FINDINGS IV By Harry T. Cook

Harry T. Cook

By Harry T. Cook 

2/4/13

The lectionary blesses its users each year on this Sunday next before Lent with a version of what is known as the "transfiguration." A fixed feast day is actually appointed to celebrate that "event," but it falls each year on August 6, which also, since 1945, is the commemoration of Hiroshima. For that reason alone the day and liturgical intention often get lost in the shuffle. Not to mention that in the Northern Hemisphere, that time in August usually finds people away from home at the seashore or along inland lakes fleeing the dog days and disinclined to dress for church. Notwithstanding, the day and its themes catch up with us between the Sundays of Epiphany and Ash Wednesday.
 
The general topography of the Christmas-to-Passiontide lections in any given year (A, B or C) seems meant not only to tell the New Testament's varying Jesus stories but to re-introduce that personage by stages until the denouement at Easter.
 
The transfiguration narratives are part of that re-introduction as the myth-laden story of the experience on a mountain reprises the divine setting apart of Jesus in the several baptism narratives with variations on the "This is my son" motif.
 
In the off-again-on-again chronology of the synoptic gospels, the transfiguration is placed well along in the accounts of Jesus' public career. Inasmuch as the gospel lections for the Sundays after Epiphany are themselves stories in the post-baptismal life of Jesus, so the transfiguration serves as a pause in the action for a reminder of who and what the evangelists -- the first Christian theologians -- wanted their auditors and readers to believe Jesus was.
 
The evangelists, imaging the voice of Yahweh, used the transfiguration of Jesus as a re-affirmation of their idea of his identity: "Thou art my son . . ."

As has been observed, the vagaries of the church calendar take us several chapters ahead in the Lukan narrative to the transfiguration, and, with it, to the accompanying readings in Exodus and Corinthians, which are thematically related to the gospel lection. Both Moses and Jesus are depicted as ascending a mountain upon which each has an exchange with The Other. Moses is depicted as coming away with the written covenant (Exodus 24:39). Jesus came away with the divine imprimatur (Luke 9:35) reiterated from his earlier baptism.
 
In all three of the canonical gospel accounts of the transfiguration (there is none in According to John -- except see John 12:27ff) Moses is present, joined in each case by Elijah. In Exodus, Moses' face is aglow. In Luke, Jesus' "countenance was altered" (RSV), face was "changed" (NRSV). Mark and Matthew merely say Jesus was "transfigured." Matthew adds that "his face shone like the sun," which is closer to the image of Moses in Exodus.
 
Three persons are said by Luke to have accompanied Jesus on his mountain retreat: Peter, James and John, all of whom Luke has already classified as "apostles" (5:14-15). What did they represent to Mark who initially named them and to Matthew and Luke? One obvious answer is that the three are depicted as authenticators of an other-world experience and were therefore required for the narrative. Another proposition is that the event is a retrojection of a post-crucifixion vision shared by several of Jesus' followers and is plunked down in the gospel story as an occurrence on the way. A third possibility is that placing them at the transfiguration was a means by which the evangelists could authenticate those they believed had been among first-hand witnesses to the Jesus figure's extraordinary nature.
 
Luke omits what Mark and Matthew include: the "tell no man" of the experience until it should make sense in light of the resurrection, to which all three will bear witness of varying force - Mark being the most reluctant of the three (see Mark 16:8). Luke does mention that the three "kept silent and in those days told no one of any of the things they had seen" (9:36b). "In those days" suggests that eventually they would tell the story at such time as it would resonate with events to come.
 
Another interesting aspect of the transfiguration narrative is the presence in it of Moses and Elijah -- the law and the prophets: Moses the archetype of Torah, Elijah of its prophetic interpretation. A returning of Elijah who is said not to have died but to have been taken bodily into the heavens (2d Kings 2:11) was to herald messiah's coming. Messiah was to be the fulfillment of the prophetic promise.
 
In what better company could Jesus be placed by those promoting his image than Moses and Elijah?
 
The three synoptic evangelists precede the transfiguration narrative with a passion prediction (Mark 8:31-33, Matthew 16:21-23 and Luke 9:18-22) and a subsequent exhortation to discipleship (Mark 8:34-9:1, Matthew 16:24-28 and Luke 9:23-27).
 
The three (passion prediction, exhortation and transfiguration) constitute the pattern of discipleship: the mapping of the sacrificial path, the call to sacrifice and the promise of seeing all of that in a redeeming light. If the transfiguration is, in fact, a retrojection of a post-crucifixion vision), what becomes transfigured in that case is not so much the figure or countenance of a dead messiah but the lives of the ones who intentionally follow his ethic.
 
Seeing or appreciating a person for who he or she is, rather than what you have assumed about that person, is what transfiguration is. As such it is a two-way street: The thing or person is transfigured in your eyes, meaning that you are transfigured, too.
 
A man in a certain town was much feared by the children in his neighborhood. His house was surrounded by huge growths of shrubs that blocked all the windows. Seldom was the man seen to leave his home. On the rare occasions he appeared out of doors, he talked to no one and no one talked to him. Children would scatter in fear.
 
The man died, and in due course it was found that he had willed a million dollars, his entire estate, to the welfare of the children of his town. Overnight, the man was beatified in the eyes of those who assumed he had been a dangerous old crank. Who was transfigured in that transaction?
 
Would that contemporary Christians would see the Jesus figure for who he probably was: an itinerant teacher of ethical wisdom trying to help people see the great liberating truth that the "rule of God" they sought through the advent of a messiah was within them, and had been all the while.
 
If Christians see themselves as that kingdom (or dispensation), they will be transfigured, and the face of the church will glow with an authenticity that has pretty much eluded its countenance from the beginning.