READINGS:
Genesis 12: 1-4a
Psalm 121
Romans 4: 1-5, 13-17
Matthew 17: 1-9
The Transfiguration is one of those surreal moments in which we, and for that matter the gospel writers, really cannot conceive or convey what is going on. I have been known to refer to them as “sacred mushroom moments” but of course I wouldn't do that here!
That said I admit that I am a lover of the psychedelic 60s. There is much that is beyond telling, and that era went down its own majestic rabbit holes of exploring the wildness of the human mind. Turn on, tune in, drop out, in Timothy Leary’s famous mantra of that decade, is a mantra that it is undoubtedly a good thing I came along too late to learn. I was too young to indulge in the psychedelic breezes that were blowing then. Yet in all seriousness they were the desperate attempts by a counterculture to fine meaning, love, joy, in life where society seemed to offer none.
Perhaps I digress. I am not here or anywhere advocating psychedelic or hallucinogenic substances. I am saying however that there is much that the words of human conversation cannot convey, and the psychedelic poets of the 60s and the inspired writers of sacred scripture found themselves trapped in the same morass as they tried to find ways to express the inexpressible.
For this Transfiguration scene, common to Luke, Mark, and Matthew in their telling of the Jesus story, is telling us something, but it is something beyond words. It is prefiguring that other beyond-words sequence of scenes that began with the event no human eye could witness, the resurrection of Jesus from the dead on that first inexplicable Easter morning. I don’t know what happened on that Day, or, rather, I don’t know how it happened. But I know the frightened few became the bearers of resurrection hope, hope, justice, righteousness and life-laying-down-love from the moment that they learned that the man of Nazareth had shattered the cords of death.
And this was all prefigured, in its lesser way, in our surreal scene of Transfiguration. But why? Why are we being told about Peter, James and John and their encounter that was beyond words, their encounter with indescribable holiness on a mountain top, shortly before the terrible suffering and execution of their friend and leader?
I suspect if there is to be one central takeaway from this surreal scene it is simply that Peter, James and John, and of course Jesus, came down from their mountaintop experience. They came down with a new instruction which they heard, as they understood, directly in the voice of God. “Listen.”
Soon they were to encounter that greater moment, the resurrection, which takes place after those protracted scenes in which we see revealed the extraordinary pains that divine love undergoes to bring about hope for humanity. With the suffering and death of God behind him, Jesus is prepared to add to that message “listen,” to add to that message the new command, “go, tell.”
It is worth noting what the disciples were not permitted to do at the time of the Transfiguration. They were not permitted to remain fossilised, memorialising nostalgically some moments in their past, like burnt out rock stars or sports men or women recalling their long-gone finest hour. They are told to listen, and later, after seeing the extremes of God’s love they are told to proclaim. To proclaim that love even to the ends of the earth and the end of time.
The sequence is critical. Listen. Pause, reflect, listen again if you like, for that is what Lent gives us a chance to do. And only then are we sufficiently renewed in faith to proclaim hope to the world.
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