What Does The Transfiguration Mean

The Quiet Truth

It is hard to face the quiet truth that so often we, as followers of Jesus Christ, are determined to prioritise our own agendas, shaping our faith to fit our comfort and preferences. So much of Jesus’ teaching—the radical forgiveness, the costly love, the call to serve the poor—too easily slips into the “that doesn’t apply to me” category, conveniently shelved alongside the commandments we find uncomfortable.

And what we take away from the account of the Transfiguration is all too often completely the wrong message.

I must have heard at least ten sermons on the Transfiguration. And pretty much they were all the same! Something like this ...

By all means dwell on the glory of the Lord. Sustain your spiritual life by spending time in his presence. But understand that it is also very important to “come down from the mountaintop” and get on with life.

Sounds good, doesn't it? Except that it misses the entire point of the Transfiguration! It's bad exegesis. If that's the message you feel you should illustrate, then take that other hilltop outside Jerusalem, when Jesus ascended, and directly told the disciples to go and get on with it!

This particular mountaintop experience has got something else, which for some reason (touch of irony here which may become obvious later...) I've never heard talked about.

Now forget the sermons you have heard - what does this mountaintop remind you of? Of course, the law was given to Moses on a mountaintop. A bright cloud - God's intense presence - surrounded him. His face shone. Seems to fit better doesn't it?

And Moses was in the middle of an Exodus - a flight for freedom. And what did they talk about in this passage? His departure. The word departure in this verse is one used in the sense of “dearly departed” - i.e. died. But more interestingly the word in the Greek is the word exodon . They spoke of His exodus.

We know that that old story of Passover, of Exodus, of a new life in a new land, is a living prophecy, written in history, of what Jesus does for us here and now. Jesus himself used the parallels of Passover and Exodus to explain his own death, and resurrection.

Now the cross and the exodus, the new and the old, are linked but remain completely different.

When the Children of Israel finally get free in the book of Exodus, it is attended by violence, firstborn children dying, soldiers drowning, and the battle fought against flesh and blood human beings. And when they come into the new land, they do it with violence. Certainly Jerico was a wicked city, but can you imagine an invading army storming into Port De Prince shortly after that city was razed by the Haitian earthquake, and slaughtering all the remaining residents?

It is unthinkable.

A Radically Different Way

Jesus fulfills the story of exodus and taking possession of a new land, but in an utterly different way to the disciples expectations.

They too had read in their Hebrew scriptures the violence that we struggle to come to terms with it. Only by ignoring the fact that the Midianites, and the Canaanites, and the Philistines were actually people – mums and dads and children and grandparents, can we make it seem temporarily palatable. And they possibly had the same misgivings from time to time.

Or maybe not!!

Take that uncomfortable and puzzling story of the prophet Elijah calling down fire from heaven to consume his enemies (2 Ki 1:10). Jesus doesn't try to reconcile this with the way we are supposed to behave. He simply rejects it outright. When his disciples ask him

Jesus rebukes them...

Let me underline what Jesus says here: what kind of spirit you are of. You only have two choices. Either you read the scriptures with the spirit of Christ, or you read them with a spirit that sees God as a destroyer, and somehow as well as a saviour.

We cannot, as true followers of Jesus, simply read the Old Testament and assume that it gives us a true picture of God. At best, there we see a vague shadow or outline. So don't bring ideas about God's character derived from your Old Testament reading, and try to match this with the character you see in Jesus Christ. Instead, let the radical life of Jesus, in all its humanity, and humility, its power and its paradoxical weakness, in its serving and its ruling, redefine God's true nature for you.

It's an old adage – we read the Old Testament through the New, but what on earth does that really mean? Well we know on occasions it will mean a different emphasis, on others a different direction, and sometimes a 180 degree turn.

This is how Jesus read the scriptures. In fulfilling the law, some parts of it were totally reversed, changing the laws condoning enemy-hatred into a command to love them.

You may be thinking, haven't we wandered off the point here. How does this fit in with the Transfiguration? Well, you know how the story continues.

Peter finally recovers from his terror, and as usual, speaks without thinking!

Peter wants to create something to enshrine this moment into something permanent.

He wants to build something institutional based on the Law + the Prophets + Jesus.

Well, God the Father wants to put a stop to that! And so suddenly He envelops all three of them in a cloud, and they disappear. A moment passes. Then slowly the cloud disperses. And Moses and Elijah have gone. Only Jesus is left. He is standing alone. Then God's voice is heard saying

How can we have missed the point?

Peter, James and John are struggling with Jesus radical reading of the law and prophets, and they are grappling with a new understanding of what God wants! It's not just about the nation of Israel, God loves the whole world. And some things they have learned about God from their scriptures are just plain wrong! Some of the law is reversed. The Father doesn't punish sin with inflicted suffering. The behaviour of some of the prophets was wrong, even though they appear to be following God's instructions. The enemy is not to be resisted with violent warfare.

Instead the enemy is to be loved!

Loved!? Seriously?

Yes. We need to stop ducking and weaving, and concede that what Jesus says always again and again trumps whatever we have understood from the lives of Moses and Elijah, and from the Law and the Prophets.

Take a second look at how Jesus uses scripture … or Paul. You must have noticed how they seem sometimes to play fast and loose with it, pulling it out of context, and sometimes reshaping it within a New Testament construct. The only explanation is that they were led by the Holy Spirit to do just that. The early church had to read their scriptures this way, otherwise they would have simply created a offshoot Jewish cult. The church fathers grappled with this too. So if you want to be truly faithful to your Christian heritage, there's the challenge.

You don't have to pretend any more that religious violence is okay because you think God must have said so. You don't have to pretend it really was okay to stone people. You can stand alongside Jesus as he truly reveals the character of God.

And there is one more important point to notice.

The word Testament in the Bible context means 'covenant'. But the New Testament that we read is not really the new covenant! When Moses came down from the mountain, he carried from God the tablets of stone. That Old Deal or old covenant was written down. But what Peter, James and John had at the end of the day was not anything remotely resembling a document.

They had had an encounter, with the personality of God. They were encountering him every day, of course, in the “normal” course of Jesus life. Now they encounter a different side to him. His face is shining, he is surrounded by a kind of solid overpowering light, which pours out of him.

And this new deal or new testament, is not the writing in these parts of the Bible.

The new covenant, inaugurated by Jesus with the words,

is written on your heart, and mine. As Paul comments in 2 Corinthians 3:3,

And God writes that on your heart as you personally encounter the glory of Christ. It leads to his life-spirit filling you and others, and the loving selfless character of God spontaneously creating a new community, which mystically becomes united with God finally, as a bride is united with her groom.

Unfortunately, christendom and christianity and the organised church cannot really deal with all this individual freedom and spontaneous unity and spirit led living. It is so much easier to organise unity bureaucratically by all agreeing on a particular interpretation of scripture, and then getting people to sign up!

So again and again, you will find the organised church trying to hedge people around with formal membership lists, written documents, structures and rotas and written responsibilities, hierarchies and special clothes and special days and special seasons. Extra creeds to repeat weekly.

OK, so we have to live with this stuff!!

But let us never believe that this is what we are called into. No, it is into an encounter with a living God, one who turns upside down our notions of who he is, and of who we are.

We do well to hear again Jesus words in John 16:13 (NIV),

But you may for a while now, have been struggling with another question.
If Jesus’ teaching reshapes how we understand the Law and the Prophets, why didn’t God reveal things that way from the beginning?

Well, we did promise you some courageous questions, didn't we!

So we will deal with that next.

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