"Now about eight days after
these sayings he took with him Peter and John and James and went up on
the mountain to pray. And as he was praying, the appearance of his face
was altered, and his clothing became dazzling white."
Those of you who
have been listening to me preach for some time will have heard me
mention Will Willimon - a man who has very much been my preaching
mentor. I have only met him in person once, but I have spent
a relatively enormous amount of time reading his preaching guides and
listening to his lectures on how to preach. And Will
Willimon's key strategy in preaching, which has become the basis for so
much of my own pulpiteering
(if that's a word) can be summed up in four words
that he is fond of quoting, namely:
'stick with the weird'.
And if you haven't heard me
mention this before many of you will no doubt nonetheless discern how
this principle operates in my treatment of Biblical passages - that my
approach to the Biblical narrative is generally not to avoid the
difficult bits, but rather to focus in on those aspects of a passage
that do not seem to fit easily, that are uncomfortable, or that are
just downright weird.
And then you come across a
passage like today's reading - the story of the transfiguration -
where the whole thing is just completely weird, and it is hard to know
what to do with it!
"And
as [Jesus] was praying, the appearance of his face was altered, and his
clothing became dazzling white."
Jesus shone! What are we supposed
to make of that? How did He do it? Why would Jesus
want to do it? Was it all just a part of some strange dream
of the disciples, and if it wasn't a dream what point was Jesus trying
to make, if any?
Of course these sorts of
questions aren't unique to this particular passage. There are
lots passages and lots of stories about Jesus that are, at first,
difficult to penetrate. And yet we who are experienced in
dealing with the Scriptures know that there are methods for unlocking
seemingly difficult texts, and the starting point is generally looking
at other pieces of Scripture which pick up on similar themes.
And so with this particular story
of the transfiguration, our starting point might be to look at other
persons who are transfigured in the Bible and compare the nature of
their transfigurations to Jesus' transfiguration, such that we might
begin to see what transfiguration in general is all about, and hence
what Jesus' transfiguration in particular has to teach us.
The problem we have though when
we start to look at the other transfiguration accounts that occur in
the Bible is that there aren't any. There are no other
transfiguration stories. There are no other people who were
transfigured at all!
Yes, there was Moses, who we are
told had a 'radiant
face' after his encounter with God (Exodus 24:39) but it
is hardly a strong comparison. There's no suggestion there that he was 'shining like the sun'
or that his clothes were transformed such that they were 'whiter than any fuller could
bleach them', let alone that he shared in any of the other
strange elements of this story.
In other words, when it comes to
transfiguration stories in general in the Bible, there just aren't
any! This account pretty much stands alone, and for that
reason it is hard to have much of a clue as to what to make of it.
One comfort in this of course is
that the disciples didn't seem to have a clue what to make of it
either! On the contrary, the three characters who shared the
experience with Jesus behaved like rabbits caught in the headlights,
not knowing what to say.
I'm not sure what it was that was
going through Peter's mind when he made the suggestion about setting up
the three tents, but then again it's not clear that Peter understood
what he was talking about either. It seems to have been one
of those moments that you look back on later, kicking yourself, and
thinking of all the much more intelligent things you could have said if
only you'd had the presence of mind at the time to say them.
It was difficult for the
disciples to work out what was going on with Jesus that day, and it
remains difficult for us two thousand years later to work out exactly
what was going on with Jesus that day. He seems weird,
impenetrable, and not like us at all, suggesting that perhaps there is
a dimension to Jesus that is far more mysterious, more powerful, and
more glorious than we might have otherwise imagined! Let us
hope so, for if we are going to deal with the struggles of this life
and with the evils of this world we will need a Jesus who is more than
just an inspiring brother and a spiritual buddy.
As some of you know, I've spent a
lot of time and energy this last week trying to help coordinate a
campaign to prevent my friend, Sheikh Mansour (our local Iranian Muslim
cleric), from being deported by the Australian government.
