Transfiguration

The Transfiguration

“Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory” Luke 9.32

‘Weighed down with sleep...’ We all know that feeling: in front of the television late at night; frighteningly at the wheel of a car on a long journey; or with a dear friend who nevertheless bores for England. Had Peter, James & John succumbed to sleep, we would not be celebrating this great Feast of the Church tonight.

Although it has only been celebrated in the western church in recent centuries.

It was on this day in 1456 that the news that the Turks had been chased out of Belgrade, reached Rome. So the Borgia pope, Callistus III, in honour of the victory, declared that the church should observe August the 6th as the Feast of the Transfiguration of our Lord.

But what actually happened?

Well, as with many of the pivotal events in the life of Jesus, it is not clear exactly what happened. And even more of a mystery is why John’s Gospel, perhaps the one you would expect to make most of it, is the only one of the four not to mention it.

There have been attempts to ‘explain it away’. Bultman suggests it was a post resurrection appearance transferred back to this point in Christ’s ministry by the Gospel writers. How this ‘explains it away’ I’m not quite sure…

Then others have called on the vision hypothesis. The disciples were drowsy and stressed and misinterpreted a mystical experience of praying with Jesus. Professor Morna Hooker seems to favour this approach.

Or perhaps Mark made up the story as a vehicle for some special teaching that Jesus gave to the three: Peter, James and John. It was the best way of explaining things in a pictorial fashion?

Or maybe it was just a plain old Gospel miracle! I don’t have a problem with occasional miracles, although I can’t quite join my Pentecostal friends who think nothing of a hundred impossible things before breakfast.

So I assume it happened more or less as the three synoptic Gospel writers remember it. The veil between this world and the other became gossamer thin and the disciples were caught up in a nexus of spiritual realities and blurred frontiers.

They saw Moses and Christ as the fulfilment of the Law. They saw Elijah and Christ as the One to whom all the prophets pointed. They heard the voice of Almighty God, reiterating Christ’s Baptismal affirmation that this was his beloved Son and that they should listen to him.

And they saw the Shekinah cloud, a theophany of the God of glory, and the reflection of that glory in the face of their teacher, Jesus the Messiah.

And they saw all this because they stayed awake, despite the lateness, after a long day and a climb up the hill.

There is a little Jewish joke here as well - a sort of pun.

Some of you will remember in another sermon how we saw that the Hebrew word for ‘glory’ was the word for weight, heaviness, gravitas. Here the disciples are weighed down with sleep, Luke tells us, but they remained awake and so were weighed down with glory.

If we are to celebrate the Glory of God, then we must stay awake, or be vigilant. For it is too easy to be so weighed down with the sleep of this world that we miss the glory of the other.

It struck me as we read tonight’s OT passage from Exodus, that after Moses went up the mountain to be enveloped in the glory of the Lord, he waited 6 days for anything to happen. Most of us, I suspect, would have given the Lord an hour at most and then been off to the next engagement.

Celebrating the Glory of God takes time. I remember inviting the local Pentecostal pastor to preach at my church in Camberwell and explaining that the service had to finish by noon. He looked at me as if I were mad and exclaimed: “But sometimes the Holy Ghost don’t get there till 12.30!”

Whether it be in Church or at Glyndebourne, in reading a book or watching a film, in a walk in the country, or looking at the stars - so many places where we can glimpse the glory of God who created all things for our enjoyment; if we will but stay awake spiritually and let the weight of God’s glory settle on us, then we begin to celebrate life in its fullness - and this is the glory of God.

The spiritual disciplines, and the daily offices are not there to stop us enjoying the world too much (although reading some of the Fathers you might suppose this); they are there to slow us down and help us to savour the world, the moments of each day.

What use are all our ‘havings’ if they are weightless - without glory. What use is a life packed full of experience if - ichabod - the glory has departed.

As Jesus goes down the mountain with the disciples, he speaks to them of his impending suffering and of his resurrection. And he has already told them, although they do not understand, that his Passion will be the greatest display of God’s glory.

We celebrate this Mass to the Glory of God. As we bring the gifts of the world at the offertory - our bread and wine and money - so we celebrate God’s glory in all he has given to us.

And as we lift up our Lord’s broken body, so we celebrate his victory over death and the glorious hope he has given us.

It is hard to celebrate the glory of God when we are suffering, in body mind or spirit; or watching those whom we love suffer. Yet as we look at the suffering of God in Christ, and remember that we will share in his resurrection glory, then even suffering and death become part of the path to glory.

The Westminster Catechism reminds us that “The chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him for ever.”

Secular drowsiness, the stupor of 21st century life, must not rob us of seeing God’s glory and delighting in his creation.

And here at this mass, as Christ is again transfigured in this bread and wine, let us be awake to the presence of the Glory of God.

“Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory” Luke 9.32