Sermon: The Transfiguration

Preacher:

David Martin

Date:

Sunday 2nd March 2014

Service:

Cathedral Eucharist

Readings:

Exodus 24:15

Psalm 99: 7

Matthew 17:5, 8

Listen:

Download Recording (MP3, 13.1M)

+‘So Moses went up the mountain and a cloud covered it.’ Exodus, chapter 24, verse 15.

‘They spoke to him in a pillar of cloud.’ Psalm 99, verse 7.

‘While he was yet speaking, a bright cloud suddenly overshadowed them...but when they raised their eyes they saw Jesus only.’ Matthew, chapter 17, verses 5 and 8.

Our subject is the Transfiguration and as we read around the story in commentaries, and in the Gospel passages that come before it and follow it, we realise this moment of glory is the turning point of a story that leads to a cross of shame, to the stripping away of power and the emptying of self.  Jesus moves from the preaching of a kingdom in which the meek inherit the earth and the pure in heart see God to the expectation of the cross. Peter, James and John, the three disciples present at this moment of exaltation, are the same three present at the moment of crisis in Gethsemane before the horrors of Calvary. The prospect at the Transfiguration is one of rejection but it is also a glimpse of fulfilment. When Moses and Elijah appear alongside Jesus we are being asked to remember that they both went up a mountain, both brought messages that were rejected, and both passed directly into the divine presence. We are being told that Moses represents the law, and Elijah the prophets, but Jesus is the beloved son and heir who completes the law and fulfils all that the prophets foretold.

For the Fathers of the Eastern Church this moment of glory when the face of Christ shone as the sun was an anticipation of the glory of the risen Christ on the morning of the resurrection and the glory of his presence among the disciples, as at Emmaus. The Fathers also saw it as a moment when heaven touched earth, eternity entered time, and the divine was manifest in the human.

So much for looking forward, The Transfiguration also looks back. What was unveiled through a cloud on the mountain of the Transfiguration looks back to what was revealed through a cloud in the waters of baptism: the glory shared by the Son with the Father. Baptism was the first pivotal moment and the Transfiguration was the second. Thomas Aquinas called them the two great complementary miracles. The same pattern discloses itself at the second moment as was disclosed in the first. It is a pattern of receiving through offering, gain through loss, renewal through purification, light through darkness. What goes down to the depths in the purifying waters of baptism rises again restored and renewed. What we have both in baptism and in the Transfiguration is a reference to the two primal elements of Creation in Genesis: water and light. What was signified through baptism in the primal element of water is now unveiled by the Transfiguration in the primal element of light.

This reference backwards and forwards is how the New Testament works. The Bible isn’t guaranteed ticker tape spewing out meaningless reports about one thing after another. Holy Scripture is a sign language drawing our attention to what is really significant: the sign of water, the sign of light and the sign of the cloud, which is water and light together. Let us pause to look at all three signs. The Transfiguration is mediated through the sign language of light. Light comes first and last in Scripture. We move from the first creation of light in Genesis to the light of the world in St. John’s Gospel that shined in the darkness and was not overcome, to the light of Revelation that shines at the centre of the heavenly city. Then we have the sign language of water. We move from the water that was the first source of life to the water that burst forth from the rock in the arid desert, from the water that generates new life in baptism to the streams that flow from the heavenly city as they first flowed in Eden to fructify the whole world. Finally we have the sign of the cloud, We move from the cloud that went before the people as they travelled hopefully to a new country, to the cloud that enveloped Moses as he received the law and entered the divine presence; from the cloud that signified God was tabernacled with his people in the temple to the cloud that revealed the divine presence in the face of Jesus Christ on the mountain of the Transfiguration.

There are three moments in our story: when the cloud envelops the presence, when the countenance divine emerges and shines forth as the sun in the heavenly Father’s realm, and when the visionary gleam departs and the disciples see only Jesus. What then of the first moment when the cloud envelops the divine? Throughout the Bible the cloud signifies the presence: ‘The Lord is in his holy temple, let all mortal flesh keep silence before him’; ‘The glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together’. The cloud hides God because we cannot look on God and live: as Isaiah puts it ‘Truly thou art a God that hidest thyself’. That is the first moment. What then of the second moment when the countenance divine shines forth upon the clouded hill? The human countenance is the most intimate index we have of divinity. On one scale we are overawed by the insignificance of humanity against the unimaginable backdrop of space: the infinite spaces out there make us very, very afraid. But all those multiplying noughts add up to nothing; they are literally meaningless compared with the infinite world of meaning in here, revealed in the human face. The scientist and mathematician Blaise Pascal wrote that what we understand of God from the powers of Nature is slight compared with what is revealed in the face of Jesus Christ. The human face encompasses everything you know on earth and all you need to know: the necessity of judgement and the depth of compassion, the light of reason and the fire of love. In the sign language of Scripture the nature of God is revealed in the face of Jesus Christ and the spirit of God is made known in a human life from a woman’s first cry of joy at the birth of a child to the last cry of dereliction of a man at the point of death.

In the final moment on the mountain the disciples ‘raised their eyes and saw Jesus only’. The moment of illumination is over: redemption remains to be worked out on the plane of everyday existence, problems and difficulties that will not go away, satisfactions and heartaches, taken-for granted familiarities and special times of mutual recognition, expectations and uncertainties, temptations, times of trial and moments of dereliction, but through it all a recollection of the human form both subject to abject humiliation and gloriously transfigured; and the guiding virtues through all the changing scenes of life identified by William Blake as pity, mercy, peace and love. 

            To Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love,

            All pray in their distress,

            And to these virtues of delight

            

              Return their thankfulness.

 

             For mercy has a human heart,

             Pity a human face,

             And Love, the human form divine,

             And Peace the human dress.

 

              Then every man, of every clime,

              That prays in his distress,

              Prays to the human form divine,

              Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.