The Transfiguration: Who is Jesus?
Recap Luke.
0.1 Jesus is the Christ
To be Christian, as many of us here are, is to make the claim that Jesus is the Christ. That is, Jesus saves. Jesus is the answer to the problem of sin in the world.
0.2 Words a bit empty
A bit like Peter, I don't necessarily know what I'm saying when I say that. Jesus is the Christ. I am chronically misconstruing this idea, mangling it, underselling it, allowing it to become mere words, tired and hackneyed expressions for the vaguely good stuff, redemptive and reparative stuff. He is a solution to a problem, a saviour from a given situation. Medicinal, remedial, reactive: Jesus is the Christ. He's the Lord and King and Saviour and he brings peace and love and joy.. and these words all mean about the same thing. Jesus is the Christ vaguely.
0.3 Words loaded with the wrong meaning
I have come to the recognition, the intellectual assent, the earnest conviction, that Jesus is the Christ. Some evangelical individual in my life played the two ways to live card and I conceded checkmate. Jesus is the Christ. And I go boldly forth to then make that Christ in my own image.
As Peter does. He labours to manufacture a non-suffering Christ. You are the Christ, the Kung-fu Christ, the guns-blazing, Romans-defeating , magic Christ. In Mark's account of the Transfiguration, Peter's confession that Jesus is the Christ is then proceeded by Peter seeking to dismantle the plan for suffering.
Mk8v29 And Jesus asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Christ.” And he strictly charged them to tell no one about him. And he began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again. And he said this plainly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and seeing his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.”
Jesus to be the Christ wrongly ~ I have a wrong-footed notion of what a Christ is.
0.4 Worldview of empty/wrong words
So, by empty words and misdefined words, I have faith in a reduced Christ. And from that I live in a reductive universe, with a dessicated worldview, functionalistic, populated by mundane urgencies, busied clutter of social action and minor moral outrage and the pursuit of global justice with some help from my Christ.
The Christ of that faith is a moral compass for navigating the tricky decisions, and a resource, an occasional motive force, and it does anchor my intellectual framework, but, if I was to sum that faith up, Christ is not so much a light which I have seen directly, but a light which I see by, a torch I shine on other things at an oblique angle on my own terms, and it illuminates them but in a cold light.
0.5 the substance of Christ's glory
The Christ that saves me, the Christ who illuminates my world, is the same cosmic Christ who brought the universe into being.
Christ himself is the object of the Christian worldview, the very substance, the core and it's extents, front and centre, beginning and end.
Christ is the Infinite personal. Infinite. Personal. Infinite - extension without end, platonic geometry, perfect rigour. And yet personal. Discrete and idiosyncratic, named and faced.
Holding those notions in tension scrambles one's brain. Consider what a curious thing it would be to speak to light, to encounter light personified.. weird.
We are finite beings grasping at infinite notions. It is in a flight from that, that I arrive at my more conservative Christ-as-tidy saviour version. It is in fear of those mystic sects at the fringes of Christianity's spectrum whose loopy and superstitious preoccupation with the Transfiguration that means I settle for a neither-nor version of Christ ~ a little less infinite, a little less personal.
The appearance of Christ glowing in a cloud. There is nothing pragmatic about that, there is no tidy three points of application to go home from that. The incomprehensibly vast God appears in unapproachable light. Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.
Luke's account structures a reading of the transfiguration through the Exodus, to make it comprehensible.
1. LIGHT CLOUD TERROR GLORY
1.1 - God uses visual language to reveal truth about himself, an argument from wonder, the interpretation of phenomena: LIGHT - light and cloud as poems-about (application – you are the light of the world)
1.1.1 Glory / Angel of Lord Theophany
they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him.
How to explain what is happening here?
Jesus has set aside glory – kavod of God, his weightiness, his infinity, that which makes him dangerously God, precisely these radiant effects of his radioactive divinity.
So, here on the mountain top is a Glory foretaste – as Moses had a foretaste of the glory that would fill the tabernacle, so the disciples get a glimpse of Jesus post-resurrection restored to glory.
