St Martin's & St Paul's
Parish Canterbury
St Martin's & St Paul's
Parish Canterbury
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Last night at St. Martin & St. Paul, we came to the end of another pantomime. In a Pantomime, there are certain stock characters and everyone speaks and acts in an exaggerated way, which is what pantomime means. We know that at some stage things will go very wrong but that, by the end, evil will have defeated and good will prevail. As characters come on we recognise them because of the way they speak and dress.
With this in mind, we might ask the question: how did Peter, James, and John know that the figures who appeared beside Jesus at the Transfiguration were Moses and Elijah? Perhaps the answer relates to how, when you look at a Stained Glass Window, you can identify the figure of Jesus. He usually has long hair, a beard, a finely-featured face, and white or light coloured robes. It seems that, when Jesus arrived at the mountain top, something dramatic happened: Jesus - who in reality would pass for an ordinary man - became extraordinary, his body and clothes bathed in light. So too the figures who appeared by him were set apart from the normal figures we see around us, and were therefore identifiable to Peter, James, and John as the great forerunners of the Messiah: the prophet Elijah and the man through whom God had saved his people from oppression in Egypt and brought them to the Promised Land, Moses. They suddenly saw Jesus in a new context; the final and perfect revelation of God in relationship with humanity, perfecting in himself all the roles carried by Israel's leaders, patriarchs and prophets, and they heard the voice of God: this is my beloved Son.
What happened then? Well, the figures disappeared, the light passed away and Jesus stood there with them exactly as he had before, an ordinary man, only this time they - and they alone - had received a revelation about Jesus' identity; that he was indeed the Son of God and the fulfiller of God's saving work in the world.
The Transfiguration thus confirms two things: one that God is in Jesus Christ; two, that God is determined that the truth of this shall be revealed in signs and wonders of this kind only to a very few people. In the Temptation in the wilderness the figure of evil was all for such revelations: in fact he proposed that one big revelation, involving Jesus jumping off the temple and being saved by the hand of God, would be a wonderful short cut to proclaiming Jesus' identity and overcoming forever resistance and doubt. But Jesus does not take that path and the devil leaves him, frustrated. The Transfiguration reaffirms the commitment to a different kind of revelation; the Jesus who ascends the mountain with the three closest disciples is the same Jesus who descends; but they have seen something that will allay any doubts and will one day be remembered as they come to understand all the truths revealed to them in the light of his death and resurrection. Jesus truly is the Son of God and one with God. But how is this to be known? Not with overwhelming signs and wonders, but through the ordinary interactions of men and women and children in the world. The Incarnation of God in Jesus takes a new and ongoing form in the light of Pentecost: the Holy Spirit filling his people makes of them the Body of Christ that is in the world today.
Jesus, coming down the mountain into the ordinary buzz of human life, reminds us that He is always to be found where people are. So where people are is where we have to be.
Like the disciples, we have had a revelation of who Jesus truly is and of what he means for the world, somehow we have to find the way to take that revelation into the world. At the time this the disciples did not understand that, later they did. We too are on a learning curve and sometimes it feels a bit steep; but we are not alone and we go into the future together.
Amen
