Sermon: Transfiguration

Our generation is living in a unique liturgical time.  Very few people alive today have lived through a year like this one, and no-one alive today will ever see another year like this, not even the youngest chorister or the smallest Sunday School child.  What am I talking about?  It's the day after Candlemas when the 40 days of Christmas came to an end.  Hard on its heels this coming week Lent beckons, and with it the promise of Easter.  This collision of seasons only happens when Easter falls very early.  This year, 23 March, is the earliest it has fallen since 1913.  It will not happen again until the year 2160, that is in our great-great-great-great grandchildren's time, 150 years hence.  The astronomy does actually allow Easter to fall one day earlier, should the paschal full moon fall on the day of the spring equinox when that day is also a Saturday.  Easter fell on 22 March in 1818, and will do so again in 2285.  (Those who are alive in the middle of the 23^rd century are even luckier than we are.  In 2258, Easter will fall on the latest possible date, 25 April, and only 27 years later, on the earliest possible day.  Such near conjunctions happen only every ten thousand years.)

Why am I telling you this?  As a superannuated mathematician, I can't deny that the calendar fascinates me.  The cycle of the seasons has resonances here in Durham: I have preached before about watching what the light does in Romanesque spaces at the solstices and equinoxes, and have mentioned the meridian line in the cloister.  Our guardianship of Bede's relics gives us an interest in the themes that occupied him, among them the complex calculation of the date of Easter, so controversial in his day, and still a point of sensitivity in ecumenical debate between east and west.  But let me be more homely.  The Old English word ‘Lent' simply means ‘springtime'.  So to turn from the Christmas liturgical cycle to the Paschal cycle is to begin to turn from winter and anticipate summer.  Candlemas is a ‘cross-quarter day' in the calendar, when the days are palpably longer at last.  So at this meeting of seasons, it seems apt to have as our gospel reading a story we associate with high summer.  The transfiguration is an August festival.  So why are we given this same story to read on this Sunday of the year, what we used to call Quinquagesima, the amber traffic light that warns that Lent is near?

The story is pivotal in St Matthew's Gospel.  It's a point of climax when Jesus is revealed for who he is, the one St Matthew wants his readers to know and follow.  For a moment, the mists dissolve, and the secret is laid bare: he is disclosed as the anointed one who has come in fulfilment of all that the law and the prophets longed for.  In his flesh and blood we see nothing less than Israel's God who had once disclosed himself in another transfiguration at a burning bush and spoken his sacred name.  All that has taken place so far has been leading to this apex, this crown of the parabola.  From now on, the narrative darkens as it descends towards the passion - but we know what we didn't know before, which is that the man destined to die is none other than the Son of God. 

We mustn't forget where this story comes in the gospel.  It follows on the heels of the great recognition scene at Caesarea Philippi where Peter confesses Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the Living God.  Caesarea is Banyas, the source of the River Jordan where it emerges from a great cliff, and the source, for Matthew, both of Christianity and of the church.  For what is Christianity but to make the confession that Jesus is the Son of God?  Matthew is saying to us that those words change everything.  They transfigure all of life.  And this is to remind us of where the gospel began: with Jesus' baptism in this same river, where he first announced that the kingdom of God is at hand.  In other words, it is baptism that is the transforming, transfiguring force in our lives.  And one of the consequences of recognising and confessing Jesus in baptism is that our vision of the world is cleansed, purified.  We see in new ways.  And what we see is God's presence at the heart of all existence and at the heart of all human life: Christ playing in ten thousand human faces, a world charged with the grandeur of God as the poet put it.  On Lindisfarne they talk of ‘thin places' where the world is more transparent to the presence of God.  This is how Matthew wants us to read his transfiguration story: as inviting us to see creation as ‘thin', sacramental, alive with the divine, a vision of beauty and grace open to us all.  If you ask me what religion is, I say that it is a new way of seeing, a way of being aware that makes the ordinary extraordinary and the commonplace nothing less than a miracle. To see and live and pray like this is transfiguration.

The story holds a second aspect we mustn't miss. The transfiguration of Jesus is framed in St Matthew by two predictions of how he must suffer and die.  The Christ whom Peter has recognised will not go up to glory before he suffers pain; or to put it another way, the glory of the transfiguration will turn out to be the glory of his self emptying for us in his death on the cross.  The marvellous paradox of Matthew's passion account is that he sees in the darkness of Good Friday something hidden from those who crucified Jesus.  He puts it into the mouth of the Roman centurion, that good man whose confession of faith at Golgotha mirrors Peter's at Banyas: ‘Surely this man was God's Son!'.  Transfigured Night we might call it.  And this too speaks not only of what happened then and in that place, but what can happen now for all of us.  The crucifixion has many layers of meaning; but one of them is that God knows the pain of the world.  ‘My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?'  Last week I quoted Bonhoeffer who said that in our distress, ‘only the suffering God can help'.  Matthew's point is, God knows and cares, because he has walked that way himself.  And again, if you ask me what religion is, I say that it is a new way of interpreting suffering, entering into the world's pain as God himself does.  To see and live and pray like this is transfiguration.

There is one more connection we need to make from the story of transfiguration.  The revelation of Jesus' glory on the mountain, the bewildered disciples, the sense of being awestruck by some great mystery remind us strongly of another New Testament story.  I am thinking of the appearances of the risen Jesus to the disciples at the end of St Matthew's Gospel.  It's tempting to wonder whether the transfiguration preserves a memory of an Easter encounter which Matthew for reasons to do with the way he wished to shape his story, has placed right at the centre of his gospel.  And this perhaps helps us to see why it is embraced by those predictions of what lies ahead for the Son of Man: not only that he must suffer and die, but that he must be raised on the third day.  To hear this story again is to be pointed towards resurrection hope, the hope into which we were baptised, the hope which sustains us all our days, whether we live or die.  Resurrection is the goal of the journey we begin on Ash Wednesday.  And if one last time you ask me what religion is, I say that it is to hope against hope, to live Easter, to banish despair by lighting fires in cold dark rooms and tell of love's work being done in the world. To see and live and pray like this is transfiguration.

I can't pretend it is easy.  Like Peter, I blunder about in the presence of glory: I miss the point by trying to capture it instead of paying attention to what God is doing. The voice from the cloud tells us what we must do. ‘This is my Son, the Beloved: listen to him!'.  If we can discern his voice amid the clamour and chatter that bid for our attention; if we will listen and obey and follow, then we can know transfiguration, glimpse glory in our ordinary days.  It's no good going in quest for it as if it were the holy grail or the golden fleece: it must find us.  But it will, for his pledge to us is: ‘where I am, there you will be also'.  And maybe, just maybe, this eucharist could be that mountain top, that burning bush, that place where we see the glory of the crucified and risen Lord, and know and love him once again.  

Michael Sadgrove, Durham Cathedral

Matthew 17.1-9

(Sunday before Lent)