Appearances of God in these terrestrial form take on two types:
1.1.2 Angel of the Lord
Genesis - ~ wrestle with jacob pellial; Abrham at mamre; hagar ~ appears in human form, angel of the lord, messenger of covenant - associated with secone person of trinity
Send angel ahead into promised land, and appear to commander of the army of the lord to joshua
1.1.3 Glory Cloud
Glory cloud, pillar of cloud/fire
Thick darkness comes with fire lightning thunder and burning radiance of sinai
1.1.4 LIGHT and CLOUD
And as he was praying, the appearance of his face was altered, and his clothing became dazzling white.
The primary sensation I get from this meteological encounter with God, this sublime sound and light show rendered in extreme natural phenomena. The primary sensation I get is thick radiance.
God. The force at the centre of reality, the universe . What would it be to encounter such a being, the author of all things, the conductor of the astral chorus, furnace of the engine that keeps that planets in orbit, utterly undomesticated. Imagine we peel back the veil and see the raw divinity, what is at the centre of universe, inside the blast radius of the radioactive core of the workings of the universe, unapproachable, searing heat of light.
1.1.5 GOD IS LIGHT
The main verse on this would be
“This is the message we have heard from Him and announce to you, that God is Light, and in Him there is no darkness at all.” 1Jn1v5
Ezekiel, Habakkuk, the Psalms make similar comparisons and statements about the glory of God as luminous
Paul's Damascus road experience is perhaps the most vivid account of an encounter with God-as-Light:
“At midday, I saw on the way a light from heaven, brighter than the sun, that shone around me and those who journeyed with me” Ac26v12
Ponder light's lightness.
Light. God is Light. A point source, an energy, a wave, a particle, a spectrum, a speed, a mere metaphor? This is the problem of light ~ what is light?
Light: emitted, transmitted, reflected and absorbed. From the rectilinear propagation of an evangelion, to living in the light's warming glow and nuanced colour, to the casting of light and shadow onto the relief of a textured universe.
Light as a handle to my faith, never gets old, never bottoms out, never ceases to draw my imagination to the nooks of new possibility. And, God chooses to reveal himself as a light bright cloud. Why?
Consider the way a cloud's droplets crystalise light's infinite extension into a momentarily bodied presence. Consider the luminous precipitate, the diffuse substantial, fluorescent suspension.
Not an incidental happy coincidence, that God's qualities a little bit like light. God call light into being, for the purpose of making himself known. When you see light, it is viscerally speaking of God. God is Light.
1.1.6 vs disenchanted universe,
How does the culture understand light?
On the one hand, Light is mundane.
Light: a utility along with gas and electric, mere light to be twiddled to mood lighting. Such is our saturation with cheap light, we talk of light pollution – the neon adorned urban epicentres of which, ironically correlate with the pitch black gloomth of their sense of hope and joy.
On the other hand, Light still holds a fascination, a mysterious something which answers a hunger we have for
Avatar – intimate scene beneath a glowing tree, as they walk their footsteps cause the ground to glow, in cinematic short hand for a mysterious divine.
Michael Jackson's Billie Jean video, likewise, he flicks a coin into the homeless guy's pot and it lights up, as the paving slabs light up. This notion that light can be kindled, imparted..
Or Katy Perry's Firework video, resonates with the idea that light is more than light.
~ maybe these are trivial in their depth of understanding, but there is a longing for the light, and humans will find it wherever they can get it.
- Diller&Scofidio's Blur building
- Anthony Gormley's Blind Light – at the Haywood, the thicness of atmospheric prescence.
- But most of all James Turrell whose large scale light art works he speaks of thus “We generally use light to illuminate things, but I was interested in the thingness of light, as a physicality … I want to have a work that is light so that you are looking at light, not something light illuminates. Light itself becomes the revelation.”
God is light. What is Light?
light as energy conductable, storable:
context of Moses face and Glow
the reverse entropy of Jesus pouring contagious light into the system, so, what of clothes as conduits?
