LUKE 9: 28-36

Laterally Luke…The Transfiguration…New in 2019

May I begin with a plea that we don’t try to explain the inexplicable or explain away the unbelievable? The Celt in me comes to the fore in not drawing too firm a line between heaven & earth, the seen & the unseen. Keep that line ‘thin’.

I can’t think of a more appropriate or effective way to preach the Transfiguration than to approach it as + Rowan does in his great little book, ‘The Dwelling of the Light’¹ where he explores a Russian Icon of the Transfiguration from the 15th C.

Rather than look at Our Lord’s Transfiguration as kind of tableau - as I suspect we often do - why not explore the ‘sheer energy of the portrayal’ as + Rowan puts it.

Whereas Christmas tableaux & Palm Sunday processions can become pretty much ‘ho hum’ if we’re not careful, the only energy being when someone fluffs their lines in the former, or waves their palm too exuberantly in the latter.

What’s going on up there is that all God’s energy of Light & Life & Love are being revealed & brought to bear on & in Jesus. He’s so ‘filled with God’ that He connects His people’s past with their present & their future. Not just back on that mountain top but now, too. Pin it all down to ‘back then’ & we’re missing all the possibilities of Now. God is always God of our now, built out of our pasts in every sense. 

Traditionally we link Moses with the Law, & Elijah with the Prophets, & why not? But up there Jesus is being revealed as the summation of both, & everything else God provides for our present & our futures. The Apostles up there with Jesus don’t so much grasp this as are grasped by it. The icon + Rowan brings to life for us shows them, as he puts it, ‘sprawling helplessly; they face a tidal wave’. I’d put it as facing the upheaval of life as it’s been, & a sweeping into new & uncharted waters of life as Jesus’ successors. Peter has yet to grasp that the only way to prolong this experience of life, as it is in Jesus, is to submit ourselves - today - to the tide of Divine Light & Life & Love the Spirit ‘unleashes’ up on that mountain & everywhere else God calls us to be.

Brian

Afterthought: There’s a lot of talk today about what needs to happen to the Church to give it a future. Might the answer lie in us allowing God’s Spirit to energise us on the depression we’re living in, as Jesus & His Apostles are energised on that mountain? Not to grasp that energy, but allow ourselves to be grasped by it so we find ourselves over- whelmed by, swept along by God’s Light & Life & Love. 

¹ John Garratt, Mulgrave, Australia, 2003