Feast of the Transfiguration

The Rev. Gerald W. Keucher

The Feast of the Transfiguration on August 6 th is considered such an important day that when it falls on a Sunday, it takes precedence over the Sunday readings. Clearly that trip up the mountain with Jesus made a huge impression on Peter, James and John, because an account of the Transfiguration is included in three of the four Gospels.

The Transfiguration did not make an impression just on the three of them; it’s significant for us today. What’s so important about it for us? Well, let me try to get at it this way.

Some early Christian writers summed up what God did in Jesus Christ by saying, “God because a human being so that human beings could become God.”

This may well sound very strange to you because we’re accustomed to thinking of religion along the lines of morality — you know, God became man so that we would become good. According to the way most of us have been taught to think, God came to us in Jesus Christ to tell us what we’re supposed to do. Jesus becomes a kind of external legal mechanism that sets the rules and enforces them.

Most legal systems provide only punishments for misbehavior. You may get a ticket for speeding, but nobody gives you a lollipop for obeying the speed limit. Moralizing religion promises the reward of heaven as well as the punishment of hell, and some people think that makes a difference. But it doesn’t make a difference. Offering incentives and rewards is the same as threatening punishment.

I have a book that you don’t have to read once you’ve seen the title. It’s called Punished by Rewards, and the point is, of course, that the dynamic of offering rewards for acceptable behavior is just as coercive as threatening punishments for misbehavior. Rewards and punishments are all about outward behavior; they have nothing to do with the transformation of the heart that Jesus is after.

If I obey the law, the police don’t care whether it’s because I want to be a good citizen or because I’m afraid of getting caught. But Jesus wants my heart to be right out of love, not out of fear. As St. John says, “Fear has to do with punishment, but perfect love casts out fear.”

If we approach religion in terms of rewards and punishments, then we’re likely to say that the confirmations of Jesus’ divinity that come at His baptism and again at the Transfiguration are proofs that Jesus is entitled to tell us what we’re supposed to do. By this way of thinking, the Transfiguration gives Jesus the authority to promise us rewards for good behavior and to threaten us with punishment if we do wrong.

I think those early Christian writers had a better understanding of what God was up to than the carrot-and-stick approach we commonly use. See, if God became human so that we could become divine, then an event like the Transfiguration doesn’t primarily just prove that Jesus is divine. Rather, the events of Jesus’ life become important because they show us what kind of God we will become because of our incorporation into Christ’s Body at our baptism.

What does Jesus show us about God here on the Mount of the Transfiguration? What kind of God is God? What kind of God are we already becoming through our life in Christ?

As we look at the dazzling glory of Jesus speaking with Moses and Elijah, we might think that we’re seeing a demonstration of God’s power. Maybe we’d think that, if we’re part of Christ’s Body, we get to exercise some of that divine power by deciding who is worthy to be included and who has to stay outside. God is almighty. If we’re going to share God’s life, doesn’t that mean we get to use some of that divine power?

A whole bunch of people think that, but that’s not what Jesus shows us here. Jesus doesn’t speak of exercising power here; Jesus speaks about the departure He is about to accomplish at Jerusalem. That is, Jesus speaks about the betrayal, suffering and death He is about to experience. And after the Transfiguration, Jesus doesn’t say to His disciples, “See? See who I am? Now you better listen up or else!” Instead He tells them that He must go to Jerusalem and be betrayed into the hands of sinners and suffer and be killed.

The God revealed in Jesus Christ is the God who pours out His life for the world. God became human so that He could drink to the dregs the bitterest cup people can prepare for each other — rejection, betrayal, humiliation, physical suffering, painful death.

Our God is not a God Who causes suffering by punishing His enemies. Our God is the God Who takes into Himself the world’s suffering that we have created. God overcomes evil and death, not by fighting it as we would want to fight it, but by giving Himself up to it.

It’s important to say that Jesus did not just submit to evil. Jesus overcame evil by submitting to it. The point is to overcome evil and death. Submitting to it is how evil can be overcome. It’s the only way it can be overcome. We cannot overcome evil by becoming part of it, by using the same methods of violence and exclusion that evil uses.

Two things happen as we pattern our lives on overcoming evil by submitting to it.

First, something happens in us. We become disciples of Jesus. 1,891 years ago, in the year 115 AD, Ignatius, the Bishop of Antioch, was arrested for being a Christian and was taken from Antioch in Syria to Rome so that he could be executed by being thrown to wild beasts.

During the long sea journey he wrote, “Now as a prisoner I am learning to give up my own wishes. All the way from Syria to Rome I am already fighting wild beasts, by land and by sea, by day and by night, chained as I am to ten leopards, I mean the detachment of soldiers who guard me. The better you treat them, the worse they become. I am more and more trained in discipleship by their mistreatment of me.”

That’s the first thing that happens when we follow Jesus by striving to overcome evil by submitting to it: we learn what it means to become a disciple. We learn to give up our own wishes that are contrary to God’s will, as the hymn says, “Until my heart is pure, until with thee I will one will, to do or to endure.”

The first thing happens in us: we become disciples. The second thing happens in the world: through us God overcomes evil. God overcame death because Jesus submitted to it. The early Christians attracted people to the Faith by how they submitted themselves to suffering and death.

In our own time, that’s what happened with the civil rights movement. If the marchers had taken guns with them to shoot the police and their opponents, evil would have been perpetuated, not overcome. Resisting evil by submitting to it is God’s way of overcoming it. God’s power is made perfect in our weakness. So the first step in overcoming evil is to become weak in the way the world counts weakness, so that we can become strong with the strength that God supplies.

We have not been baptized into a life of rewards for keeping the rules and punishments for breaking them. God has no part in religious systems that perpetuate evil by using violence, coercion, exclusion, and scapegoating to enforce their prejudices. Rather, we have been baptized into God’s great self-offering for the reconciliation of the world.

Our faithfulness, our devotion, our joy, our generosity, our costly forgiveness of one another, our hospitality, our acceptance of each other, our efforts to relieve suffering, the way we comfort one another in our pain and grief, our presence here today and every Sunday — all these things are some of the ways we offer ourselves to the world because we have been made part of God’s self-offering.

The Transfiguration is important to me not only because it shows me who Jesus is — both divine and human — but because it tell us who I am and who I will be.

It’s even more important to me because it tells me who you are and who you will be. If I look with the eyes God has given me in baptism, I can already see glimpses of the glory of the only-begotten Son of God in your faces right here, and in the face of every person who has become part of God’s great self-offering for the reconciliation of the world.

Thanks be to God for His inexpressible gift!