Tomorrow, Thursday, August 6th, the Church celebrates the Feast of the Transfiguration. The Transfiguration occurs right after Peter's confession. Jesus asks, "Who do people say that I am?" Peter gets the question right: "You are the Christ of God."
Standing before these disciples, is the long-awaited Messiah of God. But then, Jesus shocks them by telling his disciples that be "must suffer many things, and be rejected .... and be killed, ... "(Luke 9:22).
These disciples can hardly comprehend this: God's Messiah must also suffer and be killed. Who signs up for this? When you throw in lot with a contender for messiah; you’re looking for a winner. You’re looking for the pomp and power. You’re hoping for glory.
But it gets worse. Jesus tells those who would be his disciples, "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me" (9:23). Not only will there be no glory in this for Jesus, there will be no glory in this for his followers either. Jesus must suffer in order to be obedient to God; they must suffer in order to follow Jesus. And the transfiguration on the mountain occurs right after Jesus’ doubly distressing explanation.
Peter, James, and John, the lead disciples, go away with Jesus to a high mountain. There, Jesus is caught up in a glorious revelation. Taken up into a cloud of glory and they are overcome with awe. Jesus is seen talking with the two great forebears of the Jewish faith: Moses and Elijah. All three synoptic gospels tell of the Transfiguration, where Jesus's face shone like the sun And then, suddenly, they see only Jesus, and hear a voice from the cloud saying, "This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!" In this dazzling moment of recognition, it was revealed to these disciples who Jesus truly was and that his suffering way of the cross was at the heart of who God is and how God operates.
In St John's Gospel, when Jesus says, "The hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified," he is looking towards his suffering and death. And at the Last Supper, as soon as Judas has left to betray him, Jesus says: "Now is the Son of man glorified, and God is glorified in him."
All of the gospels are clear: God’s glory is found in Jesus’ suffering.
In our secular age we believe that freedom and personal happiness give life its meaning. Since there’s nothing beyond this life, according to this way of thinking, suffering can only be seen as an unwelcome disruption. Suffering can’t possibly be a part of what gives life its meaning.
Jesus has a different perspective. He told his disciples, "Whatever you do unto the least of these, you do unto me.” The twentieth century saint, Mother Teresa, always remembered these words of Jesus. She said that she saw the face of Jesus in the face of each sick and dying person she helped. She saw the glory of Christ reflected in the suffering of those left for dead on the streets on Calcutta. She asked the rest of us to look for Jesus' face in the faces of the sick, the suffering, and maligned too.
The physicist Niels Bohr, the father of quantum mechanics, once said that the first inkling he had about the nature of the universe came when he was a child gazing into the fish pond at his family home. For hours on end, he would lie beside the pond, watching the fish swimming in the water. One day he realized with a start that the fish he was watching did not know that they were being watched. The fish were unaware of any reality outside the pond. Sunlight streaming in from the outside was, to the fish, simply an inner illumination contained within the pond. Even when it rained, the fish saw this not as an event from the outside but only as ripples and splashes enclosed in their environment. Bohr wondered if humans were like the fish in this regard, being acted on in multiple dimensions of reality but aware of only our limited frame of reference.
The glory of God let loose in the suffering of Christ that is made plain at the Transfiguration takes us beyond our own limited perceptions to a larger field of vision, a greater dimension of creation. For one brief moment the curtain is drawn back and we are able to see what is at the heart of the universe. The glory of God is found in the suffering of Jesus.
It’s a sobering vision that Peter, James, and John have there on that mountain top. It’s certainly not for the faint hearted. And isn’t it just like the Church to disrupt the last days of summer with this awesome reminder of what kind of God has got a hold of us in Christ.
Andrew +
