Transfiguration

 

 Reading Mark’s account of the Transfiguration (Mark 9.2–9). Reflection for the Second Sunday in Lent, the 25^th of February 2024, in the pew notes at St Peter’s, Eastern Hill, Melbourne.  Written by Philip Harvey. 

Incomprehensible. Inexplicable. Unexpected.  Indescribable. These are responses a reader like me still has, after a lifetime, reading the Transfiguration. 

The manifold stories that make up the Gospels bear witness and are, for that reason alone, credible. The Ministry has its own confounding logic. The Crucifixion is an uncompromising fact, one that we have to bear up. But the Transfiguration occurs without warning or background briefing. Like Peter, a reader bumbles around trying to make things hospitable for everyone, but like him we are actually gobsmacked (or its Greek equivalent). We all need to be brought up to speed. 

This story is about when we see someone we know anew, in a completely new light. We have known this person, but now we see them with amazement, their words and actions, their very being. It’s almost hard to believe the wonder of what we are being shown. This is one first way of reading the story. 

Another way is to understand we are seeing a sacred scene, one in which we learn about the company Jesus keeps and what that says about Jesus. His conversation is with all known tradition, past, present and to come. This itself is an example for us to follow, but it is also placing us in a relationship with him that cannot be ignored. If this is what Jesus is being shown to be, we are already in a changing relationship with him, like the disciples. We are being made to look and listen. 

By reading the Transfiguration as sacred scene, we start to appreciate the challenges of the witnesses to this vision and their spare efforts at description of what they experienced. Verisimilitude in a story means getting close to the truth, but in the terms of this story we are in the tricky position of being shown the Truth. We notice that the Transfiguration is one means of revealing the person and work of Jesus, just as the stories of his Ministry and Passion are other means of gradually making the incomprehensible comprehensible, the inexplicable somehow explicable, the unexpected eternally unexpected and surprising, the indescribable describable within the limits of our available language. 

While the nature and temper of the Transfiguration story is unique, filled with light, its meanings grow in the context of Scripture and the life and death of Jesus himself. The event is as intimate and ordinary as a conversation with a disciple, yet astounding and universal in its commanding presence, whether then or now, or to come. The story, and the event it describes in its own manner, comes at a moment where the heritage of the past is being met in Jesus; the present is verily present;, and the future will now mean, inexplicably for all of them, Crucifixion and rising to new life.