Last Sunday, we remembered the event of Jesus’ Transfiguration. For some people, the story of the Transfiguration is impossibly other-worldly, and thus unbelievable to those living in a scientific age. So, perhaps we need to try to comprehend it as the product of a pre-scientific culture and its understanding of how truth is conveyed. I believe we are called to use our intelligence to decode what scripture is telling us (certainly, this is a fundamental Anglican tradition), so it behooves us to ask: how does this story with all of its ethereal qualities help us to understand the nature, teaching, and significance of Jesus of Nazareth? On a very basic level, what the passage records is “an authentic religious experience that Jesus underwent and which was witnessed by a handful of his most intimate followers.” Such phenomena have been recorded throughout history by both believers and skeptics; they are part of a common human experience irrespective of the context.
Here is an example of what I’m referring to:
In 1934 Bill Wilson, one of the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, was admitted to the hospital for the fourth time in fifteen months because of his alcoholism. At one point in what seemed at times a losing battle with addiction, he fell back into a deep depression. Ahead of him, he saw only madness and death. Science as evidenced through modern medicine, the only god he had at the time, had declared him the victim of an incurable disease. Without faith or hope, he cried out, “If there be a God, let Him show Himself!”
Suddenly his room was filled with a white light. He was seized with an ecstasy beyond description. Every joy he had known was pale by comparison. Then, seen in the mind’s eye, there was a mountain. I stood upon its summit, where a great wind blew. A wind, not of air, but of spirit. In great, clean strength, it blew right through me. Then came the blazing thought, “You are a free man.” . . . “This,” I thought, “must be the great reality, the God of the preachers.”
Most scholars agree that the overall point of the story is to foreshadow “the coming glory of the messianic age.” We see this in such features as the comparison of the appearance of the face of Jesus which we are told had “changed” with the shining face of Moses upon receiving the Law on Mt. Zion because he had spoken with God. Mountain-top experiences were, of course, common in antiquity as a means of expressing direct experiences of the Almighty.
When Peter suggests erecting three “dwellings,” we recall that the Festival of Booths was Israel’s way of commemorating God’s protection as his people wandered through an endless wasteland upon leaving Egypt in the Exodus. And the choice of Moses and Elijah is quite intentional, suggesting the receiving of the Law and its later interpretation; the implication, of course, is that Jesus is the “ultimate interpreter.” This is why in the passage one of the key messages is the command, “Listen to him!” And in the cloud, reminiscent of the one that hovered over the people as they wandered in the wilderness, God affirms that Jesus is his Son and his Chosen one!
Interestingly, this passage is illustrative of time-honored patterns of worship among Christians. Luke is writing to a community that has not seen Jesus. Yet, he narrates a scene that “all but lays out the four-fold pattern of our worship” that we follow as disciples of Jesus of Nazareth: a group gathers, they hear the Word read and preached, they share a meal, and then they go out to serve. So, the pattern is this: there is a “retreat to worship and the time to listen to the Word, be immersed in the cross, and be gathered in prayer” such that all leads inevitably to a return to the ‘everyday world’ with all of its crying needs. We see this, above all, in the glorious mountaintop experience of the Transfiguration which is followed in the most natural of ways by the disciples going out to serve humankind as Jesus had done.
Although it is not widely acknowledged by many Christians, the New Testament flows so naturally out of the Old that, for example, it is impossible to separate the message of Jesus from that of the Prophets. Thus, we must be well versed in the Old Testament in order to understand the New. In this connection it is worth repeating that for Jesus and the disciples, the only scripture they knew was the Hebrew books — i.e., what we call the Old Testament. The Transfiguration can actually be viewed then as the ideal point of coalescence of the whole of the Old Testament into Jesus’ ministry. After all, this grouping of figures recalls the entire tradition of Israel from Moses through the Prophets up to and including the ministry of Jesus.
In the Transfiguration episode we have a foretaste of the coming glory of Jesus in the presence of the Apostles who were eyewitnesses; it was both “affirmation of his Messiah-ship and foreshadowing of his death and resurrection.” Later, Peter would recall the experience as “he anticipated his own death and defended the legacy of the teaching on Christ’s future coming.” When his opponents maintained that the Apostles’ teaching on the second coming of Jesus as judge was a mere “cleverly devised myth,” Peter replied that he could “proclaim with confidence” the ‘prophetic message’ Jesus brought because he was “present on the holy mountain when Jesus received honor and glory from God the Father.” He himself had heard God “affirm Jesus as the Beloved Son.”
Greg+