Jesus himself alone – 2 March 2014

...when they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus himself alone. [Matthew 17:8]

This is the puzzling, troubling account of what we call the Transfiguration.   I am one who thinks this passage bristles with difficulty – and yet at the same time we sense that it ought to be reassuring and enlightening.  I don’t have the courage to look back, even if I could, to see what I have said about this passage in years gone by, in sermons and studies.  Looking to see what others are saying about it, including some great names, tends to be scarcely edifying.

Jesus takes Peter, James and John, up a hill away from the others.  Those three disciples have there what Jesus later calls a vision.  Jesus is transfigured – the Greek word is μεταμορφωθη, there is a metamorphosis.  He becomes dazzling white and shining.  Moses and Elijah appear, talking with Jesus.  Peter thinks it’s so wonderful and appropriate – today he would say awesome -- that he wants to set up three shrines there, trying to capture the moment and preserve it.  But then it is all overshadowed by a cloud, and they hear a voice: This is my Son, the Beloved... listen to him.  The disciples are terrified, but Jesus touches them and says, Get up, don’t be afraid.  And when they look up, they see no one except Jesus himself alone.  The Greek is surprisingly emphatic at that point, three words, Jesus himself alone.

Of course it has become a subject for great art.  Every rendering I have seen features Jesus somehow blinding and glorious, as you might expect.  In Titian’s painting you can scarcely see the disciples at all for all the light around Jesus – they are shadowy figures cowering terrified at the bottom.  That approach to the event focuses on the vision, on Jesus remote in glory, conferring perhaps loftily, remotely, with Moses the Lawgiver and Elijah the Prophet.  It is taken typically to authenticate Jesus as Son of God.  And in the eastern Orthodox churches this event is seen as deeply important and meaningful, appearing in icons and in the liturgy. 

And yet, with all of that, we may find ourselves somehow still standing outside it all looking on, as it were.  The cloud which eventually hid it all may seem a merciful thing.  It’s like a stop-sign to our analytical brains, and to any attempt to use this strange story to prove anything about Jesus.  The event, says Matthew, disappears, it becomes enveloped in a fog, like Wellington airport, and all you know for sure is that you’re not flying right now.   All we know for sure when we have read about this Transfiguration is that, in the cloud, eventually, they encounter what Matthew emphatically calls Jesus himself alone.  And now it is not any vision.  He touches them.  He tells them to get up and not be afraid. 

This is the 21^st century.  The word spirituality has now come to mean almost anything.  Trying to hang on to Christian faith by dogmatic adherence to creeds and rules of behaviour or rules of worship, or by experiences of charismania, is a recipe for shipwreck.  It is necessary now that we make friends with mystery, with the cloud as it were, and as Jesus said, not to be afraid.  Our faith is not a set of answers – that is now seen as threadbare.  We now have to learn from the mystics and the wise men and women of the centuries who learned silence and stillness, and who were Christian because they shared this with Jesus, the risen Lord.  The prayer they prayed was ultimately his prayer, the prayer of the risen Lord – in the words of John Greenleaf Whittier: The silence of eternity, interpreted by love.  From there, from the cloud and the mystery, from the presence of Jesus himself alone, we go on to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God.