• Home
• Services at Saint Peter’s
• Theology
  • What We Believe
  • The Pulpit
  • The Caversham Lectures
• News
  • News and Opinion
  • The Rock Archive
  • News Archive
  • Our Printed Heritage
  • Photo Gallery
• People
  • Friends of Saint Peter’s
  • External Links
• About
  • Music at Saint Peter’s
  • Saint Peter’s Character
  • Our History
  • Church Groups
  • Staff and Contacts
  • How to Get Here
• Login
  • Parishioners’ login
  • Vestry Members’ login
• Search Saint Peter’s

Disclosing the Inner Life of God

Transfiguration : 11 August 2013  : 2 Peter 1: 16-19 , Luke 9: 28-36

Holy Trinity Lyttelton is amongst the recently tragically earthquake destroyed churches of Canterbury. A notable feature of this remarkable Church were the murals of scenes from the life of Christ, hand painted on the walls by the 19th century Vicar Canon Coates. Choices had to be made by the artist as to which of the many incidents from the New Testament were to be selected, since only a few could be included. We might like to ask ourselves at this point what our top of the pops might be in such a New Testament selection.

Canon Coates made some surprising choices. The middle period of Christ’s ministry, with its many miracles and powerful teaching episodes, is pretty much ignored. But he bookends all that Christ said and did with the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan at the beginning, and the transfiguration of Jesus at the back end of his ministry. This is what you might call a rather Eastern Orthodox approach, since these episodes are focussed on because they are assumed to be, not so much extraordinary incidents in the life of Jesus, but rather a revealing of the depth dimension of where he comes from, and whom he works with. What counts here is the consortium of God the Father, speaking his words of approval over his beloved Son, and the cloud of Shekinah glory that brings the scene to a close, together with the uncreated light that glows from Jesus, as manifestations of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit shines forth from the Son in all that he does in his ministry, and the Father is the originating cause of it.

This scene would come to make sense in all its fullness after the Council of Constantinople in 381, which formed the creed we say Sunday by Sunday, and which acknowledged the doctrine of the Trinity, that Father, Son and Holy Spirit are equal in glory, and are equally involved and mutually necessary in the business of our salvation. So what had happened on Mount Tabor was that Jesus had disclosed to the inner circle of disciples, the most trusted three, the inner life of God. He was taking the proclaiming of the good news beyond just letting the human race know the bare minimum information necessary to make its way back to God, and was now generously and trustingly and self-disclosingly letting his trusted associates into what you might like to call the intimacy life of God. This is who God is in himself, when he is as it were at home.

This matters to us because it removes the possibility of what might be called a God behind God, a God operating by different agendas to those disclosed in the saving events of Jesus’ ministry. Such a dark God might not fundamentally care about us - might not be the gracious God we have come to expect. As King Lear said despairingly at the end of his life, "As flies are we to the Gods, they kill us for their sport." But now we know that the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is not sovereignly indifferent to our plight. He has given us an insight in to the Triune persons who are one unity of being within which he is located, a continually circulating exchange of compassionate and communicating energy.

I said before that this is a very Eastern Orthodox perspective on the transfiguration. It is to them also that we owe an intriguing take on what this scene means for our eternal destiny. The person who saw this most clearly was the 20th century Russian theologian Sergius Bulgakov.

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. Then, 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. So we can look forward to this glorious conclusion of our lives with eager anticipation.

But here we need to sound a note of caution, and of fuller disclosure about why the transfiguration took place. If we focus only on our glorious future inheritance, and on the glittering plenitude of being of the Triune persons, then we might forget what happens when all this future glory comes into collision with our tragically flawed world. When Jesus descends the mountain he then sets off to Jerusalem for his appointment with destiny. The next hill he will be climbing is the hill of Golgotha, on which he will die a slave death, the humiliating, degrading death that all free born Roman citizens dreaded. We have domesticated the cross so much that we find it hard to recover the scandalising dimensions of such a death for the contemporaries of Jesus.

The transfiguration was about strengthening Jesus to face this ordeal, about encouraging him in such a way as to have the intestinal fortitude to go through with this essential concluding part of his ministry. And it is a reminder to us that although we have now been reassured that we are dealing with a trustworthy God, and that our final destiny is one of transcendent glory, we too must take the road of the cross in order to arrive at that destination.

Given the way our world is, locked in as it is to cycles of frustration, failure, self-destructive folly and tragedy we too can expect the cross to enter our lives unasked, and in ways contoured to the circumstances of our personal story. We too must adopt a cruciform pattern of living to get to the weight of future glory promised us. But we are strengthened Sunday by Sunday with the emergency rations graciously given us in the Eucharist to make this journey along the roads of this world. Approached in the right way, the Sunday Mass can be our personal ascent of Mount Tabor.