LIGHT IS CONTAGIOUS
which leads to the second observation from this passage
OBJECTS CAN CARRY LIGHT
1.2 - God transforms artefacts as a parable about reality, the idea that inter matter can be a conduit for glory.
(application - We are being transformed from glory to glory)
And as he was praying, the appearance of his face was altered, and his clothing became dazzling white.
CLOTHES & CHANGE
Transfiguration, change in substance and effects
~ literal transfiguration, and application
~ a spooky universe of substances
Poetic of changing clothes
spooky eastern traditions
transfigure - in usual language
~ greek word here for transfiguration is metamorphosis
~ as a butterfly changes
graphic images
face shine like sun
clothes white -
illumined and warmed by sun
cannot look at sun lest damage eyes
- always keep the sun at an angle to our vision
make this comprehensible
CLOTHES
Going back to my notes I wrote on this two years ago, I’d just been at Greenbelt and had been chewing over Katherine Maxwell Rose’s talk about clothing justice. She is absolutely right, clothes shouldn't be slave-made, blood bought, disposably cheap, and chemically toxic.. but the clothes in view here.. och.
The bible's view of artefacts such as clothing is way spookier. Consider the bleeding woman touches Jesus' cloak Lk8 and the sick are cured by Paul's handkerchief Ac19.
“And God was doing extraordinary miracles by the hands of Paul, so that even handkerchiefs or aprons that had touched his skin were carried away to the sick, and their diseases left them and the evil spirits came out of them.”
This is the Catholocism your mother warned you about. It is a vital and more enchanted universe – not pantheism, as if we were to give spiritual agency to these artefacts, but the bible is unafraid to consider that physical objects can be embued with very significant poetic meaning and so carry power of a spiritual nature.
Considering clothing in this way draws us up and beyond Katherine's ethical emphasis on important injustice-limitation
- And, beyond Mt6's faith for provision in not worrying about clothes, considering the lillies
- And beyond 1Pt3's idol-limitation don't let your adorning be in gold jewelry.
- toward a transfigurational understanding of the clothes we wear, the world as you know it has the capacity to be a conduit for Light.
An 20th century architect of Dutch monasteries Hans van der Laan considers “architecture is liturgical insofar as it transfigures ordinary material.”
The Christian life of culture-making relentlessly is to transform the ordinary as water-to-wine, we anticipate the coming wedding, and so, like Mt22 seek to dress the world accordingly in wedding garments.
2. OLD TESTAMENT READING OF THIS EVENT:
- THE NEW EXODUS
- THE FULFILMENT OF LAW AND PROPHETS
And behold, two men were talking with him, Moses and Elijah, who appeared in glory and spoke of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.
Moses and Elijah, one the founder law-giver concerned with the beginnings of the chosen people, and one the foremost reformer prophet concerned with the endings and eschaton of the chosen people. Two Old Testament characters noted for their mountaintop encounters with God and their mysterious disappearances.
This is not David Beckham endorsing a product, celebrities coming to turn on the Christmas lights. Moses and Elijah are towering symbols of everything that has come before, because everything comes to a head in this moment. The Old Testament is the powder keg and Jesus is the spark.
All law and prophecy are a longing, and Jesus is the longed-for, but, while the longing for a saviour is generic, everybody is looking for something, the saviour himself is specific and his specificity is rehearsed/patterned by the Exodus, and his specificity is given articulation via The Law and The Prophets.
The Transfiguration was and is and is meant to be mind blowing. Encounter God as Light, glimpsing infinity, should leave you struggling to make a coherent sermon on it. But, exactly for the reason, Luke focuses on this narative parallel to Exodus, not merely as a literary wink, but as the key to why glory comes.
The Exodus is perennial, it is the key narrative, Jesus calls a people to himself, again and again, he does so as a new and better Moses, he does so perfectly, .
The Law and the Prophets are perpetual. Permanently relevant, constantly reinvented as harbingers of Christ in new cultures speaking of Christ still today..
