Br. Lain Wilson

The Transfiguration of Our Lord Jesus Christ

Luke 9:28-36

One of the things I love most about this Chapel is the play of light and color. It changes seasonally, daily, hourly. The deep orange that appears in the afternoon, the jewel tones of the Lady Chapel, and, most importantly for me, the revealing of the faces in our clerestory windows as the sun rises. Dark texture ever so gradually gives way to brilliant color and light, and I can see the faces of our monastic forbears. These faces, these colors, are always there, but it was only this illumination that allows me to see them.

Today is the feast of the Transfiguration, when we recall Jesus’ journey to the mountaintop with three chosen disciples, there revealed to them in glory. The sign of this is visual – his changed appearance, face and clothing. The disciples, for the first time, are able to see Jesus as he truly is.

When I first encountered this story, I’ll admit I was a bit let down. I knew, somehow, that it was a big deal – perhaps clued in by the heading it got in my Bible. But the details were odd, at least to the modern, Western imagination. I remember feeling like a commercial for bleach had crept into the biblical narrative.

What changed for me was encountering the long tradition that the most important transformation in the story was not Jesus’, but the disciples’. Jesus may have appeared transfigured, but only because the disciples were made to see what was already there. Like the light through our windows, the Holy Spirit transformed the disciples to see what was there all along. To see that all that surrounded them was already charged with the glory of God.

Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann, in his extended essay from over sixty years ago For the Life of the World, called out our tendency to create divisions: spiritual vs. material, sacred vs. profane. I would add here not only how we impose lines in our relationship with God, but within our world, and between each other. Nature vs. culture, domestic vs. foreign, us vs. them. “The world is a fallen world,” Schmemann writes, “because it has fallen away from the awareness that God is all in all.”[1]

The awareness, in other worlds, that the glory of God glimpsed by the disciples on the mountaintop, was not a one-time, one-place thing – but rather a glory that suffuses creation. A glory dwelling in the silent hearts of those we meet: friends and neighbors, strangers and enemies.

Schmemann concludes: “It is only when, in the darkness of this world, we discern that Christ has already ‘filled all things with Himself,’ that those things, whatever they may be, are revealed and given to us as full of meaning and beauty. A Christian is the one who, wherever he looks, finds everywhere Christ, and rejoices in Him.”[2]

There is so much darkness in our world: so much suffering, so much hatred, so much division. The transforming power revealed in the Transfiguration reminds us that even in the darkest places, God’s glory abides. Even in the most silent hearts, God’s glory dwells. Even where divisions are most rancorous, God’s glory nevertheless is there, filling and bridging and mending all things – truly there, if only we have eyes transformed to see.

Amen.

[1] A. Schmemann, For the Life of the World (New York, 1963), 5.

[2] Ibid., 86.