way of seeing, a way of being aware that makes the ordinary extraordinary
and the commonplace nothing less than a miracle. And as Luke points out, God
knows and cares, because he has walked that way himself. And living between
these two stories is a new way of seeing and interpreting suffering, entering
into the world's pain as God himself does, entering that circle of life. To see
and live and pray like this, that is transfiguration.
Amen
