Transfiguration Sunday:
2 Kings 2:1-12; Ps 50:1-6; 2 Cor 4:3-6; Mk 9:2-9
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Boston University
Welcome to my favorite day in the liturgical year, the apex of this season of revelation, a hinge of hinges between not simply the seasons of Epiphany and Lent but also of the liturgical cycles of Incarnation and Pascha. Only the final Sunday in the liturgical year itself, the Feast of Christ the King, equals it in liminal power. But the Transfiguration is also more than a hinge—it serves in both the calendrical narrative that we walk from Sunday to Sunday and in the history of Christianity as an icon.
Icons condense multiple versions of a story into an image, like visual versions of Tatian’s Diatesseron (c 160 – 175) that combined the four gospels into a single narrative. Icons also have a way of compacting history into a present moment, of rendering temporality within a frame of eternity. And in so doing, icons become windows onto that eternity, and into the multiplicities of holy narrative, a means of prayerfully entering and not just contemplating the scenes before us. Icons of the Transfiguration often show Jesus standing on a craggy peak between Moses and Elijah, backlit by a glowing, almost eye-shaped, mandorla. Peter, James, and John either stand below him or lie on the ground, terrified by the gravity of light, cloud and voice. Sometimes Peter is shown facing or reaching out to Jesus from below, signifying his impulsive booth proposal. Taking in this iconic scene, we stand on the lip of eternity and receive an inward invitation.
To what are we invited? Are we asked to place ourselves on this mountain, lying down or standing up, shaken, confused, awe-inspired? Yes, and much more. We are invited not simply to observe a metamorphosis, to use the most common Greek term for Transfiguration. We are also prompted to transform or, more specifically, to open ourselves to divine transformation, to change “from glory into glory, till in heaven we take our place, till we cast our crowns before [God], lost in wonder, love, and praise” as Charles Wesley puts it in his hymn “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling.” Wesley’s poetry turns upon the vision of Paul in his second letter to the Corinthians: “And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed [μεταμορφούμεθα] into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit” (2 Cor 3:18). This is the lifelong process referred to in Western Christian tradition as “sanctification” and in the East as “deification” or theosis. Transfiguration signifies our paradoxical agency in this process—we open ourselves to it, hold ourselves accountable to it, but never, ever accomplish it. “Be transformed [μεταμορφοῦσθε] by the renewing of your minds,” Paul invites, once more, in his second letter to the Corinthians (2 Cor 12:2), using the same metamorphic verb as our story. We stand before this icon-- before this Jesus suspended between heaven and earth, between his earthly ministry and his oncoming execution, in the dense mystery of life, death, resurrection and ascension-- to be formed by the awesome impress of Grace.
This year Mark’s version of this synoptic story (John’s gospel is often said to be suffused with it without explicitly telling it) leaves us with an added challenge: how to read the glory of transfiguration without falling prey to triumphalism (the mapping of divine power onto social hierarchies, the reading of social dominance as a sign of divine favor). Ched Myers who wrote the revolutionary Markan commentary Binding the Strong Man (1988, 2008) remarks, “we Christians who dwell in the bosom of empire have missed the point of Mark’s gospel” (xxxv). Mark’s gospel is known to contemporary biblical scholars as a text studded with anti-imperial barbs-- this Christ , this Son of Humanity, exercises his power paradoxically. The last are first, the powerful are humble, one can only gain one’s life by losing it, and the Messiah manifests his glory through a stigmatizing execution. Signs and wonders are subsequently veiled—including today’s -- lest they be read through a lens of imperially tinged expectation, of might making right. How, in such a context, do we read Mark’s vision of the Transfiguration? This Mark, who alone of the four canonical gospels left his original readers with the terrifying specter of an empty tomb and no resurrection stories—what might Transfiguration mean to him? Myers argues that the Transfiguration in Mark actually stands as the second, the midpoint (or hinge, if you will), of three key apocalyptic signs: Baptism, Transfiguration and Cross (Binding the Strong Man, 391). The Markan Transfiguration serves, as Myers reads it, as a confirmation of Jesus’ oncoming cross, and the politically charged new reign of God that stands over and against that of empire. His glowing clothes are the white robes of the martyr (Binding, 250).
Myers (and others) might well read much of the patristic era interpretations of Transfiguration, texts to which I have long been drawn, as a form of “spiritualization” or mystification, a kind of traditional accretion that needs to be stripped away. But I wonder how these theological visions might be woven together for our own contemporary contexts. How might a strongly anti-imperial reading of Transfiguration animate and be animated by this icon we have been contemplating? Indeed, what if the Transfiguration itself became the dynamic threshold driving and drawing forth a dynamic interchange of contemplation and action, individual and collective? What if we dedicated ourselves to the ripple effect of our prayer, our study, as the foundation of our action in this world? --And what if we refused to deprive our action, our work for justice, of a the wellspring of a much fuller breadth of Christian tradition, even as we refuse to be corralled by “traditional” readings of it? What if we came to see our own transfiguration as part of that of the world? That we are central figures—“bonds” or even “laboratories,” as Maximus the Confessor put it (Ambiguum 41)—in the renewal of creation, a process of reconciliation through which the cosmos itself, drawn back into and around the heart of the divine, might become, finally, “a world of light and glory” (Andreopoulos, Metamorphosis: The Transfiguration in Byzantine Theology and Iconography, 19).
And so tonight the icon of Mark’s Transfiguration presents us with a challenging icon, an image of transformation that cannot leave us unscathed. We are gifted with a metamorphosis of heart, mind and body intended to reverberate from this chapel to the last layer of creation itself. In it we see “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God” and perceive its significance afresh in a vocation of transformation. We are invited to take that impetus to the crossroads of “church” and “world,” indeed to take it as a call to be agents of transformation in the world, a people who work in the name of the body of Christ for the ongoing transformation of that body. This can be what it means to be changed “from glory into glory,” to be agents of divine light shining into the shadows of our world.
May we take this vision in all its splendor and challenge and sing together our great alleluias, till we meet again at the lip of the empty tomb. Amen.
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