Our next sermon on the Transfiguration is from Svantje Swider:
Christ is in our midst!
Sisters in Christ, I’d like to try something. Humor me for a second. Close your eyes. And think of your first Pascha. Or the first Pascha that you can remember. Walking into the church to see all the lights, the choir or the chanters singing “Christ is risen,” and then of course great food and drink afterwards. Okay, you can open your eyes now. We look forward to Pascha all year! And especially toward the end of Lent when things are starting to get rough. It’s definitely a peak Orthodox spiritual experience, with the other Orthodox great feasts not too far behind.
For Peter, James, and John, the Transfiguration also serves as a ‘mountaintop’ experience in both the literal and the metaphorical sense, as a peak dramatic life-changing spiritual experience.
Before studying it for this class, the Transfiguration story always seemed to me a little bit like a stunt or a magic trick. Peter, James, and John go up Mount Tabor with Jesus. Jesus is transfigured before them: his face shines, his clothing becomes a dazzling white. Elijah and Moses appear with Christ, talking to him. Peter, James, and John are shocked. A cloud overshadows the three disciples and a voice from the cloud, the voice of the Father, admonishes the disciples: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.” Then suddenly it all disappears and only Jesus remains. On the way down the mountain, Jesus orders the disciples to tell no one what they saw on the mountain, not until the Son of man is raised from the dead.
What an amazing experience. But… what was the point of all that? What purpose did transfiguring in front of Peter, James, and John serve? Peter, James, and John follow Christ back down the mountain, under instructions not to talk about what they’ve seen, at least not yet, and return to their normal lives.
Well, the Church’s hymns for the feast propose some possible answers to this question. The Kontakion for the feast says that the purpose of the Transfiguration was “so that when they [the disciples] would behold You crucified, / they would understand that Your suffering was voluntary.” Seeing Christ Transfigured, hearing the Father call Him His beloved Son, would give insight and understanding that would help the disciples navigate their darkest hour in following Christ.
So in the Transfiguration, Christ reveals to all of us the uncreated light. But he specifically chooses to do it in front of these disciples to prepare them for great darkness ahead. The disciples need to understand what is at stake before Christ leaves them, before He is taken to be crucified. Peter, James, and John are the same trio that He is going to take with him to watch and pray at the Garden of Gethsemane. John will eventually stand with the Theotokos at the foot of the cross, standing steadfast, watching Jesus die. Peter will follow Jesus to His trial, deny Him three times, but after denying Christ he is overcome with remorse, repents, and returns to being the faithful disciple we know. And we know from church tradition that many years later, Peter will himself be martyred by being crucified upside down.
The Transfiguration not only prepares the disciples for their darkest hour, the crucifixion, but prepares them for a lifetime of risk and suffering as they proclaim the Gospel. In the Epistle reading, Peter tells the church in his letter what the Transfiguration has meant to him throughout his life. In the Epistle, a much older Peter, anticipating his own death, tells the story of the Transfiguration to remind the church that Christ and His glory are real. “I will be careful to ensure that you always have a reminder of these things after my decease,” Peter writes, “For we do not follow cunningly devised fables when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of His majesty.” We heard the voice of the Father saying “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” We heard this voice when we were with Christ on the holy mountain. And now Peter, reaching the end of his life, thinking about his death, commends this story to the whole church, to be “as a light that shines in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.” Peter is dying, and to keep up our hopes, to keep us on track after he goes, after things get difficult, he reminds us of the Transfiguration. The Transfiguration was not only a cherished memory for Peter, an experience that buoyed him through hard times, but it is also part of our collective memory and heritage as the church.
Peter, James, and John had seen the true light, and that experience would prepare them for what came ahead and would sustain them throughout their whole lives.
God prepares us for hard times, too. He provides us with ‘mountaintop’ experiences, whether informal and personal ones or the ones built into the rituals of the church itself, such as the great feasts of the church, the beauty of liturgy on a Sunday morning, our baptism. The Transfiguration itself is also preparation for us. It’s our story, too -- Peter gave it to us, like Christ instructed him, to fortify and encourage us like it encouraged Peter. When we are feeling low, when we are suffering, when we feel like God is distant, we can fall back on our memories of those times, of the spiritual lessons they taught us. Through His Transfiguration, and through our own personal ‘mini-transfigurations,’ Christ shows us who He is, so we can carry that knowledge with us. Our memories of our own personal mountaintop experiences – our baptism if we remember it, Pascha, that time we read Scripture and something really spoke to us – we can call on those memories to carry us through our own hardships.