Christ Church

“Behold a voice out of the cloud”

“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.

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“Ye shall know them by their fruits”

“How came we ashore?” Miranda asks her father, Prospero, in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. He was the Duke of Milan but preferred his books in the study of natural philosophy to the mundane duties of running his dukedom which he had delegated to his brother, Antonio.. Betrayed by his brother, who in cahoots with Alonzo, the King of Naples, usurped his dukedom, Prospero and Miranda are set adrift on the seas on a derelict raft. Never mind that Milan is not an Italian port city! They wash up on an island – “the Bermoothes” – Bermuda, as it turns out. Not such a bad place to come ashore, I suppose. The play is the only play of Shakespeare that is set outside the Euro-Mediterranean world. Miranda at the time in the play was three. Now at fifteen she learns who she is, the daughter of the Duke of Milan. Prospero’s answer to her question “how came we ashore?” is “by providence divine.”

The play explores the ambiguities of Prospero’s intent. His knowledge of nature in Renaissance eyes is a kind of magic – so-called ‘white magic’. It belongs to early modernity in different ways to see knowledge as conferring a power over nature. We should be only too well aware of the deadly consequences of such knowledge in our own times. Prospero conjures up a storm, a tempest, to bring his betrayers to the island and under his power. But to what end? Revenge? Or something more? Reconciliation?

There is a nice sense here of the interplay between natural and moral philosophy. On the ship are not only his betrayers but also the son of one of his betrayers, Ferdinand, the son of Alonso, King of Naples. As well there is the noble Neapolitan, Gonzalo, who gave Prospero his books as he was being set adrift. On the island, there is Caliban, the symbolic image of the indigenous cultures in their encounter with European culture. Shakespeare not only explores the complexity of that encounter but provides a Euro-critique of itself that derives from the indigenous cultures themselves.

The play unfolds the love theme between Ferdinand and Miranda that leads to forgiveness and reconciliation. Forgiveness and reconciliation are extended even towards those who show no remorse, no change, such as Prospero’s brother, Antonio, and Alonzo’s brother, Sebastian, unrepentant scoundrels and miscreants both. Yet grace is greater than those who resist it; they are sustained by what they refuse to embrace but, at the same time, what they cannot enjoy. There’s the rub.

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