2.1 EXODUS
- Exodus is the narrative key, the practice by which we are carried by God from A to B, from all slaveries to all freedoms. The Christian life is a journey, further up, further in, it is ecstatic, it is on mission.
~ Luke slightly more than the other evangelists sets up his narrative to draw attention to the Exodus parallel, with Jesus as the new Moses:
- Mt Sinai and Mount of Transfiguration
~ Feeding 5k in groups of 50s, out of egypt in 50s, into promised land in 50s
~ fed by manna in desert, miraculous bread
~ Moses takes up companions - ex 24 - joshua and others goes up on the mountain
~ Jesus takes three up with him
~ they are up/away for 6 days (Luke counts inclusive Roman days, Mark's 6)
~ This is my beloved son, hear him.
Similar said of moses “hear him”
- Jesus face glows, Moses face glows
~ Moses comes down to immediate rejection disobedience and chaos and a golden calf, so Jesus too returns to his disciples in village
~ Jesus comes down mountain and finds chaos, his disciples failing to cast a demon out of a boy, a demon who 'shatters' the boy.
~ And he says, oh faithless and peverse generation - language taken from moses
~ then immediately follows Jesus sends out the 72 as Moses likewise after Sinai 70+2 )
This is the bigger Exodus. Jesus discusses his departure with Moses and Elijah. Literally “his Exodus” in the greek. This is massive, its going to be a bigger Exodus.
2.2 LAW AND PROPHETS
- The Law and the Prophets, paradigms of interpreting God, structures for displaying God. Moses represents the Law. Elijah represents the Prophetic.
The are the archetypal, the quintessential, the textbook form of Law and Prophet. That is why they, rather than any other OT celebrity are there on the mountain.
Jesus says on the road to Emmaus - Lk24v27 that the Law and the Prophets are concerned, centrally, with Jesus.
And Jesus claims in Mt5v17 “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.”
What is the Law?
What is the Prophets?
Immediately, they refer to certain chunks of the Hebrew scripture, which create moral categories, and which anticipate a servant King in Bethelem. But more essentially, and more broadly, Law and Prophecy are categories of human experience which are crystallised in Jesus, find their perfection in him.
But beyond that, I think we need to wrestle with the
Indeed, the perpetuation of prophecy is crucial to Jesus' point here, as it is when he speaks a woe in Mt23v29-31. The notion that prophets *were* is what kills the prophets that *are*.
Jesus claims: (v11) “Elijah does come.” or “Elijah comes.” Present tense, Indicative Mood, Middle Voice. Elijah here stands as a Type, the prophetic mode, which is enduring.
Constantly speaking of what the spirit of God is doing, constantly relaying the Father's heart, constantly preparing the ground for the Christ-seed, constantly calling the Ahabs and Herods away from their Jezebels and Salomes, constantly speaking the original truths, the timeless, timely and urgent: the jealous love of God.
Non-exhaustively, and by way of provocation, I suggest some ways of painting these two aspects which find their fulfilment, their harmony, their answer and exemplar in Christ. Hear me lightly, but, can we say:
Law describes what should be done objectively. Prophecy interprets what God is doing idiosyncratically.
Law is timeless. Prophecy is timely.
Law is the legal precedent constituted in the past. Prophecy is the vision which forges the trajectory of the future.
Law is the thou-shalt-not. Prophecy is the what-if-when?
Law is the establishment. Prophecy is reform.
Law is truth. Prophecy is Grace.
Law is form. Prophecy is content.
Law is fact. Prophecy is meaning.
Law is prose. Prophecy is poetry.
Law is concrete. Prophecy is allusive.
Law orders the creation now. Prophecy anticipate the eschaton to come.
Human life exists in the now, looking towards the not yet. Law and Prophecy are means of grace by which navigate the world in communion with God.
Perpetual prophecy.
Perennial Exodus
when the law and the prophets are personified, what do they want to talk about - the route to jerusalem, a tactitical discussion
Spoke of his exodus?
3.1. BELOVED AND EMBATTLED
RECAP
- Who is Jesus? The Christ.
