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The Connection between Glory and Suffering

Mark 9: 2-10 : Lent 2, Year B : 4 March 2012

Travelling through Spain last year I was appalled to find the number of times museums of torture proudly stood alongside other tourist attractions recalling the medieval past of that particular city.

The vivid posters advertising these houses of horror generally gave pride of place to the iron maiden, a human sized and human looking contraption into which the victim was inserted, so that when the door closed the iron spikes that lined the interior would impale them. But this kind of barbaric behaviour wasn’t confined to the medieval past. Visiting the cliff top fortress that stands guard over Barcelona we discovered that the former Prime Minister of republican Spain had been brought here, after his hiding place in Paris had been discovered by the Nazis, to be tortured, and then shot by firing squad.

Long exposure to Christian symbolism often leads us to tune out to what is depicted there. The cross, an instrument of cruel execution subjecting its victim to a lingering death - whips and scourges are sometimes surrounding motifs - and then of course there are statues of the sacred heart of Jesus - which one theological student at Mirfield summed up in the memorable one liner - "look at my operation."

Other ages of faith were less squeamish about this blood and guts side of the Christian story, though there are those today who do not shrink from it, as witness Mel Gibson’s recent cinematic foray into the events of Holy Week. But speaking for myself I have been in flight from the pain, sacrifice and suffering side of the Christian faith for most of my adult life.

Take for instance, that first reading from Genesis about Abraham being prepared to sacrifice his only son. I used to avoid preaching about it, and had the reading suppressed wherever possible with its barbaric overtones of child sacrifice. Surely this was an embarrassing echo of the appalling pagan religions that Israel had slowly turned away from, to worship only the true and loving God Yahweh. And my imagination had been powerfully affected by the way Benjamin Britten uses this story in his "War Requiem", to depict God as a stand in for the power brokers of Western Europe who decided to accept the sacrifice, and so condemn a generation of young men to the slaughter on the western front.

But in recent years I have come to see the deep truth in the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac. It is tale for our time that, amongst other things, encourages parents to take an honest and realistic look at their expectations of their children, and of their role in their children’s lives. Sometimes we can make an idolatry out of our children, expecting them to live out our unfulfilled ambitions for ourselves, to be the successful and significant people we failed to be. Or we are tempted to hothouse their development, so that we can bask in their reflected glory. Or we may think that we have generated out of our bodies our faithful little friend who will be our life time companion and carer, who will never disappoint us the way so many of our adult contemporaries have.

These are the idolatrous, unfair and illegitimate expectations that need to be laid on the altar of sacrifice, that need to be let go of, and said goodbye to. Give them back to God so that our children will be set free to be themselves, and not the prisoners of our unconscious dynastic ambitions. For the truth is that we are temporary stewards of our children, the ones who responsibly care for them for a time, equipping them as best we can for a future that is theirs to realise as best they can, according to their own lights. And even if we do a good job of bringing them up, we cannot then insist that they become our friends for life, and our grateful servants, bound to us in claustrophobic bonds of affection.

Consider also how the Transfiguration dovetails into the sacrifice of Isaac. Mark doesn’t tell us about the content of the conversation between Moses, Elijah and Jesus, but the other gospel writers do. It concerns the terrible fate awaiting Jesus in Jerusalem. Through it God the Father is strengthening Jesus, encouraging him, to go forward into this ultimate act of his ministry. And Jesus is allowing himself to go into harms way, is allowing himself to be put in jeopardy in this way, without retreating into the temptation of a retired life as a former inspirational spiritual leader.

What will soon follow the Transfiguration is the ultimate sacrifice by which the world is set free. And although Jesus is as it were tested to destruction in his freely accepted vocation as faithful Son, he will receive back far more than he can have bargained for. The light flowing out of him on Mt Tabor is a first instalment of the transformed, transfigured life that lies on the other side of death.

There is in fact a connection between glory and suffering in the Transfiguration. On Mount Tabor Peter, James and John received a glimpse into the future of the world, as it will be when God has renovated and renewed it. A 20th century Russian theologian Sergius Bulgakov saw into the truth of this more than anyone else.

Bulgakov asks, where do we see Jesus as most truly himself in his ministry, revealed for who he truly is? The answer is in the Transfiguration. This wasn’t just a vision, or a hallucinatory mountaintop episode. The Jesus radiating uncreated light is the Jesus who sits at the right hand of the Father in the life of the world to come. The Jesus glowing with an intense light that no earthly power source could produce is the second person of the Trinity, who dynamically lives within the Trinitarian circuit of the Father and the Holy Spirit, a conduit for and catalyst of the Divine energy that circulates around them like an electric force field.

What is more the uncreated light radiating out of Jesus, that illuminates Moses and Elijah, also renders transparent and translucent and transfigured the material fabric that makes up the alpine landscape at the top of Mt Tabor. Matter, the stuff of our world, that binds it together and gives it its solidity, has for a brief time become a transmitter of Divine energy. As soon as the Transfiguration is over it goes back to its normal state of being a resister rather than a transmitter of Divine grace. Thus it continues as a blocker of Divine energy, mercifully allowing us to go on in this brief envelope of time in which the mercy and the providence of God gives us a breathing space to get our act together.

For at the end, at the return of Jesus and the end of time and human history, matter will become totally open to, and a transmitter of, the uncreated light flowing from the holy, blessed and glorious Trinity. There will be a fundamental change in the structure of the world. In one sense our world will still be there, but in a more fundamental sense it will be transfigured and transformed into the new heavens and the new earth. The what was the staggering one off of the Transfiguration will be the new normal. We too like Moses and Elijah will glow and glisten as our spiritual bodies reflect back, connect to, and are infused by the Divine energy.

But for that to happen the events of Holy Week must be allowed to play out, through a terrible destiny that Jesus must be prepared to embrace. And it is an inescapable necessity because as God speaks his language of Divine love into the world it must translate itself and take shape in the tragic events that lead up to and away from Calvary. In God’s perfect and fulfilled world none of this carry on would be necessary, but in this world with its God resisting agendas, and its taste for torment and judicial executions that is precisely what will happen. For through the events of Holy Week God works to a solution of the human rebellion against him, with all the associated miseries that this has brought to it, which will respect human freedom, and will work within it to overcome it. Wayward, grumpy, folly driven adolescents that we are he will find a way through suffering to draw us back to the homecoming that we deep down long for. For further information and insight on how he will accomplish that come to this Church on Good Friday.