Sunday 6th August 2006The Transfiguration
Fr David Cherry
Daniel 7: 9-10 & 13-14; II Peter 1: 16-19; Mark 9:2-10
“This is my beloved Son: hear him”
The glory – the weight of God’s beauty – is made visible in human flesh like yours and mine.
A lament I sometimes hear among Christians is that preaching has
gone soft; the church’s teaching has grown weak on sin,
judgement, heaven and hell. We don’t preach about these
subjects. Funerals too often focus on the deceased and not on
God… and so on. What I think is being said is that the
Christian faith has lost its grit. Things have become a bit too
matey. We do not fear God and we’re drifting into ‘anything
goes’, accommodating ourselves too much to expectations around
us: what some people call ‘the world’.
I’ve heard a lot of what I call ‘contra mundi’
sermons in my life - ‘sermons against the world’, sermons
which generalise and pick on the world, encouraging us to be suspicious
of it – ‘them over there’ and ‘we over
here’ are of course different. They all leave me feeling
depressed. Recently, at a first mass, I heard a preacher say that
‘men (sic) prefer darkness’ and I thought
‘hogwash!’
It is not because I am an eternal optimist – somehow able to
believe that a glass if half-full rather than half-empty, that I find a
suspicion of human nature difficult. Rather, it is because I
believe what the book of Genesis tells me: “And behold it
was very good.”
The whole message of the Bible, the whole disclosure of God towards us
which culminates in the Person of Jesus; the liturgy we celebrate is to
bring this home to us. God is for us. God is not against
us. God wants us to live by faith and not by fear (I wonder how
many times Jesus is reported to have said: Fear not); God wants us to
live in the faith that we are loved, even ‘liked’ and that
love is eternal; and that love is for me and for you.
I hope that is why we come here – Sunday by Sunday – to be renewed in the perfect love that casts out fear.
On this feast of the Transfiguration we consider the glory of Christ,
revealed for who he truly is: God and fully human. You and I are
made in the image of God. AND it is a glory that is eroded
through the envy we find in ourselves; an envy which leads us away from
our true glory as unique beings made in the Divine Image.
But we cannot discover what sin is until we have begun to discover what
the glory of being human is and rejoice in it. The theologian
Matthew Fox speaks of ‘original blessing’ – an
antidote to the misunderstanding of ‘original sin’.
Hopkins says in one of his sonnets:
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells
Selves – goes itself; myself it speak and spells
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.
And this is why I have put that quote from Cardinal Basil Hume on
today’s Mass sheet about humility. Humility is not about
having a low-opinion of oneself (there are plenty of people and
influences to do that for us - and it is not a virtue); and to fear God
is not to be frightened, but to know oneself as a loved creature of God
and to find oneself in awe and reverence for God because of the wonder
of one’s being; someone who is being loved into being; someone
who is emerging from the darkness of self-deception into the clear
light of the truth and able to relax and enjoy being who one is.
To be transfigured is to be revealed in one’s truth, to see
one’s true worth. The process of what the Eastern
Orthodox call ‘deification’ or divination is not about
becoming something one is not, but becoming more truly who one
is.
“This is my beloved Son: hear him” comes the voice from
heaven at Jesus’ baptism and again at his Transfiguration
on the mount. The glory – the weight of God’s
beauty – is made visible in human flesh like yours and
mine. Here he is. Attend to him. Listen, hear, see,
perceive.
There is a profound paradox at the heart of what is being made
known. The disciples, before they set off for Jerusalem, are told
to attend to him because the fullness of God in Christ will be made
known in a sign of contradiction, the defenceless and vulnerable figure
of the Cross.
In St John’s gospel there is no account of the Transfiguration,
this ‘making known’ on Mount Tabor. Instead, for St
John there is a type of Transfiguration experience which happens in the
Garden of Gethsemane at the point of Jesus’ betrayal.
Seeing Judas approaching, Jesus asks: ‘Whom seekest thou?’
and Judas replies ‘Jesus of Nazareth’. Then Jesus
says ‘I am he’ surrendering himself into the hands of
others, to be done unto. At this point of giving away his power
and revealed as fully human, there is God’s glory revealed.
And the soldiers fall to the ground. (Vanstone: The Stature of
Waiting)
Love and Judgement go together. A gospel of frightening people
into submission is not good news. But a gospel where God is as
helpless as me, for love of me has power to change my heart and make me
humble, to own that I am also a ‘wounded creature’.
And this coming to the truth of who I am is judgement.
What further judgement is needed? It reveals to us the
extraordinary vulnerability of God who choses to become so and to be
known like this, a loving Victim. And it is our judgement because
we realise – if we allow it to come home to us – the
terrible weight of our deception of control and our capacity for every
inhumane action because of our woundedness and obduracy.
Allowing love to judge us in this way, we respond in humility and
penance – the acknowledgement that this is simply true. And
this truth is what frees us from stubborn pride, false dignity,
defensive behaviour. With relief we say – let me stay in
this truth, let me live from this truth. The disciples on the
mount want to remain there, but of course living from this truth is a
relational journey of rebirth to be lived out on the plain.
So ‘Tis good Lord to be here’. It is good to be in the place of truth, knowing myself for who I am.
We come – and I would say there is no other real reason to come
– to be renewed in the perfect love of God for you and me.
Here it is good to be, in humility as we are - so that we may receive
the creative love of God bringing us to life; restoring, healing.
It is his action upon us, within us.
We lift up our hearts to sing of Christ’s glory and of ours in
him: ‘From glory to glory advancing we praise thee O
God…’ In doing so we pray that our hearts may be
attuned to his heart for us; that all humanity may reflect that glory
which we behold as we acknowledge him in the Sacrament. The
priest declares: Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins
of the world – so that we may attend to him.
“This is my Son, the beloved – in the full glory of your
humanity - . Hear him – attend to him….”
Amen