On the Eve of the Transfiguration

Tomorrow June and I will listen to St. Mark telling us about the Transfiguration of Jesus. Here’s what Mark will say:

Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. Then Peter said to Jesus, "Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah." He did not know what to say, for they were terrified. Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, "This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!" Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus. As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead. So they kept the matter to themselves, questioning what this rising from the dead could mean.

Mark’s telling of the event is remarkable, especially for the way he honestly lets us know how the disciples respond to what they see and hear. Take Peter’s reaction. Stunned and quite blown away by the way things are going, he can barely contain himself; his enthusiam boundless, he blurts out: “Rabbi, this is a great moment!”

I hope that sometime in your life you’ve had a moment like that. One time in front of the Oklahoma State Univeristy Library, I experienced something like God’s “tazar,” an extended moment that exposed me to “no time and no space,” an experience close to whatever God might experience of Himself. At least it seemed to me. It came suddenly. Stayed a moment or so. And went suddenly. I wish it could have lasted a lifetime.

More usually, however, my mountain-top experiences tend to come within an especially beautiful liturgy when the Eucharist is celebrated with special care among friends and loved ones, both here on earth and in heaven. During the singing of a notably beautiful hymn, for example, something (maybe the Holy Spirit) comes over me and I get choked up, bowled over almost, so that I can barely sing. I feel tears welling up, and taking deep breaths, I find it difficult to calm myself. Strangely enough, once I’ve blown my nose, and returned to the more normal way of things, at such times I wish I could have captured whatever its was that overwhelmed me.

At other times I’ve found myself racing with a camera to catch and make permanent something that has caught my eye. How I’ve wished for the Ansel Adams’ moment, and when it has arrives (at least to my imagination), I work feverishly to capture all of it on a print I’ll be glad to exhibit anywhere.

Whenever the Holy, the Lovely, the Beautiful, and the Good takes us aback, we often want to capture the moment. So with Peter. “Let’s catch the moment,” he implores. “Let’s build three skene--the Greek word Mark uses to translate Peter's Aramaic term. Skene! What are the skene that he plans to have everyone to build? The word can mean a "tent" or "temporary shelter." It can mean "tabernacle" as a worship place (the dwelling place of God in the Hebrew Scriptures). It can mean a "house" -- a permanent dwelling place. Why would these three need houses? Perhaps he wants to "house" the event so that it will last forever.

One pastor has diagnosed Peter as having an "edifice complex." He wants to encase, rope off, pin down, and create something of a museum so that the excitement—good, holy, beautiful, and stunning as it is—lasts as long as possible. Not a few pastors have a strong desire to memorialize that they consider their astonishingly wonderful ministry in a building that will last for centuries.

God, however, often opts (both for himself and for us) to have things otherwise. In Christ God tells us that it’s best not to endorse such probamatically egocentric desires. It’s better not to stake down the tent. It's better to pack it up, shove it in the backpack, trudge down the mountain, and go where the action is more palpably intense. It's better to get back to where others truly need our help, better to lose ourselves in service to the genuinely poor, better to follow Christ into the alleys, prisons, and hovels of the marginalized. Having seen something of the splendor, we’ll more truly be astonished at the real glory, the glory of the Radiant Light fading away on the cross, then flickering and eventually going out. For the time being, Easter can wait. On this coming Ash Wednesday, of course we will remember that the Son shines. He is, after all, "God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God," as we say the Creed. But we'll also "listen" to Him as the Voice commands and importantly put grey ashes on our foreheads and head out the doors and down the steps with the Suffering Servant to where the real re/construction takes place.

Yes, the liturgy during tomorrow's Feast of Transfiguration will be incredibly lovely, beautiful, and good. We will see Jesus for who he is, "of the Father begotten." But that's not all of who he is. He is the Glory of the cross. That vision lies ahead of us. Within seventy-two hours. With the beginning of Lent.

Yet this first, momentarily: the Liturgy of the Transfiguration with the shining Jesus.