- Go up Mountain and encounter GOD-AS-LIGHT – this unprotected welding arc of hih voltage current
- Witnessing and explaining this event are LAW and PROPHECY.
Then out of the cloud comes this voice: This I my son, my chosen one. Listen to him. -
What's Jesus doing here?
Jesus does this for the joy, he with draws in prayer to commune with the father. This is his source. In prayer. Going to the father. Drawing on his beloved identity to face the task.
Very basically, this fits us back into the two stages of Jesus ministry and aligns this moment with the Baptism, whish began the first stage of Jesus ministry.
What's Peter doing here?
Losing his mind.
3.2. PETER's RESPONSE
Peter's response was the wrong response. Why?
3.2.1 lets get busy. lets make something i can control. A sheltered indoor space.
peter's utilitarian response
shelters – no departures, No Exodus.
shelters – all equal no distinction for Jesus
build a tabernacle?
this is the place
Peter and the architect's impulse: with an insatiable pre-emptive nostalgia, he seeks the preservation of the necessarily transient, he seeks the domus-tication of the divine, and so gets lost in the presence-to-hand of this Kodak moment.
What do you do with your Holy Moments? Go and tell? Give it away? Or sit on it, abstract it, frame it, pickle it, holy-huddle it.
Jesus seeks to transfigure us by also dis-figuring us of our idols. Peter has glimpsed a glimmer, but, before a church is built on this rock, a certain stripping away of camping-trip images must occur. Saunders scathingly critiques Alexander as having a taste only for easy-going, leisureable, recreational, vacational architectures. Certainly this is the danger, to wish all of life was Iwerne, as if we could stay at L'Abri forever, as if it were Christmas every day. Don't you know there's a war on.
3.2.2 lets create a perfrct communuty group. Just us, you me and Moses. A virtual church inside my headphones
Our high points become our snare, exactly as Peter in Mk9v5 hopes to stay there, with that bunch, away from the complicated crowds downstairs.
But you are filled to be poured out, you are called to Speak, so you should be given to giving yourself away. Come down the mountain, don't band together committees of good intentions, but rather go out, go down, to the mess below. Because God does, his going out is as sure as the dawn.
Ephemeral messaging vs kodak moment
certainty, assurance, Peter's comment on "more precious"
5. OUR RESPONSE
Who do you see yourself in, in this passage.
5.1 “Listen to him” "looked up and saw only jesus" - Grasp who Jesus is.
2Cor3v18 And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.
2Pt1v16 “..we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For when he received honour and glory from God the Father, and the voice was borne to him by the Majestic Glory, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased,” we ourselves heard this very voice borne from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain. And we have the prophetic word more fully confirmed, to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place,
Seeing Jesus changed, different, anew. The transfiguration mountain top is like the point at which the curtain ripped, a glimpse of John's second sight: Rev1v13-18. This is the point of meditating on Christ himself. This is the purpose of meditating on Christ himself, to see him a fraction more clearly, more as he really is. Transfigure mine eyes, oh Lord.
peter fell facee down
so will we
5.2 Go transfigure
There is an aesthetic of heaven, this passage has been acutely visual. The task of communicating this is not limited to professional Christian artists, we are all tasked to participate in the image of God. We all live out an exodus, a leaving slavery, a journey to freedom. And in even the small things, we live subjunctively, allegorically, we are poems-about, analogies for, diagrams about eternity. And the Light of etenity, I would posit is more harrowing that Thomas Kinkade tends to paint. There is a need for art as pyromanic as Steve. Health and safety be damned colour party. We transfigure. Stripping old images. Making new. Water to wine and the alchmy of christian art
So, there is the doing of Light, drawing diagramatic and poetic transfigurations, as pictures of the Exodus.
5.3 Go and be Light
But most totally and for everyone, we are called to be Light.
You are the light of the world Mt 5
We too are children of light
Jn12v36 you have the light
1Th5v5 the light has you
Paul (as Katy Perry in Firework) tells the Philippians to Shine like stars Ph2v15
A light is lit, actively, intentionally. From nothing to something. Into your great darkness is spoken a "let there be Light.." You were lit for a purpose. You were sparked at a price. The gospel in you is an ignition bringing to blaze all the fuel God put in you, an uncontainable fire hazard.
