by CCW | 6 August 2023 10:00
“The glory of God is man alive [a living human being] and the life of man is the vision of God,” as the 2nd century theologian Irenaeus said. Today is the Feast of the Transfiguration. It sets before us the vision of Christ transfigured, the vision of his divine majesty, and what that means for us, namely, the idea of our transformation. “That we, being purified and strengthened by thy grace, may be transformed into his likeness from glory to glory,” as the Collect puts it. What does that mean and how, we might ask? Well, it has to do with what we see and hear, in short, what we are learning through what is being taught.
On the Mount of Transfiguration we are told, “Behold a voice,” a voice that comes “out of the cloud”, the bright overshadowing cloud of God’s glory, the shekhinah of the Hebrew Scriptures that signifies God’s presence. What does it mean to see what is heard? It means an understanding – a divine understanding articulated through our human understanding. Hearing and seeing are the biblical senses of understanding, and they are, if I may put it this way, the most intellectual of the senses, meaning that they point us beyond a literal sense to something intellectual, to something understood. To behold a voice is the language of Revelation.
The Transfiguration is the summertime epiphany of the Trinity. It complements the wintertime epiphany in the Baptism of Christ. For both there is a beholding of what is heard. “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” (Matt.3.17) and again, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; Hear ye him” (Matt.17.5). The Baptism inaugurates the way of the obedience of Christ for us, our justification. The Transfiguration commands the way of the obedience of Christ in us, our sanctification; hence the added charge, “Hear ye him.”
The voice is the Father’s voice. To hear that voice in the biblical sense of acting faithfully upon what we hear is to enter into the way of understanding through the Revelation of God in Jesus Christ. The sequence of teaching which brings us to the Transfiguration (Matt.16.13-17.1) illustrates just how hard and yet how necessary that way is. “Who do men say that the Son of man is? Who do you say that I am?”, Jesus asks his disciples. Peter answers: “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God”.
Jesus’ response shows that what Peter understands, he understands from God. “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jona! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven” (Matt.16.7). It is not simply a finite human understanding, a human opinion or construct by us. It shares in something more. It is divinely human. Through this understanding Simon becomes Peter, πετρος, which means ‘rock’ And upon this understanding (and no other), Jesus says, “Upon this rock, I will build my church” against which nothing will prevail (Matt.16.18). But how well do we stand upon this rock of understanding? Again, Peter provides the paradigm.
For no sooner has he confessed Christ and been named Peter, the rock, when he is rebuked as Satan for denying Jesus’ teaching about the necessity of what will unfold in his going up to Jerusalem; namely, the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ (Matt.16.21-23). Blessed by Jesus for an understanding revealed by God through him, he is then cursed by Jesus for being “not on the side of God, but of men” (Matt.16.23)!
Peter does not fully understand the confession he has made. It is not that the confession itself is not true; rather, his understanding of it is not altogether adequate to its truth. There is the constant need to think the fullness of understanding contained within it. As with Peter, so with us, both individually and institutionally. Such is the journey of the understanding, of faith seeking understanding.
And that is the real meaning, I think, of our being transformed, transformed through our growing into what we see and hear spiritually and intellectually in Christ. It is the meaning of our liturgy and the life of the Church which seeks the realization of who we truly are in Christ. We can even learn from the example of the unrighteous servant, not to be unrighteous in our dealings with one another but to act with prudence, a kind of practical wisdom that belongs to the truth and journey of our lives to God.
But does this process of transformation mean that we become different persons or different beings? Does it mean a negation of the givenness of nature and our being? Do we cease to be human or is the transformation about the realization of the truth of who we are in Christ?
Dante, in the very first canto of the Paradiso of his Divine Comedy, invents a word in Italian, “trasumanar” sometimes translated as “transhumanised.” It opens us out to the whole vision of God that belongs to the Paradiso, the vision of the glory of God in and through the various aspects of our humanity as seen and known in God. It is not a negation of creation but the fulness of its redemption. It is not a flight from the world into some kind of techno-future which is what is suggested in the current idea of transhumanism, itself a re-engineering of our humanity to be like machines. For Dante the word and idea which it conveys is about our being more truly and fully who we are in God and thus by definition something more than being reduced to just ourselves.
Peter has to learn that the sufferings of the Messiah belong to the glories of Christ. This brings out the centrality of the Passion of Christ. “He went not up to glory but first he suffered pain.” And so must we. Our worldly ambitions, our temptations to despair, our self-obsessions and worries, our sense of hurt and wrong, have to be crucified in us. They don’t define us. The way of the cross is required of us in our identity with Jesus. “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Matt.16.24), Jesus says to the disciples. And behold, what follows immediately is the Transfiguration. We enter into the Revelation of God and find ourselves in the company of the Trinity. “Behold a voice.” That sense of self-denial frees us to who we are in God, to our true selves, as living human beings and as such the glory of God.
The Father speaks out of the bright overshadowing cloud of the Holy Spirit to give birth to our understanding of the essential identity of the Son who was conceived by the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary. The story of the Transfiguration ends with Jesus’ command: “Tell no one the vision until the Son of man is raised from the dead”.
It is only in the light of the Resurrection that we understand more fully the confession of “Christ, the Son of the living God” and the character of our identity with Christ. “We suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him” (Rom.8.17) as we heard last Sunday in the Epistle reading.
The question for us and for our churches is whose voice will we behold? For there are many voices, such as the voices of our culture in all their complexity and confusion, their contradiction and cacophony, which vie for our attention. When those voices are not brought into the understanding of the voice of God’s Revelation, then they are destructive and deadly voices that negate the transcendence of God and the givenness of nature and of our humanity as living beings; in short, they negate the vision of God and the journey of the understanding into what is seen and heard.
To behold the voice of the Father means to enter into the understanding which the Trinity reveals. It means to be transformed by what we behold; in short, to be “transformed by the renewing of [our] minds” and not to be conformed to this world (Rom.12.2). “Hear ye him” commands our obedience and establishes the character of our witness and our life in faith. It is what it means to “behold a voice out of the cloud.”
Fr. David Curry
Transfiguration/ Trinity 9
August 6th, 2023
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2023/08/06/sermon-for-the-feast-of-the-transfiguration-ninth-sunday-after-trinity/
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