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A Glimpse into the Plenitude of his Being

The Transfiguration : 5 August 2012 Daniel 7: 9-10, 13-14 , 2 Peter 1: 16-19

"The Christian religion would be better off if the books of Daniel and Revelation had never made their way into the Bible. We would be spared all those nutty predictions of the end of the world, and the encouragement of resurgent fundamentalism." So spoke Alan Pyatt, the then Bishop of Christchurch.

Judaism tends to agree with him. It downplays all the apocalyptic parts of the Old Testament because that kind of biblical literature, and the ideas associated with it, encouraged the disastrous rebellions against the Romans a lifetime or two after Jesus, that resulted in the destruction of the Temple, and the forced dispersion of the Jewish people around the Mediterranean.

Apocalyptic developed as a secret resistance language, couched in religious terms, when foreign oppressors ruled the Jewish homeland. It encouraged patience and endurance in the face of persecution because God would have the last word in human history, overthrowing apparently invincible tyrants, and deploying his power and his glory to vindicate his chosen people.

The problem for people who want to censor the Bible in the way just mentioned is that Jesus himself used apocalyptic language to describe what would happen after he had gone, and the way in which people understood his resurrection drew heavily on the ideas of apocalyptic literature. And the transfiguration itself is an apocalyptic event, pointing forward to the what will be at the end.

Yet the transfiguration has embarrassed and perplexed many New Testament commentators, who see it as a mythological intrusion into a down to earth account of a this worldly utterly human Jesus, whom they want secular minded folk to take seriously. So they have tried to explain it away in one of two ways.

It could have been a mountaintop hallucinatory experience. It can sometimes happen as you near a hilltop that you can be enveloped in low flying cloud formations that are backlit by the sun, producing ethereal visual phenomena. Figures appear and disappear as the clouds pass over rapidly, and mountaintops can psyche people up to expect the unusual.

The other explanation is that the Gospel writers took their later experiences of the resurrection of Jesus, and retrojected them back into this incident as a way of framing up the impending death of Jesus on the cross. His humiliating death was a troubling and difficult event for his followers to explain, so they position this resurrection like experience at the front end of it as a way of alerting readers to the happy ever after ending to the story.

There is a very limited truth to this take on the transfiguration. Most contemporary commentaries point to the way in which the point of this event was to strengthen Jesus and his inner core of followers so that they could cope with the appalling events about to take place on the hill of Golgotha. And it is certainly true that the transfiguration marks a transition point between the ministry of Jesus as a teacher and a wonder worker, and the deeper meaning of his ministry in the climactic stage of it, as he gives his life in a way which changes things decisively for the better for the human race.

But this is more than just a summit conference on discouragement, in which the two key figures from Israel’s religious tradition share their experiences of rejection, and advise Jesus on what to do about it. If the death and resurrection of Jesus is God’s yes that overcomes all human no’s, then how does it do that? What Divine resources does it draw on to achieve this extraordinary outcome? And how does this event recast what is about to follow as being about more than the routine judicial execution of an obscure religious troublemaker?

Earlier ages of the Church, and the world of Eastern Orthodoxy, have seen the deeper meaning and significance of what took place here. It is a parallel event with the Baptism of Jesus. One in which the Trinity disclosed and revealed itself just as it is. The cloud is the way the Holy Spirit becomes visible in this incident. The Father speaks his confirming words of approval, "This is my Son, the beloved. Listen to him." And Jesus is revealed glistening with the uncreated light flowing out of him, which is the way he is in himself as the second person of the Trinity. In other words Jesus has shown the three disciples who he really is in the place where God dwells, as he is as one of the Triune persons.

St Thomas Aquinas wrote of the beatific vision as the great reward and goal of the life of heaven. We shall wonder and praise and adore the beauty and the glory of God. Peter, James and John received an advance preview of this. They see the end goal of where life on terrestrial earth is going. We were made to be within the force field of the Divine life in all its radiance and attracting splendour and compassionate energy and healing power. This briefly radiates out from Mount Tabor. And it declares that what is about to take place in Jerusalem will be trumped by this primal energy, which will work through the events of this emerging tragedy in such a way that the newness and the freshness of the Christian hope will become the pivot point of human history. All history will pass through the cross.

To speak of God, to try to imagine him, or to think of who and what he is in himself, is to be in the business of contemplating pure being itself, the plenitude of being, the radiating splendour that makes the stars move, and the worlds turn. We are only derivative creatures, formed of dust, but with a spark of his greatness within us, if we will but let it emerge through Christian belief and practise.

To talk about God in this way is to use the language of metaphysics, the way the Greeks found to discuss Divine reality, and one in which the Christian faith made itself at home. But its original set of ideas came from biblical apocalyptic literature, in which as the stars begin to fall, and as the empires of the earth collapse, his humble champions are vindicated. The transfiguration is an apocalyptic event, in which God declares his hand, reveals his identity, and prefigures what will be. Now the end game of the human story begins to develop. Evil can fight its rearguard action, but in the long run it hasn’t got a show up against this primal source of power.

Peter, James and John were frightened by what they saw. Icons of this event have them prostrated on the earth, taking cover in the contours of the terrain. So great is the mystery of God, his incomprehensibility, his Shekinah glory, that he can never be reduced to just a fascinating visual phenomena for our viewing enjoyment. Thomas Aquinas saw that if we viewed him directly we would, as it were, blow a fuse. So he ventured the opinion that God will graciously allow us to think some of his thoughts after him, to share in some of his intuitions about himself, to catch some of the backtrack of his self-perceptions, and in this way to be protectively shielded from the too much of the beatific vision. We will see it at one remove.

What gives the transfiguration authenticity as more than visual hallucinations, or creative gospel rewriting, is the corroborative evidence of 2 Peter. As the author writes: We weren’t you know, just wishing on a star when we laid the facts out before you regarding the powerful return of our Master Jesus Christ. We were there for the preview! We saw it with our own eyes: Jesus resplendent with light from God the Father as the voice of majestic Glory spoke. We were there on the holy mountain with him. We heard the voice out of heaven with our very own ears.

And the point of it all was to give us confidence for the future, that we have been given the inside running on how things will turn out, no matter how rugged things become in between. As Peter writes: We couldn’t be more sure of what we saw and heard - God’s glory, God’s voice. The prophetic Word was confirmed to us. You will do well to keep focusing on it. It is the one light you have in a dark time as you wait for daybreak and the rising of the Morning Star in your hearts.