Sunday the 26th is Transfiguration Sunday, a decidedly more minor part of the church year. It is the kinge between the readings that tells us about the identity of Jesus and the ancient penitential season of Lent. It is a challenge for older ministers as the story keeps to the same path in the gospels.
It is a fitting conclusion to the season of epiphany/manifestation that begins on January 6 and the experience of the Magi. Now an adult Jesus goes up a mountain with three disciples. There he is revealed in a stunning new light. He appears as a prelude to the resurrected Jesus and engages in conversation with two prophets who tradition saw as assumed into heaven, Moses and Elijah.
When I was a child, I went through a geology phase and learned of metamorphic rocks. These transform due to heat and pressure: so shale becomes slate. This is the word the gospels use that gets translated as transfiguration via Latin.The idea is that Jesus is revealed in a new form or figure. Quite simply divinity is accentuated.
One could approach the Lord’s Supper in a similar way. Ordinary elements become the bearers of utterly new meaning. So bread and wine carry the very life of Jesus. Ordinary water becomes the water of spiritual rebirth. In ordination church members are transfigured into church officers such as minister, elder, or deacon.
Transfiguration includes seeing the world through e religious eyes. It is seeing someone as made in the image and likeness of God, no matter their social class. It is Mother Teresa seeing the face of Christ when she served the sick and dying in India.
Matthew 17, today’s reading in many churches, transfigures our notion of divinity even as it draws on theophany from the Old Testament. This mountaintop event is framed by Jesus announcing that the Messiah will suffer and die. In this account, divinity and humanity are linked by the experience of suffering.
Lent could be seen as days in March and April, but within the church year they are transfigured into spiritual preparation for Holy Week. They help us to realize that we are tested, tried, or tempted just as Jesus was in replaying the days in the wilderness of the freed Israelites.
So, a diet turns into fast and abstinence. A change in behavior or attitude becomes a sacrifice. That Latin word has the sense of performing a sacred act or rite. I don't think that I ever quite got the idea of Lenten abstinence, or giving something up for Lent when young. I did have a nascent sense that this o was training for the big leagues of adult spirituality. If I could give u potato chips for a few weeks, maybe it would make me stronger, a form of spiritual workout, just like practicing shooting baskets.
Jesus incarnates, embodies divinity for us. Instead of one of control, the mechanism for divine ve include suffering. It sanctifies or at least ermist the everyday to become holy, to point to the beyond, the divine.
NI bWright, the eminent British churchman and scholar just published on new book on the cross. Lent leads us always to the cross, to a love that will do and suffer what is necessary for the beloved.The arms of the cross embrace a world love by God. In that light we do well to practice the small struggles of Lenten sacrifice. In a larger sense, we do well to practice lenten acts of social justice as a small stand against the script that tells us me first since we are all on our own.
Lent comes with the spring, of seeds planted to help foster a new Garden of Eden.
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