Transfiguration Sunday (Last Sunday of Epiphany, Year C)

Metamorphosis
Last Sunday after Epiphany before Lent (year C)
14th February 2010 8:00 a.m. Morning Prayer with Eucharist 
Beijing, China
Readings: Exodus 34: 29-35; 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2; Luke 9:28-43; Psalm 99

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

The Old Testament reading today is about Moses going to the Holy Mountain and returning with the brightness of God still on him.  In today’s Epistle, Paul comments on the Exodus passage and applies it to his pastoral charges in Corinth.  The Gospel is Luke’s version of the transfiguration, when Jesus was transformed before his close disciples’ eyes to something they were later—after the resurrection—to realize was nearer his true glory.  In the Church’s calendar, today is the last Sunday before Lent, called Transfiguration Sunday on account of the Gospel Reading.  Usually the transfiguration of Jesus is preached today.  I want to talk to you, however, on the transformation of us.  It is what St. Paul in today's Epistle describes. 

2 Cor 3:12-4:2
Since we have such a hope, we are very bold, not like Moses, who would put a veil over his face so that the Israelites might not gaze at the outcome of what was being brought to an end. But their minds were hardened. For to this day, when they read the old covenant, that same veil remains unlifted, because only through Christ is it taken away. Yes, to this day whenever Moses is read a veil lies over their hearts. But when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.  Therefore, having this ministry by the mercy of God, we do not lose heart. But we have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways. We refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God’s word, but by the open statement of the truth we would commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God.

Sometimes people use the Corinthians passage in an anti-Semitic and sectarian way—in it, Paul compares the revelation of God to Moses unfavorably to the revelation of God in Jesus:  Moses had to veil his face before the glory, Jews in the Synagogue veil their faces (cover their heads) when they read Torah and this is an emblem of their misunderstanding of what Torah means, but Christians don’t have to veil their faces and they have an undistorted understanding of God’s will.

But this supercessionist reading of 2 Corinthians is wrong.  The letter was written well before Judaism and Christianity had gone their separate ways, at a time when most people who accepted Jesus as Messiah still identified themselves as Jews and made some effort to keep the Law of Moses.  The issue Paul is addressing in this passage is one of halakic interpretation—whether the demands of the Law are the key to making oneself right with God, and if so, how rigorously one applies them.  Paul argues as a Jew among other Jews.  He argues not just a liberal halakic view—one that says that the demands of the Law are not all that important—but a radical one.  He says that the demands of Law are wholly relativized and made secondary to what God accomplished in Jesus.  He bases his argument on the hope that the Christ event gives those who trust Jesus. 

Again, writing as a Jew he uses a very Jewish tool of scriptural interpretation-  the Midrashic technique of linking scriptural texts and taking specific details of the text as points of departure for imaginative and interpretive development.  The evocative image of the glory of God resting on Moses—a symbol in the Exodus story of Moses’ authority—is Paul’s point of departure. In the Exodus story, the light emanating from Moses’ head as he descends from Sinai frightens people.  Moses covers his head to calm their fears and the brightness fades enough so that Moses can uncover his head.  Paul applies the story to his own discussion with his contemporaries about how rigorously Jews should follow the Law and whether it should apply to Gentiles converted to the Judaism of the time that believed that Jesus was God’s anointed one.

He says he and other believers in Christ are bolder than Moses because of the hope that Jesus gives them--  where Moses in the story covered his face in God’s presence, they can look into the face of the revelation of God directly.  He contrasts his opponents’ Synagogue liturgical practices—covering the head while the Torah is read—with his own group’s liberal practice of worshipping with head uncovered (at least for the men).  He contrasts the import that he sees in the scriptures with what he calls the “veiled understanding” of his opponents when they read the same scriptures. 

He makes his point using rhetorical devices that in many ways are very foreign to us today.  But his point is that faith in Christ makes you free and brings deepened understanding. 

Paul tops his argument by using a very un-Jewish image.  He takes the pagan myth of metamorphosis, or shape changing, to describe the effect that all of this has on Christians. The myth is not found in the Hebrew scriptures (except maybe when the snake in Eden gets his legs taken away).  It is, however,  well known in the paganism in which most of his Gentile converts would have grown up:  Zeus shifting shapes into swans, or bulls, or young men; the Olympian Gods changing human beings in the myths into constellations, flowers, trees, or  even just echoes.

