Sermon: Your eyes will see the King in his beauty.

May the words of my lips and the meditations of our hearts be now and always acceptable in your sight, O Lord our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

A verse from each of our readings this morning:

            O Lord, thy word endureth for ever in heaven            Psalm 119.89 (BCP)

            Your eyes will see the king in his beauty                        Isaiah 33.17

            The one who comes from heaven is above all    John 3.31

 

It is wonderful to see the beginning of the installation of the Transfiguration window given by the Friends of the Cathedral in memory of Michael Ramsey in the South Quire Aisle across to my left. It embraces the promise stated in today’s First Lesson from Isaiah, ‘Your eyes will see the king in his beauty’, for it was on the Mount of Transfiguration, that the body of Jesus was revealed to his most intimate disciples in dazzling glory, in divine splendour, in holy beauty.

Isaiah 33 takes up a theme about which I preached last Sunday at the Sung Eucharist, namely the tension between hope and realism, about how things might be and how things actually are. So, this chapter is a strange amalgam. It talks about harsh realities: treachery, destruction, war, devastation, injustice, judgment. And yet, interwoven are great and hopeful promises: of salvation, peace, stability, prosperity, quietness.

Indeed, the tension between realism and hope runs throughout the prophecies of Isaiah. Sometimes, some of the promises seem to be fulfilled, but then again, perhaps only partially or temporarily, or fleetingly; it seems that ultimate salvation is yet to come.

Of course some of it is idealised. ‘Your eyes will see the king in his beauty’ refers back to the chapter before which says:

            Behold, a king will reign in righteousness,

            and princes will rule with justice.’

That, no doubt, is in contrast to those kings who failed to lead the nation in accordance with those virtues. You will be aware that in the historical books of the Old Testament individual kings are judged according to whether or not they did what was right in the sight of the Lord.  The figure of King David became idealised; despite his many failings he became regarded as a king after God’s own heart. The hope was that a new David would arise and fulfil Israel’s destiny.  In time, this idea of the ideal king was taken up in the great hope of a coming messiah, a king greater than David, whose reign would usher in universal righteousness and peace.  So it becomes a future hope, to be embraced in all the bitter realism, in all the changes and chances of present experience.  And with that went a sense of God’s nearness – God would no longer be remote, distant, but experienced as dwelling among his people.  So, let me remind you, of how today’s passage concludes:

            Your eyes will see Jerusalem, a quiet habitation, an immoveable tent,

            whose stakes will never be pulled up,

            and none of whose ropes will be broken.

            But there the Lord in majesty will be for us

            a place of broad rivers and streams,

            where no galley with oars can go,

            nor stately ship can pass.

            For the Lord is our judge, the Lord is our ruler,

            the Lord is our king; he will save us.

Not quite the Jerusalem we know, as once again, there is the glimmer of a hope of a just and lasting political settlement between Israel and Palestine – but how often those hopes have been dashed.

Here is a vision of God dwelling in the midst of his people – with the irony that while Jerusalem had no water-ways – now there is abundance of water with all its associations with life and fruitfulness, but not the type of water that would invite warships, precisely because God’s in-dwelling is the guarantee of peace and security.

So, the picture of the final raising up of the ideal king was one way of dealing with the tension between hope and realism.

A second way of dealing with this tension was to look to God’s word.  And here, this morning’s psalm is instructive. Psalm 119 is the great psalm of God’s word.  It is an acrostic poem, in twenty-two sections, conforming to the Hebrew alphabet, each section including eight verses all beginning with the same letter. It employs a whole series of different nouns for God’s word or his commandments. This morning we heard two sections.  And immediately we encounter realism: the Psalmist talks of active persecution, the kind of persecution that might have destroyed him. And he seems as if he is on the brink. And yet, at the same time there is hope because of the character of God’s law:

            My soul hath longed for thy salvation:

            And I have a good hope because of thy word.

One has a sense that, despite great affliction, the study of Torah is both a strength to him and a defence. Moreover, while human circumstances change, God’s word endures:

            O Lord, thy word: endureth for ever in heaven.

            Thy truth also remaineth from one generation to another.

He recalls God’s primal word in establishing the created order; a word that continues

to sustains the earth. And he employs those moving words:

            I see that all things come to an end; but thy commandment is exceeding broad.  

We could say, ‘I have seen a limit to all perfection, but your commandment knows no bounds’. Here, indeed, is realism: life has taught him that all things fall short of perfection in spite of our most careful planning and our best intentions – but God’s word is expansive and eternal.

So from these two Old Testament passages, both of which speak of realism and hope, we see a sense of a promise that God will indeed dwell in the midst of his people, raising up a righteous king, and a strong conviction that despite the harsh realities and imperfections of life, God’s word is perfect and enduring.

Both of these strands come together in today’s Second Lesson from St John’s Gospel.  For here, that word, eternal in the heavens, is revealed as a living Word, a Word that was with God from the beginning; a Word that indeed was God, eternal with the Father. Through that living Word, all things came into existence. And that same Word has come among us in human flesh:

            He whom God has sent, John says, speaks the words of God.

And here is the contrast between what is earthly, imperfect and transitory with what is heavenly, perfect and enduring:

So there is the testimony of the Baptist: ‘I am not the Messiah, for I am earthly – ‘he, Christ, must increase, I must decrease’. 

And John adds his own commentary:

The one who comes from above is over all; the one who is from the earth belongs to the earth and speaks earthly things. The one who comes from heaven is above all.

Here is God dwelling in the midst of his people; here is the one who will be acclaimed King, but whose who reigns would be revealed from a cross of wood, manifesting the glory of God in the place of deepest humiliation and pain.

And in John’s Gospel we see more clearly than the others that truth that Christ’s embracing of our flesh, our limitations, our imperfections, embracing our life and our death, was in order to raise us to the heights:

‘Do not cling on to me’, he says to the Magdalene, ‘because I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’

You see how we are included in this ascent, as Christ raises our humanity to the heights of God’s throne.

‘Your eyes will see the king in his beauty’, said the seer. ‘Your word is eternal in the heavens, says the Psalmist’. ‘The one who comes from heaven is above all’, said the evangelist.

I began with reference to the Transfiguration, the theme of the Michael Ramsey window. The Transfiguration, placed as it is in the synoptic gospels, can be regarded as an anticipatory Resurrection appearance – Jesus is revealed before his Passion in his glorified body. But paradoxically, it also seems to bear the imprint of the Cross: there is the Mount of Transfiguration and there is the Mount Calvary; Jesus is accompanied by Peter, James and John in his ecstacy on the Mount of Transfiguration and in his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane; Jesus is flanked by Moses and Elijah on the Mount of Transfiguration and he is flanked by two bandits and murderers on Mount Calvary; a thick cloud envelops the Mount of Transfiguration, and there is darkness over the land as he is crucified on Mount Calvary.  Hope and realism.  It is as if suffering and glory are superimposed one upon the other; we can’t interpret one without the other.

‘You shall see the King in his beauty’. May this hope strengthen us in all the realism of our daily living and the life of our world, and in this holy place today, assisted by art, architecture, symbol, music and word, may we glimpse the glory of the risen Christ who stands among us, great David’s greater Son, God’s eternal Word, and know the reality of our salvation, today and for our future.