And light lights, the rectilinear propagation of that which is nowin you cannot but bring a richness of colour and texture to visibility in the room and along the street and across the sky.
Concluding thoughts
infinite God, incarnation, short circuit,
the bizarre
the elegance of God's plan
how would you design it?
- Jesus is God is Light
- God has been Light and will be Light
- That light is the power to overcome.
- We've beheld it and not understood.
- Gains its coherence in being contexted in Exodus
- Propels an application in so transfiguring.
The sin problem, incarnation,
broken hearted hunger
Transfig experience vs biblical text suffciency
prophetic art anticipates heaven
~ The Jews, that is, the church qua existing covenant community, has a *light-for-glory*. Light from within, Christ the filament gloriously emitting light outwards from the bulb of the church. Christ's coming into the world is light-for-glory, your glory, Christian. Christ-In-You-the-[luminous]-Hope-of-Glory.
~ The Gentiles, that is, the world, your colleagues, your family, your housemates, have *light-for-revelation*. From this moment, they can now see their hand in front of their face. Radiant light transmitted through the ether from the lit-for-glory saved-ones, casts a world brighter and more shapely, coherent and navigable. Light-for-revelation is task lighting, lamps-unto-paths, neon signage.
_# I will hold the Christ-light for you_
_in the night-time of your fear;_
spontaneous human combustion
beyond the consumer level
back up stream to the main board, raw energy
so luminous
effervescent
harrowing perfect light
turn off the lights, and i'll glow. - vanilla ice
I do not simply want to pad around theological tidbits
woo you, and compell you, to a conviction that Jesus is not merely, in all probability, a superlative human being in a class of his own.
1. Ponder the event
2. Read it through the OT
3. Live like such.
How do we make sense of glory?
- past and present
- exodus
- law and prophets
~ towards action.
baby-lord-jesus. Ricky Bobby ra
Spooky glowing orb at centre of univrrse
This aspect outsifr my experience
Reformation jesus lesd open to superstitions
And the word, conjures semantically a lack of substance – bud-lite, muller-light, pepsi-lite, the sugar-free, fat-free version of a product..
Elijah comes. Would you know it if you saw it? Three connected misapprehensions keep the disciples in the Scribe's dark.
1. Form. Wrongly venerating Elijah as an Old Greybeard historic character ~ literal, specific, limited, pluperfect (woe to that Mt23v29-31), as if prophecy was. Prophecy is. Elijah comes.
2. Function. Wrongly considering Elijah's sufficient Elijian role as completely completing moral reform and political overthrow. A whitewashed and rosy-tinted account of the good-enough prophet will disqualify John-the-Baptist, and we would-be-way-preparers, as not-Elijian-enough.
3. Messianic prerequisites. Wrongly limiting that the Messiah only comes to an already perfected people, that the Saviour comes only when there is nothing more to save us from. Elijah comes and Jesus comes. We participate prophetically in preparing the way and pointing the way, imperfectly, incompletely but supernaturally and substantially.
And a voice came out of the cloud, saying, “This is my Son, my Chosen One; listen to him!”
~ “with whom I am well please”
- baptism and transfiguration - section breaks ahead of challenging ministry, two sections of jesus ministry
- soaking in a beloved identity
We encounter God in the wilderness, establish identity of belovedness
Just as jtb bore witness, now we have a greater set of witnesses, beginning of ministry leading up to
~ Structure of Luke,
second stage of ministry
exodus
~ Demonic opposition
patterns in gospel
- baptism of jesus and transfig
- 2 stages gallilean vs judean
- both preceded by witness and question/speculation about identity
~ who is jesus, followed by witness.
- precede a new stage of ministry
- followed by demonic
- transfiguration glory - more so than baptism
ministry in two key stages - face set towards jerusalem, and emphasis on departure discussion
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