Paul uses the image probably with a bit of ironic humor--he is, after all, talking about how to handle gentiles and pagans who come into the community.  He himself transforms the image by describing a metamorphosis unlike the sudden, in-all-directions shape-shifting of the Olympian myths.  He describes a gradual but marked metamorphosis that goes toward a single point—the same glory as that surrounding Jesus, to the resurrected Lord's own image.  He writes, “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.” 

Detail from the Mt. Tabor Church of the Transfiguration

What Pauls calls the glory around Jesus is what today’s Gospel reading is about:  This steady, unchanging standard of brightness is what is revealed momentarily in the story.  Jesus' transfiguration is not a metamorphosis or transformation.  It is a brief glimpse of the true hidden state of affairs.  It seems that Peter mistakes the revelation of Jesus’ true glory as perhaps a fading transitory shifting of appearances—that is why he demands the building of Succoth—temporary shelters for the Feast of the Tabernacles or Booths symbolizing the transitory nature of human experience—to celebrate the marvel.  But the narrator comments, “he didn’t know what he was saying.”  The cloud and the voice identifying who and what Jesus is correct the misunderstanding. 

The glory of Jesus is indeed the glory of God himself.  It is a standard and a destination for us believers, though it would probably be wrong to say that we should make it our goal.  We can no more by an act of our own will take on the true image and glory of Jesus than we can shift our shapes into those of animals or flowers.   It is His glory itself upon which we gaze that transforms us.

How is it that we can "gaze upon the glory" of our Lord?

It is important to reflect on our Lord and Savior often and regularly.  That is why daily prayer and scripture reading is an essential part of any Christian’s effective spiritual discipline.  Regular Church attendance helps, but in gazing upon the Lord's glory, we must be the Church, not simply attend Church.  It is not just a passive act of admiration.  Following Jesus in doing corporeal acts of mercy, in serving our fellows, in standing with the outcast, the downtrodden, and the sick--these give us an experience of who Jesus is and what he does.  Such experience provides what Thomistic theologians call a connatural knowledge of God-- recognizing and knowing our Lord not because of formulations and verbal claims, but because parts of our heart and mind are shared with the heart and mind of our Lord. 

Given the stresses of day to day life and our all-too-familiar failings, it is easy to lose heart.  It is easy to think that the proverb "you can’t teach an old dog new tricks" is true and believe that people cannot change.  But the miracle and mystery of our faith is this—we can change because God can change us.  It is part of our faith--in the Apostles’ Creed we affirm that we believe in “the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.”    Belief in any of these things makes no sense at all if you don’t believe that God is at work transforming us, and that as a result, we shall be changed. 

The faith that we are being changed from one glory to another in the direction of the image of Jesus is reflected in the classic line from African-American preaching quoted often by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. "Lord, I know I ain't what I outta be.  And I know I ain't what I'm gonna be.  But thank God Almighty, I ain't what I was!"

Such change is sometimes hard, so hard that at times we do not know whether we will be able to bear it.  At other times it is seems easy as taking off a heavy winter coat in the summer heat.   But no matter how hard or easy, it goes on.  And it is not a shape-shifting that turns us into something alien, something that is "not us."  When Paul says this turns us into "the image of Christ" he is not saying it removes our individuality.  What he describes is a transformation into our true selves, the individual people God intended when He created each of us, with all that makes us who we are, but absent the distortions, the twistings, the brokenness that we so often mistake for what makes us who we are. 

One of the greatest foundation stones of personal faith is the experience of seeing transformed brothers and sisters around us, and seeing ourselves over the years as God works with us and changes us.  It doesn’t mean we are perfect, only that God is making progress in finishing his creation in us.  

Charles Wesley in one of his hymns summed it up this way--

Finish then, thy new creation,
Pure and spotless let us be;
Let us see they great salvation perfectly restored in Thee:
Changed from glory into glory,
'Till in heaven we take our place.
'Till we cast our crowns before thee,
Lost in wonder, love, and praise.  

It is not just in heaven when all of God's creation is done that this happens.  As we are transformed here and now, quickly or slowly, it makes us look around us in amazement of these tokens of God's love and then gaze all the more, "lost in wonder, love, and praise," on the author and pioneer of it all. 

As we look upon Christ's glory, may God so work with us all and change us. 

In the name of God, Amen.