Second Sunday in Lent
by the Revd Dr Robert Wilson PhD (Cantab), Old Roman Apostolate UK
The Gospel account of the Transfiguration (which we heard today) follows the scene at Caesarea Philippi where Peter confesses that Jesus is the Messiah, the fulfiller of the hopes of Israel. Some had seen Jesus as John the Baptist, some Elijah or one of the old prophets such as Jeremiah, but Simon Peter grasped the true nature of Jesus’ identity as the anointed liberator of Israel. At this point Jesus began to teach that his true vocation as Messiah was not to be a warrior and conqueror, but the Suffering Servant of Isaiah, who was wounded for our transgressions and chastised for our iniquities. Messianic destiny, enthronement and rule would come about through reversal, repudiation, suffering and death. Peter still understood the Messiah as a warrior and a conqueror, but Jesus rebuked him and said that God’s Messiah is a suffering servant. The Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.
Shortly afterwards Jesus took his three closest disciples Peter, James and John (the Beloved disciple) to pray on a mountainside. The disciples saw Jesus transfigured before them. In some mysterious way they were suddenly able to see the truth of his divinity, and saw the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. They saw Jesus talking with Moses and Elijah, who represent the Law and the Prophets. It was through Moses that the Law had been given on Mount Sinai. Indeed, when Moses came down from the mountainside a veil was put on his face because the skin of his face shone, for to him God spoke face to face as a man speaks to a friend. Elijah was perhaps the greatest of the prophets before John the Baptist, who had also heard the divine voice on the mountainside, not in the earthquake, wind and fire but in the still small voice. In seeing Jesus alongside Moses and Elijah the disciples recognise him as the one in whom the hope of Israel reaches its fulfilment. Peter, overwhelmed by the significance of the occasion, suggests building three tabernacles, one for Moses, one for Elijah and one for Jesus. But the divine voice reiterates what was said at Jesus’ baptism, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” Jesus was not simply the last in the line of prophets like John the Baptist, but was greater even than Moses to whom God spoke face to face as a man speaks to a friend. He was the Son, the Word made flesh, whose glory the disciples beheld on the mountainside.
But through the disciples beheld the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ they had still not fully grasped that the glory of Christ was most powerfully revealed not in power and might but in suffering and death. It is fitting that Jesus’ disciples beheld his glory on the mountainside at the point when he has intimated to them that he must journey to Jerusalem where he would suffer death at the hands of the authorities. Indeed, the disciples are told to say nothing to any man until the Son of Man has been risen from the dead. Only then would they fully understand what Jesus was saying about his vocation to suffer and die in order to fulfil his messianic destiny. St. John’s Gospel (which enshrines the witness of the Beloved disciple who had seen the glory of Christ on the mountainside) goes even further than the others in saying that his suffering and death is not only the way to his final exaltation, but it is his supreme moment of glorification, the lifting up of the Son of Man on the cross in one who took evil upon himself and somehow subsumed it into good.
Few more dramatic contrasts can be imagined than the account of the transfiguration with the healing of the demon possessed man that follows it in the Gospels, after Jesus and his three closest disciples come down from the mountainside. Yet it is a reminder that the period of withdrawal on the mountainside to pray is in order to return to accomplish the redemption of a world mired in suffering and sin. The scene of Christ transfigured in majesty is very different from the impassive serenity of the Buddha, serene in detachment from the world of pain and suffering. On the contrary, the moment of transfiguration while in prayer on the mountainside is a temporary moment of withdrawal from the world in order to return and become more fully involved in it. For without vision the people perish.
We are called to become by grace what he is by nature, to share in the divinity of him who humbled himself to share our humanity. This process of sanctification or deification is not a pantheistic dissolution of our personalities into an impersonal absolute, but rather enables us to become by grace what we were created to be, and so become more truly human than we now are.
Some of the great saints of the Church have by grace experienced this moment of transfiguration while in prayer. It is most commonly associated with the Eastern Church (for example the great Russian saint St. Seraphim of Sarov), but it is not unknown in the Western Church as well. But whether or not we ever witness this moment of transfiguration in prayer, we are all called to become by grace what he is by nature. For we know, as St. John says, that when he finally appears in glory to judge the world at the end of human history we shall be made like him for we shall see him as he is.
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