Sermon: The Venerable Alun Evans, Lent 2 2008
TRANSFIGURATION
Matthew 17:1-9
At 08.15 and 17 seconds on the morning of August 6th 1945, the bomb doors of the Enola Gay snapped open and the Atomic Bomb, code named ‘Little Boy’, began its descent towards the city of Hiroshima. At 08:16 precisely, the bomb exploded. In a blinding flash of light, described as “brighter than a thousand suns,” the city was pulverised. The immediate death toll following that blinding light is generally accepted as 100,000. Aboard the Enola Gay, now eleven miles away and at 29,000 feet, the tailgunner (Sgt George Caron) looked back over the city and remembered later, “It was like a peep into hell.”
That same day, some 150 miles to the south of Hiroshima, in the city of Nagasaki, Christians would have gathered as on every August 6th to celebrate the feast of the blinding light, the Transfiguration of Our Lord Jesus Christ. For 450 years, Nagasaki had been the centre of the small, persecuted and fragile Christian community in Japan and the home of many martyrs. Christians at morning Mass in St Mary’s Cathedral in Nagasaki may well have been listening to the reading of the strange events on the mountain top and the blinding light and the bright cloud and were preparing to receive the Body of Christ on the Feast of the Transfiguration at the very moment when another blinding light was destroying every living thing is a city not that far away.
Three days later, when ‘Fat Man,’ as the second bomb was code-named, was dropped in Nagasaki, by a twist of fate, St Mary’s Cathedral was the landmark identified by the bombardier and in a blinding flash of light at 11.02am, the persecuted, faithful, centre of Japanese Christianity had become ground zero. The church community of Nagasaki was wiped out in seconds. The defaced, dismembered crucifix of the Cathedral later found in the ruins remains an abiding icon of that blinding flash.
I cannot get away from the paradox of 6th August. I cannot stand at the altar and celebrate the Mass of the Transfiguration without holding those two great lights in fateful juxtaposition – the bright light of the deep mystery of God transfiguring the body of Our Lord Jesus Christ and the blinding flash of the atomic blast transfiguring an entire city. The light of God and the flash of evil; the light of life and the flash of death. A window into heaven; “a peep into hell.”
The three synoptic evangelists tell us that Jesus took the three apostles Peter, James and John, those he was closest to, and led them up to a high mountain. There, Jesus was transfigured into blinding light; both his face and his clothing changed before their eyes. (Matt 17:2) Then, before the eyes of the apostles, appeared the Old Testament prophets Moses and Elijah, talking to Jesus. Luke tells us that they talked about the fate awaiting him in Jerusalem. Peter in his confusion and fear suggested building a dwelling for each of the three men who appeared before them. However the disciples became even more afraid when a bright cloud threw its shadow over them and heard a voice speaking from the cloud, “This is my Son, the beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him.” (Matt 17:5) Matthew tells of their reaction on hearing this: the apostles “fell to the ground and were overcome with fear.” (v 6) When the vision is over, and Jesus again is alone with the disciples, he comforts them saying, “Get up and do not be afraid.” (v 7)
The Latin word transfigurato can be translated by “to be changed into another form.” The Greek word, metamorphosis means “to progress from one state of bring into another.” The Transfiguration is a revelation of Christ’s divine nature in the human person of Jesus of Nazareth.
The heart of the Transfiguration lies in the mystery of the union of the Divine transfiguring the Human on the mountaintop. The cloud in Jewish thought was the vehicle of God’s presence and glory, the shekinah. Jesus is overshadowed by God and his body is transfigured – literally changes its form. For a few moments, Jesus exchanged the normal human form he bore during his earthly life for that glorious form which was his from the beginning and will be his again after his resurrection and exaltation. He shares in the being of the Holy Trinity and in the glory of God. His garments become glistening, intensely white “as no fuller on earth could bleach them.” (Mk 9:3) Whiter than white – there was no other way they could describe what happened. Jesus is enfolded in the blinding light of God’s glory, and in the blinding light of God’s presence, the divinity of the Son of God shone through in the body of the Son of Mary.
Christ lets the three disciples catch a glimpse of a supernatural light which has transforming power. Solrunn Nes, commenting on her icon of the Transfiguration, says that they were not blinded by natural sunlight, but by the uncreated light that has its source in God’s being. Christ is himself that uncreated light, as Paul says in writing to the Colossians, “for in him the whole fullness of the Godhead dwells bodily.” (Col 2:9)
The events on the Mountain of the Transfiguration is not just a piece of past history, a once for all event in the earthly life of Jesus as he prepares for his passion. They are not just an encouragement and confirmation for the three apostles, revealing to them the true nature of Jesus. Yes; both of these. But also a confirmation of our hope for this world: a transformation of creation and ourselves by the power of God, when all shall be changed into Christ’s likeness, as St Paul puts it, “from glory to glory.” (2 Cor 3:18) As we look at the face of Christ in the blinding light of the Transfiguration we can declare: “That is our destiny too. As he is, so shall we be.” Or as St Irenaeus (c130-200) puts it so strikingly, “Christ became man so that we might become God.”
