Ex.24:12,15-18, Ps.99
2 Peter 1:16-21 Matt. 17:1-9
How has humanity come to derive from the white noise experience of the pre-linguistic inner consciousness to come to express our highest values? How have we known concurrent inward and outer events of human experience as being sublime to the degree of being able to establish the highest values which become lures for people to work to transform, even transfigure their lives in excellence?
The event of the Transfiguration, which we observe today on the Last Sunday of the Season of the Light of Christ, the Season of the Epiphany is found recorded in the synoptic Gospels. It is not recorded in the Gospel of John, however, Jesus as the Light of the World is a prominent metaphor in the fourth Gospel.
The event of the Transfiguration is a visionary event of a person and it was memorable enough not to be kept as a private experience; it was given descriptive language so that it could have a public audience for the purposes of establishing Jesus Christ as a high water mark in human excellent, so excellent that only the language of divinity could be used to single out his uniqueness in contrast to the rest of the children of Adam and Eve.
Visions consists of the similar matter of dreams; they defy the logical and regular seeing and hearing that we assume in everyday life.
What unique features are involved in the writing of the visionary experience of the Transfiguration, the Greek word being the same from which we derive the word metamorphosis. Such a word would imply the appearance or the perception of a phase of how the Christ was, is, and will be. If an egg to butterfly cycle is repetitive; the birth of Jesus to the resurrection of Christ would parallel the spiritual cycle of perceived identities with Jesus in a spiritual process of continuous metamorphosis. In St. Paul's mystical cycles of identity with Jesus Christ, he could say that Christ was born in him, he could say that he was crucified with Christ, that Christ was tempted as he was tempted, that Jesus suffered and was persecuted as Paul suffered and was persecuted, that Paul was raised with Christ in his resurrection, and that Paul had ascended with Christ to sit with him in heavenly places. In short, the mystagogy of the early Pauline churches was to find identity in the cycles of the phases of Jesus Christ.
The Gospel writers placed these phases into narrative form for mystagogical formation, or the intentional path of spiritual metamorphosis of being continually renewed and remade as a result of participating in the Spirit at work as illuminated by the phases of the life of Jesus of Nazareth through the Christ ascended and seated at the right hand of God the Father. Indeed, this is the poetry of the mystagogy.
The visionary event of the Transfiguration as it came to language was an attempt to show that the eventual resurrected and ascended Christ was already present within Jesus in the experience of the Transfiguration.
The language of the Transfiguration functions to proclaim the unique greatness of Jesus as someone who was not just a child of humanity, Son of Adam and Eve, but as a Uniquely identified and realized Child of God.
What are the elements of the Transfiguration? There is the functional use of mountain and elevation as signifying "nearer to God experiences." Mountains reach into the sky and are the highest projection points into the heavens, thus they are used in language to articulate in a comparative way the closest to the divine in human experience. In the event of the Transfiguration, Jesus and his "inner circle disciples" retrace the spiritual journey which Moses took for his theophany on Mt. Sinai to receive the law and they retrace the climbs of Elijah for this fire from heaven event and still small voice events.
The Mount of the Transfiguration is said to be enveloped in clouds or perhaps fog. Clouds and fog mean that human sight is limited; we cannot know everything in the vast mystery of God so that in our experience our sight is veiled or clouded. The question is whether we can see things about God adequately amid the mystery of God's greatness. The Gospel imply that we can see things adequately even within our obvious human limitations.
Within the mystery of the overwhelming greatness of God, there still is light that shines and language which declares a revealed heaven to earth supreme value. The light is found exuding from the face of Jesus signifying how he stands out among the disciples and the two apparitional figures of Moses and Elijah. Moses face once was said to shine, but now it is the face of Jesus which shines. The nervous speaking of Peter who wants to build shrines for permanent communion locations for heavenly convocations is interrupted by the Big Voice. The Big Voice is God the Father, and the words identify the owner of the voice. The Voice declare Jesus as the Beloved Son, and gives a command to the disciples: "Listen to him, " meaning that Jesus is a speaker who has a message; he is Christ the Eternal Word who is an indication that Jesus is the bi-lingual being of humanity and divinity who can translate the divine values into human terms.
The Transfiguration event also can seem to have the elements of what we might call a séance, since the long departed figures of Moses and Elijah are present, and though having died still are able to be alive and present in dream like fashion. Why was there such a séance? What is the visionary purpose of presenting this? Also, why was David missing? Since David is the chief model for messianism, it would seem logical that he would be present. It may be that Jesus being in the lineage of David is presented as representing the Davidic line himself. Moses and Elijah are in religious culture of the time chief representatives of the Law and the Prophets as found in two of the important sections of the Hebrew Scripture. Even though Moses and Elijah do not speak on the Mount of the Transfiguration, their mere presence is a testimonial affirmation that Jesus Christ is their logical successor. And if Moses and Elijah gathered communities people who followed God, Peter, James, and John could represent a new community of those who were in continuity with the faithful followers of God who were recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures.
The record in the Gospel of the Transfiguration is full of symbolic meaning, but for us today it is a message to us that we can spiritually interpret our life experiences as being in continual identity phases with the life of Jesus Christ.
He is born in us after being overshadowed by the Holy Spirit. Like the virtually unknown youthful Jesus, the life of Christ has some gradual development in obscurity. But we have revelatory moments in knowing his words as spirit and life. We have our times of temptation like he had. We have the death events in identity with his dying in dying to our selfish selves so that we might be living sacrifices in service of others with love and justice. We have identity with his resurrection in what we might call our own intuition of personal immortality even to believe in afterlife continuity of our personal identity somehow, someway. If Moses and Elijah has recognizable re-appearances, so too might we have re-constituted re-appearances in a dream world of a higher substantiality than even our impermanent physical life.
So, the event of the Transfiguration is the mystagogy of spiritual metamorphosis into which we have been given an orientation. In this mystagogy we have committed ourselves to live in identity with the phases of the life of Jesus Christ as they become individualized and personalized within our own lives in our own life settings.
Today, we say, "Get with the mystery of Christ in you, the hope of glory." And hang onto the identity with Christ as we cycle through the phases of our own spiritual metamorphoses. Amen.
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