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The Feast of the Transfiguration of our Lord, 02/26/2017
Sermon on Matthew 17:1-9, by Paula Murray
1And after six days Jesus took with him Peter and James, and John his brother, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. 2And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light. 3And behold, there appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him. 4And Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, it is good that we are here. If you wish, I will make three tents here, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah.” 5He was still speaking when, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them, and a voice from the cloud said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.” 6When the disciples heard this, they fell on their faces and were terrified. 7But Jesus came and touched them, saying, “Rise, and have no fear.” 8And when they lifted up their eyes, they saw no one but Jesus only. 9And as they were coming down the mountain, Jesus commanded them, “Tell no one the vision, until the Son of Man is raised from the dead.”
The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, 2001, Crossways, Good News Publishers
Words paint pictures in our minds, and those pictures are sometimes easier to grasp than the words themselves. On this Transfiguration Sunday, we begin in much the same way we teach children to read, by deciphering the meaning of words from the images of their objects. The difference? We begin not with pictures of trucks and dolls, cats and dogs, but with an artist’s rendition of this Biblical event.
The image below was painted by Fra Angelico (1395-1455 ad), and I use it because I am not likely to get into trouble with the copyright people. There is an issue with this painting. The Virgin Mary and St. Dominic stand on either side of the picture, and neither of those people were present in any of the Biblical accounts of the Transfiguration. In fact, St. Dominic would not even be born until 11 centuries later. So, other than to say Fra Angelica wanted to please his patrons or exercise his own sense of artistic license or piety, we’ll not talk about either Jesus’ mother or the much later disciple over the course of this sermon. Also, as I preach this sermon myself this weekend, I will show a number of images of the Transfiguration created over the centuries to point out the characteristics common to all, and what those characteristics reveal to us about Jesus Christ. But the painting below is the one I’ll use to draw out the meaning of the transfiguration of Jesus Christ.
The first characteristic common to all these images from sixth century icons to contemporary acrylics is that the figure of Jesus is center top of the painting. The paintings are more portraits of Jesus than a pictorial depiction of an event, as the other figures in the image, Moses, Elijah, and the disciples occupy positions on the margins of the image. Moses and Elijah are uniformly closer to Jesus, sometimes, though not always, on the same plain. Most often, Jesus’ position is somewhat elevated.
The positioning of the figures in the painting, especially that of Jesus himself, points to his position in God’s kingdom. First, he stands upon a mountain top, and while scholars debate whether the mountain top was Mt. Tabor or some other rocky hill, for the artist the mountain is simply a means of depicting Jesus’ and his Old Testament companions nearness to God and his heavenly kingdom. This ordinary seeming man, Jesus, who will, later in the text, be depicted as both tired and troubled, is revealed in his elevated stature as one who is closer to God. Not only is Jesus closer to God than the ordinary run of men, men like the disciples cowering at the base of the mountain, he is closer to God than even the greatest of the Prophets, Moses, the receiver of the Law as revealed in the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, and Elijah, the greatest of the prophets of the prophetic writings. Since the Torah, and the writings of the Prophets are the accepted canon of sacred literature of the Jews of the time Jesus walked the earth, this is an enormous claim. The truth of the pictorial claim is validated by the mouth of God the Father himself, when, once again, he claims Jesus as his incarnate Son. “This is my beloved Son,” “with whom I am well pleased,” says God Almighty from a cloud of light.
That cloud of light is the other characteristic common to artists’ renderings of the Transfiguration of Jesus. That light, a cloud like Matthew’s description in chapter five of his Gospel, or rays as in some paintings, is the glory of God. That glory overshadows Jesus and his companions, but it is no mere reflection of God’s glory like a sunset reflected on the waters of a lake or ocean. It is inherent to Jesus himself, as one whose two natures include not only the human but also the divine. But, while the light itself speaks to God’s transcendent glory, the shape of the light speaks to humanity’s common end. The cloud of light is shaped like a flattened circle, the shape of the mouth of the tomb into which Jesus will be placed on the evening of the day he dies on the cross for our sins, and from which he will come on the day of his resurrection from the dead.
By this time, Jesus has already prophesied his death and resurrection to his disciples. His stance reveals the nature of his death, he will die an excruciating and humiliating death on the cross. When God the Father tells the disciples cowering at the base of the mountain as the glory of God is revealed or made manifest in Jesus Christ to “listen to him,” he is telling them to comprehend and accept what is to them incomprehensible. The tomb-shaped cloud of light presents the hope of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ in a visceral sort of way to men who, for all of their time spent following Jesus and learning at his feet, are still children in the Spirit at best. The picture book that is the Transfiguration reveals that fear is at the root of their denial of Jesus’ teachings about his death, and a despairing hopelessness at their unwillingness to accept in faith the promise of the resurrection.
From this point onwards, the disciples will “grow up” in the Spirit hard and fast. Even so, it is not until Christ’s resurrection and his ascension or return to the Father some forty days after the resurrection that the disciples leave school and apprenticeship behind and become full-fledged teachers and preachers of the Word that is Jesus Christ themselves. Called to follow Jesus as his disciples, their lessons began in earnest with the Sermon on the Mount, a long lesson about life as citizens of the kingdom of heaven. We ended that portion of Jesus’ lesson plan ourselves just last week, when he told us to love our enemies, not to hate them, and to forgive them, and not hug to ourselves the harm they had done us. “Be perfect as God your heavenly Father is perfect,” our Lord and Teacher taught us, a terrifying lesson to those who remember all too well our lack of human, much less divine, perfection.
But the transfiguration of Jesus is not just about a change in his appearance that reflects both his divine nature and the work he became incarnate to accomplish for the Father. Christ’s transfiguration prefigures our own transformation, as that Light which is Jesus becomes more and more a part of our lives. We who are justified by Jesus’ death on the cross, whose sins are forgiven by his willing gift of his sinless life, are blessed not only with the gifts of forgiveness and salvation but also with a life lived in his light. Sinners though we be, from birth to death, yet still we reflect some part of his own divine light, not for ourselves, but so we may be light to the world and thereby a blessing to our neighbors.
And so we come to the end of the season of Epiphany, that time of the Church year that is the season of light, in which the gift that is Jesus Christ is unwrapped so we may see what was given us in a long ago stable. May we, with the help of the Holy Spirit, be apt students of the lessons of faith as we leave this place this day and prepare ourselves and our homes for Lent.