God in Everyday Life
According to no less authority than Wikipedia, Christ’s Transfiguration is counted among the five most significant milestones in His life after birth: the other four are Baptism, Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension. Yet, along with His baptism, its significance seems less intuitively understandable than the other three. I can understand Christ’s suffering an especially painful execution for what He and His ministry meant as a challenge to worldly values and power structures, and His resurrection and return to Heaven were necessary to fulfillment of His role as God’s Son. The importance of His baptism has been questioned—He was sinless, after all—but it set an example of what follows from repentance, redemption, and obedience to God’s will. Also, it set an example which Christians have followed ever since and which has become perhaps the most prominent among what we could call Christians’ shared experience, including Christ’s.
We can all identify with those four events as central to our faith, but the necessity of transfiguration is less clear. It occurred in the midst of Christ’s ministry and seems like a kind of “authentication” of that ministry by God for this is the point where God closes a rare direct utterance with: “Listen to Him!”
Among others, White notes that Matthew and Mark describe the Transfiguration with the Koine Greek root for the word “metamorphosis” which suggests a change in Christ that is described dramatically but only briefly. Perhaps authentication is enough of a rationale, though one wonders if Jesus would have been “unqualified” without it since God had already confirmed Christ as his Son at His baptism, and Jesus was well along in His ministry. Perhaps the Transfiguration was critical for the final embodiment of Christ’s ultimate authority to highlight the world-changing tragedy of His impending crucifixion—an interpretation that helps explain why we celebrate Transfiguration Sunday immediately before Lent.
Scripture is full of examples of events that puzzle me or that I do not understand—yet. Also, my reflections are culturally influenced by my North American Protestant background. Wikipedia notes the special importance of the Transfiguration in the Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and similar churches.
I wonder if Frederick Buechner—a theologian whose understandings and explanations I tend to respect—might share some of my curiosity about the Transfiguration. In his Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC’s of Faith (Harper Collins, 2004), he includes it as one of his 366 “beyond-words” that “point to the realm of mystery and depth that lies beyond our ordinary experience and thus could be called beyond-words.” (p. viii) Two of his three paragraphs on the subject summarize today’s scripture from Mark 9, but his last paragraph claims that we also experience “something like [the three disciples’ awe]…once in a while” in the face of someone we might see on any day: “Every once and so often, something so touching, so incandescent, so alive transfigures the human face that it’s almost beyond bearing.” (p. 393) It is so rare, but I can relate to that; and I shall understand better if and when it happens next.
Buechner also discusses the beyond-word “revelation”—the concept, not the book in the Bible—and the difference between “found out” knowledge from reasoning and “occurred to you” knowledge which is given, not earned through reasoning: “Revelation means knowledge as grace…Classic Christianity…is not primarily reasonable. [It] was born when it occurred to some…that [Christ’s] kind of life was the only kind of life worth living…a revealed religion.” (pp. 344-5; emphasis his) Let us acknowledge the limits of our reasoning and this gift of grace.
It is noteworthy that the disciples’ reaction as they witnessed the Transfiguration was “awe”. Awe occurs infrequently in the Bible only under very special conditions, and arguably the Transfiguration defines the kind of rare circumstances that warrant awe. The close connection of awe to scripture has been recognized: “The current sense of "dread mixed with admiration or veneration" is due to biblical use with reference to the Supreme Being.” (https://www.etymonline.com/word/awe ) Following no less a faith leader than U2’s Bono (PBS interview, 1 November 2022), I am disappointed that awe seems clichéd in current usage. So little of what is described every day—at least in the US—as “awesome” seems to qualify for that. On the other hand, perhaps its popularity is a veiled and haphazard but massive acknowledgement of God in everyday life.
Our parent in Heaven, thank you for the gift of your Son whose model of life we hope is our model of life and whose teachings are an anchor for our faith. Be with us and guide us as we seek to understand the scriptural foundations of our faith and grant us peace but persistence as we continue. Thank you for those who seek with us and who share what they find, and thank you for those glimpses of your presence when we spot transfiguration in others. In Christ’s name, we pray. Amen.
Denton Marks