Transfiguration

 Transfiguration Aug 6 2023

Daniel 7.9-10,13-14, Luke 9.28-36

What do you imagine when you imagine heaven? And what is the God at its centre like?

The writer of our Old Testament reading from the book of Daniel had no doubt. God was like earthly kings, only better, and his heaven was just an incredibly spectacular version of the kind of throne rooms the writer might have known. 

The book of Daniel is a strange one, a compilation of writings composed over several hundred years. There are stories, probably originally passed on orally, which date back to the time when the Israelites were in exile in Babylon, like the famous story of Daniel in the Lions’ Den, in which kings get their comeuppance. But there are also complex mystical visions, like the one we heard today, which probably date to a later time, when Israel was under the thumb of new empires, and wondered whether they would ever be free. The visions, like those we heard today, were meant to reassure them that the earthly realities they saw around them weren’t the whole, or the end, of the story. God was still in charge. In this passage, the writer envisions him as an almighty ruler. He sits, enthroned in glory, wreathed in fire, completely in control. 

Imagination is a powerful thing, but we need to be careful not to let our images mislead us into thinking they say all there is to be said about God. In the case of a majestic image like Daniel’s, it’s important that we don’t end up idolising the power and bling it portrays – the sheer bigness of God - as if that’s that only truth that matters. It’s all too easy, if we do that, to assume that wealth, strength and power are signs of God’s blessing, and weakness and smallness are signs of failure. That’s a temptation to which individuals, churches and nations have fallen prey again and again in Christian history.  It has led us to feel entitled to exploit others and the natural world in our quest to have more and be more. “Wider still and wider, shall thy bounds be set, God who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet.” If God is big, then it’s a short step to believing that “big” is God and making that the goal that trumps every other goal in life.

The people of the Bible knew, at some level at least, that God was beyond human imagining – not a supersized “king in the sky” - but it was a hard truth to hold onto. The second of the Ten Commandments told them that they shouldn’t make any “graven image” of God, for that reason; the minute we create an image of God, we somehow fix God in that image. But even if they didn’t carve or paint God, the mental image of that heavenly throne room became firmly entrenched, dominant, swamping any other images.

That’s why the story in our Gospel reading, which we call the Transfiguration, is so important. 

It’s a strange story, of course. Seeing someone shining with glory, flanked by the Old Testament figures of Moses and Elijah would blow anyone’s mind. But I think the strangeness of this story, and its significance, may go even deeper than that, and I wonder whether the most important point of this episode wasn’t so much the transfiguration of Jesus as the transfiguration of the disciples, the change – eventually – it wrought in them and their understanding of God.

We are used to thinking of Jesus as the Son of God. We are used to seeing him portrayed with a shiny halo. Even the paintings of his nativity often show him as a sort of “glow in the dark” baby, as if it was obvious from the beginning that he was different. But the reality wasn’t like that. He was a carpenter, the son of a carpenter, from an ordinary family. He had no credentials, no formal religious training, nothing to single him out. He wasn’t even from Jerusalem, but from a backwater town in Galilee. When Nathanael, who eventually became a disciple of Jesus, first heard of him, his reaction was , “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” (John 1.44). It seemed unthinkable to him that God would work through someone like this. 

And if a Galilean carpenter seemed an unlikely Messiah, a crucified Galilean carpenter was even more unlikely. The story of the Transfiguration comes just at the point in when Jesus is starting to head for Jerusalem, where he will be killed. That’s the “departure” he is talking with Moses and Elijah about, his death. He has tried to warn his disciples that this will happen, but they don’t want to hear it. They don’t get it, and they won’t get it until after his resurrection, when it will start to dawn on them that the crucifixion wasn’t a disaster, but the heart of God’s message to them - in fact, in some sense, it is the message. The crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus show them that God can be found in weakness, humiliation, and in a squalid death just as much as in the big, shiny, successes of life. The Transfiguration is a moment when the glory of God becomes visible in Jesus, but it is only a moment, and Jesus doesn’t seem to want to prolong it – Peter’s offer to build shelters, to cling to this moment, isn’t taken up. 

It matters that the disciples come to understand all this partly because many of them will face the same fate as Jesus, their lives looking as if they are ending in failure, but also because it will help them make sense of Jesus’ mission, and profoundly shape their own. Jesus spent much of his time with people whose whole lives looked liked failures, people who were marginalised and oppressed, people who were often written off, people the blingy powers-that-were of his day thought were of no consequence at all. Jesus’ affirmed, though, in his words and his deeds, that they were people in whom God’s presence could be found, lights of the world in whom God’s glory could shine. 

So the astonishment of the disciples at the transfiguration isn’t just that they see the glory of God breaking through, heaven on earth, in their midst, but that they see this happening in their mate, the man they have gone down the pub with, laughed and joked with, maybe even employed to fix their boats… and the man they will soon see crucified. 

The transfiguration is, of course, a spectacular moment, but it reminds us that God’s glory is not just found in the obvious places, the places of success and acclaim. God is big, unimaginably, infinitely so, but that doesn’t mean that “big” is necessarily God. Our God is also the God of the mustard seed, the tiny speck of yeast that leavens the dough, the grain of wheat that falls into the ground and dies, and the people that don’t look important at all, but are vital to God. 

Maybe if we really understood this, we might be able to let go of some of that perpetual striving for greatness which so easily poisons our lives, our nations, our churches, and the natural environment we depend on. And maybe, if we really understood this, we and the world around us would be transfigured too. 

Amen