Transfiguration
2And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light. 3And behold, there appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him.
This is similar to the baptism of Jesus where the voice of God was heard and a dove came down from heaven in a spectacular scene.
Through lent, we follow the life of Jesus which ends eventually at the cross. The journey is not just about what Jesus said and did but who he was. It’s improtant that we know that Jesus was more than an ordinary man. It’s improtant that we know that Jesus was an ordinary man.
That’s the paradox at the centre of christianity. Jesus didn’t do anything supernatural – he claimed that we could all do everything he did and greater with just a little faith.
Yet, at his baptism and transfiguration, a voice from heaven singles him out as being ‘my son’ and tells us to ‘listen to him’. Johns gospel also tells us that Jesus was more than a man – he talks about the ‘word become flesh’. In the beginning was the Word...
This reminds me of a famous paradox in science – the paradox of whether light is a wave or a particle. Einstein was able to show that while light behaved just like a wave, it also had the properties of a particle. It seems that light is on some kind of boundary between having mass and existing or just being a transient ripple of travelling energy. Light shows us that the two – mass and energy are closely related and Einstein gave us e=mc2 to explain the relationship.
So Jesus is in this paradoxical state of being both God and Human just as light is both energy and particle. What we can conclude is that the spirit and the natural are closely related. We may not have an equation to convert between the two but we know that they are not seperate, that they affect each others paths.
The discovery of the nature of light changed the way we saw our world. With Newton we thought we pretty much understood it all. We could make machines and used forces to construct our world. We were confident that light could be captured and controlled in lenses and prisms. Then along came Eintsein who showed us that the universe was infinitely more complicated than we could imagine and that we understood very little after all.
So who was Jesus – or what was Jesus? Well it’s easy – he is the light of the world, the Word become flesh, the miraculous healer, the prophet, the Son of God. He is the carpenter’s son, the Nazerine, the man who ate with common fishermen, prostitutes and tax collectors, the guy who cried when his friend died, who talked to a samaritan women next to a well, who cared about his Mum, who was hurt by betrayel, who fell asleep in a boat, who stuck it to the pharisees, who got angry at money changers, who wept and prayed and almost cracked under pressure when he knew he was going to die, who felt abandoned in death. Jesus was Jesus.
Posted: February 18th, 2005 under Bible Bashing.
Comments: 1
Comment from James the cat
Time: 22/2/2005, 7:00 pm
I like your comparason to ‘wave-particle dualism’. I am sure that famous theologian such as William of Annerley have already worked it to death, but it is a novel metaphor for me.
Transfiguration is like the Epiphany and the Baptism, and intimately linked in my mind to the resurrection. In case we forget the divinity of Christ, the otherness of the Divine, the transcendence if you like, in Jesus mud and tears earthly ministry.
It is occasionally popular through history to see Jesus as, variously, a philospher, a guru, a prophet, a teacher, a social worker, a magician, a healer, and other things besides. There is a strong tradition, arrising particularly out of liberal protestantism, that seeks to deny the divinity of Christ, and give all sorts of explainations to the contrary, for example the Jesus Seminar, John Spong, etc. These are not clever new discoveries by post enlightenment minds (vis. Spong’s ‘I cant let my 20th century mind be limited by 1st century belief’), but have been present in different permutations for 2000 years.
The Transfiguration stands in stark contrast to this. What ever one might say about walking on water, healing and excorcism as described in the gospel, the Transfiguration defies such explanation. At the transfiguration, the gates of heaven are opened for a moment, and Jesus stands basked in the uncreated light of the Divine. It is a glimpse of the world to come, the kingdom promised to us – but only a glimpse.
The ‘Jesus is a (merely) a guru’ outfit must stop and take stock; either Jesus is more than a high powered social worker, or we start having serious issues with the very fabric of the gospel.
The church calandar is interesting; we recall the Transfiguration at two places – now, as Jesus ‘sets is face towards Jerusalem’, and all that that entails, and August 6. Since 1945 August 6 has been juxtaposed between the Glories of Heaven revealed in uncreated light, and the Demonic fireball of Hiroshima, the start of the nuclear era.