Now I know that there will be
some people who question why I should be pouring my time into
supporting someone who should be considered both ethnically and
religiously my enemy, but that's OK. Plenty of people
questioned Jesus over His support for Samaritans and Romans and
Syrophoenicians, who supposed to be His ethnic and religious enemies,
so I'm not too worried about that. What does worry my though
is that the further I get in to this case, the more I sense the
presence of evil deeply embedded in our legal and governmental systems.
Q: Mansour is to be ingloriously deported from our country as a
security risk? Why? A: I'm sorry, we
can't tell you!
Q: But isn't it only fair that a man be told what he is accused of?
A: Yes, it is
fair, but as the High Court has ruled, Mansour is not entitled to
procedural fairness or natural justice because he is not an Australian
citizen!
Q: But I thought the purpose of the law was to deliver justice,
regardless of whether you were black or white, rich or poor, Australian
or Iranian? A: Yes it is, but
not if you're a terrorist!
Q: But what makes you think that this quiet and gentle man is a
terrorist? A: I'm sorry. We
can't tell you!
When I was a younger man I used
to think that we lived in a wonderful country where everybody was given
a fair go, but it's just not true. You can get justice, but
you have to be an
Australian citizen, and frankly, you have to be a white Australian
citizen, and quite frankly, you have to be a white Australian citizen
with money!
And in case you think I'm just
being cynical on this last point let me tell you of one good friend who
went to get some advice from a lawyer recently as to how he might
defend himself through the legal system. The lawyer gave him 20 minutes
of his time and charged him $1,600 for those twenty minutes, and the
advice this lawyer gave my friend as to how he should try to defend
himself through the courts was that he shouldn't bother.
And I'm convinced that it's not
just a case of there being a lot of particularly nasty lawyers (the
90-something percent of the fraternity giving the rest of the guys a
bad name). And I'm convinced that it's not just a case of bad
judges or poorly defined laws or corrupt police or political
interference or bureaucratic bungling. It is all of those things and it
is more! It is the system, and it is the evil embedded deeply
within the system that corrupts and infects and perverts and deforms,
and takes even the best of intentions and moulds them into actions that
destroy human life.
"For we wrestle not against
flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against
the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness
in high places", says St Paul (Ephesians 6:12), and it is
true!
I see those 'principalities and powers'
doing their corrosive work in the case of my friend Sheikh Mansour just
as I see them tearing away at the flesh of my dear brother Mordechai
Vanunu in Israel, just as I saw them at work in the case of four
entirely separate men that I have been trying to support over this last
week, each of whom are struggling to get access to their children!
Why? Because they have difficult partners and are enduring
painful relationship breakdowns? Sure! But it's
more than that too. It is the system, and it is the evil embedded
within the system, and it is the principalities and powers at work
through that deeply embedded evil, tearing up and bringing down, sowing
discord and whiteanting reputations, "turning justice into wormwood"
as the prophet Amos once put it (Amos 5:7) "and casting down righteousness
to the earth".
And it is insidious, and it is
painful, and it is enough to drive us to despair and make us want to
throw it all in, but then we look up and we see Jesus, transfigured -
mysterious, glowing, breath-taking, glorious!
And His glory shines above it
all, and around it, and through it all, and we sense that somehow in
the midst of all this pain and ignominy and corruption and death, that
yet there is hope!
The transfiguration of
Jesus. I don't understand it and I don't have many clues as
to how or why He did it, and yet I cling to it! For I need a
Jesus that is bigger than my own imagination, and I need a
Jesus who can rise above the principalities and powers and all the
forces of evil that tear away at our world. I need Him in His
glory.
As John, one of the other
disciples who shared that experience with Jesus, wrote many, many years
later: "We
beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of
grace and truth."
We beheld His glory! And that vision of His glory makes us
strong - straightens the feeble knees and lifts the falling hands, and
so we battle on, bathing in His glorious light!
First preached at Holy Trinity
Dulwich Hill, February 2010