But how difficult it is for us to make this vision our own, with all the drudgery and misery and hate and violence of the world around us. How difficult to believe that God can transfigure all this and bring creation and our lives to be as one with his divine nature, one with his eternal glory, “changed from glory to glory.” We can better get a grip on the events of 6th and 9th August 1945 – a transfiguration we understand only too well when we look at the darkness in the human heart. The blinding atomic light in all its destructive power is more of the stuff of this world.
I believe that the events on the Mountain of Transfiguration opens for us a window into the other side of things – God’s side of reality – and invites us to look through and catch a glimpse of the beauty, the joy, the glory which is God’s will for us and for his creation. Ian Ramsay, Bishop of Durham back in the 1970s, spoke of a ‘Theology of Disclosure’ – times when, in, but through and beyond the events of our daily lives, we experience ‘moments of disclosure’ and have access to God and see things as they truly are in God. In the light of God we come to see the inside of things, the truth of that moment, that experience when it is touched and transfigured by God. At such moments we find ourselves like Jacob waking after his dream and can only confess, “Surely the Lord is in this place and I knew it not! How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” (Gen 28:16-17)
Moments which are charged with God, transfigured by him. A moment of love and friendship when the love given and received between two people opens out into God’s greater love and transfigures the lovers. An encounter with creation – the silence of the night sky, the thunder of the waves, the grace of a snowdrop. A moment of stillness and solitude, heart to heart with the Divine, enveloped in the sound of sheer silence. The worship of God in the beauty of holiness.
Perhaps we need the poet within to lead us to these moments of disclosure. Certainly this is true of a long tradition in Welsh poetry from the fourteenth century ‘Woodland Mass’ of Dafydd ap Gwilym through the hymn writers of the eighteenth century, especially Ann Griffiths and Pantycelyn, and on to Euros Bowen’s ‘Reredos’ and R S Thomas’ ‘The Bright Field’ and ‘The Moor.’ To allow God’s uncreated light reveal to us the inner depth of being as it is found in God.
Perhaps we need allow the priest within us to stretch forth our hands over the ‘fruit of the earth and work of human hands’ and allow God to transfigure the ordinary into the extraordinary so that our work, our love, our suffering become charged with the glory of God. Just as your priest will shortly reach out his hands over bread and wine and call on the Holy Spirit to work the miracle of the altar so that they are transfigured into the Body and Blood of the Lord, the first-fruits of the new creation, things of earth changed from glory to glory and filled with the fullness of Christ.
George Herbert captures for us these moments of transfiguration –
Teach me, my God and King,
in all things thee to see,
and what I do in anything
to do it as for thee.
A man that looks on glass,
on it may stay his eye;
or if he pleaseth, through it pass,
and then the heaven espy.
All may of thee partake;
nothing can be so mean,
which with this tincture, "for thy sake,"
will not grow bright and clean.....
This is the famous stone
that turneth all to gold;
for that which God doth touch and own
cannot for less be told.
But these moment may last only seconds. We might wish like Peter to pitch our tents on the mountaintop and rest there for longer, but it is not to be. Jesus, urging us to have no fear, leads us down again to the plain to work with him for the salvation of the world. But having been there and caught a glimpse of a world transfigured by God we have the courage to stride down the mountain slope to the plain below.
So we leave the disciples following Jesus back down to the plain of life’s struggle. There they meet the distraught father whose son is in the throes of an epileptic seizure and the battle of light and darkness, good and evil is taken up again. Jesus’ face is turned towards Jerusalem and Moses and Elijah had talked with him about what is to happen there. But that doesn’t matter anymore, for he has been to the mountaintop and been transfigured by the glory of the Lord.
We too come down from the mountain top of our moments of disclosure and struggle to live our lives between the two poles of the blinding atomic flash and the brilliance of God’s glory. We have all of us had “a peep into hell”, but we have looked through a window into heaven as well. We know the way is long and the struggle seems unequal, but that doesn’t matter either – for we too have glimpsed a vision of a world transfigured by the glory of God and in the light of those moments of disclosure we pray for the transformation of all things in God and for the consummation of all things in Christ “so that God may be all in all.” (1 Cor 15:28)
(The descriptions of 6th and 9th August 1945 are derived from various accounts of the events of those days; and I am grateful to the presentation of the events on the Mountain of Transfiguration in the Icons of Theophanes the Greek, c1403 and Solrunn Nes, ‘The Mystical Language of Icons,’ 2004. A.W.E.)