Text on Sunday, March 6, 2011
Exodus 34:29-35; Matthew 17:1-9
We preachers have made much of the confusion of Peter in the mountaintop experience of transfiguration. His request to build shrines up there, if translated into our habits, would have him coaching Moses: Could you scrunch in a little more?. . . good. Click. Peter wants to—we want to—hold on to an image of the beautiful, rather than participate in it, though every law of Spirit warns against this temptation. Do you know William Blake’s little quatrain?
He who binds himself to a joy
Does the winged life destroy
He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise.
Certainly, ordinary religion must stand under the judgment as a pattern that “binds us to a joy” with feast days and shrines and so forth which make the experiences and memories of spiritual pioneers into levers for what Samir Selmanovic calls the “God-management system.” It is a sign of sin. But it is not what this story of Jesus’ transfiguration is mainly about. Mainly, it is about the light and about preparation to see the light aright.
Throughout my ministry, I have made close study of the Old Testament a foundation stone for understanding Jesus as God’s Christ. To the dismay of some in my churches, I do not read the words of the law and the prophets as prophecies of Jesus in the ordinary sense of that word; that is, as writings of people who knew God’s plan, forecasting Jesus like good weather on the way. They had rather their own experiences of light rising on scenes of chaos or confusion or cruelty, bringing peace, yet not like the world gives peace. They had their own questions, how to interpret the blessing of these epiphanies—how to connect their present sense of the light of God with the stories of their ancestors—one God!—and with their hopes for their children and for all children to come, everywhere—one God! In other words, our Bible is composed of accounts of spiritual experiences (and the hopes drawn from them) recorded by people who were really planted there in their present, thinking hard about past and future, just as you and I do—that is, with hopes and fears. They were story-tellers practicing the presence of God; fortune tellers and prognosticators need not apply.
You can hardly miss the similarity between the stories of Moses’ transfiguration and Jesus’. In both, God comes to God’s chosen one on a mountain top; in both, that servant brings his close disciples to the present moment; in both, the servant’s face is shining so that those who regard it can hardly bear the light; in both, they are afraid and God’s servant calls to them and speaks with them to overcome their fear so that they may get on with the business of God. In Exodus, that business is that the people receive God’s word—Torah—and be transformed into God’s people. In the gospels, the business is that the people receive God’s Word—Jesus Christ—and be transformed into God’s people. Do you feel what is underway here? We can never come to one conclusion about what did or did not happen on the mountain with Jesus, but it is perfectly plain that, from its beginning, the story helped hearers to renew their hearing for the business of God, which was worn with formulas and practices that “do the winged life destroy,” practices that had lost power to relate people in their actual crisis to the possibility of God’s presence. This happens to every religion until there is transfiguration.
Who is transfigured by transfiguration? Not just the beloved servant of God. Those who see the beloved are transfigured—changed, strengthened, renewed. Theirs is the transfiguration which starts down through the ages in the pattern of light called faith. So now let us push a little harder at the old way of telling and hearing miracle stories, that way that has shut our eyes.
Many years ago, when my son was very young and sort of new to language, we were driving through the hills west of Albany and passed over a bridge affording a view of a little waterfall with a cottage beside it. He said, “Isn’t that beautiful!” And while affirming his word, I thought to myself, “Isn’t this remarkable, that any child, whose eyes have opened but months ago on the mystery of a created world, should already be at the business we are all at, selecting from the field of all things some things to call beautiful. For the child, the question—Isn’t that beautiful?—is a real question: Is this the experience of surprise which we call beautiful, Daddy? To see beauty takes practice. It is like a language—no, it is a language. Seeing is not at all the simple thing it seems—just opening your eye and saying what’s there.
In an extraordinary study of light, Amherst physics professor Arthur Zajonc recounts some case studies of how persons who have been unable to see through their whole lives still cannot just plain “see” when the optics of their eyes are repaired. One patient, on release from the hospital, wanted to go to a technology museum to lay eyes on precision tools which had long fascinated him while sightless.
They took him to a fine screw-cutting lathe and asked him to tell what stood before him. Obviously upset, [he] could say nothing. He complained that he could not see the metal being worked. He was brought closer and allowed to touch the lathe. With his eyes shut tight, he ran his hands eagerly over the lathe. Then he stood back, and opening his eyes, declared, “Now that I’ve felt it, I can see it.” (Catching the Light, p.4)
Is it not the same in the business of seeing Jesus? Is not this your transfiguration: Now that I have felt him, I can see him? Jesus is not visible except to the inward eye, the feeling eye. There was no halo there for all to see. The gospels are plain-spoken in this matter. Some people saw him as devil, some as disturbed, some as miscreant, some as master, some as transfigured in the light of God, some face to face. Never suppose that your faith, and your deepening faith, depend on some fact yet to be pinned down, or on your forlorn acceptance of some assertion or miracle that seems to you contrary to nature. Faith is not a thing so small. It is a feeling for life that gives sight to the blind. Augustine put it this way: “Our whole business in this life is to restore to health the eye of the heart whereby God may be seen.”
So let us press a little further. Let us come down from the mountain top and greet our own faith in Christ with awe and understanding, face to face. The beauty of Jesus Christ lies not alone in himself, but in your seeing in him God’s word to you. Jesus says as much. “Whoever believes in me believes not in me but in the One who sent me. And whoever sees me is seeing the One who sent me.” (John 12:44) My long study of the Old Testament has brought me to this, that in his life and death, Jesus would have been unrecognizable as God’s Christ, except for the centuries-long shaping given by the Jews and their spiritual leaders, handling and feeling the questions of fear and hope, of individual and nation, of suffering and salvation. So sensitively did they hold these questions with scripture and commentary, with prayer and song, that when there came a man to the shores of Galilee and to the temple mount in Jerusalem and to the dark day on Calvary, the eye of the heart was made ready. Now that we have felt him, we can see him. This is the heart of transfiguration, face to face. With this experience in your beating heart, you can let go the question, whether God had a plan from long ages to send Jesus. Who knows? God’s thoughts are not our thoughts. Perhaps God doesn’t have plans, as we do. Perhaps God has no script, but only plays. Perhaps God is—period—and we, fundamentally, creatures of God, made in the divine image, so that whatever we see deep and true is already God’s eye in us, given to us freely. This is how Goethe put it:
Were the eye not of the sun
How could we behold the light?
If God’s sight and ours were not as one,
How could God’s work enchant our sight?
Dear and beloved church, we will come this Wednesday into the season of Lent. For forty days, we will look with sober eyes on our sin and the possibility of our turning from death to life. If you would come to Easter Day with eyes ready to see God, then come now and accept the gift of your transfiguration, so that with your Lord you may descend from the mountain top to the city of sin and sorrows and see what is, without flinching, without fear of your being overwhelmed. May there come for us now a song in our heart:
What tho’ my joys and comfort die?
The Lord my Savior liveth;
What tho’ the darkness gather round?
Songs in the night he giveth.
I lift my eyes; the cloud grows thin;
I see the blue above it;
And day by day this pathway smooths,
Since first I learned to love it.
Get up, disciples. Do not be afraid. See, the Son of Man has been raised from the dead. And you, O wonder of God, you do see it. Let us then use our Lent to look with an eye unblinking on the evils we deplore, and pray for change, within and without, so that we may get on with the business of God, face to face.
Rev. Stephen H. Phelps
The Riverside Church
New York, New York
©Stephen H. Phelps 2011
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