BILLTESKA

Life in Christ is a series of transformations. All the sacramens are passages from one state to another. All the world is also a process of transformation. The question is, what if anything does it mean? Nothing stays the same (you can’t step into the same River twice). Ah, but the changes are trivial and meaningless, just endless repetition of the same pattern. “The more things change, the more they remain the same,” and the River itself is always the same. Nothing really ever changes. These two ways of seeing the world (paradigms) are an ancient argument – and a modern one. Some things never change!

The pagan pre-Socratic philosophers disputed it, post-Exilic Judaism appears to have divided up between the prophetic/apocalyptic view (Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel), with its visions of glorious historical transformation at the End of Days versus the stoical existentialism of Job and Proverbs and the rest of the Wisdom writings, that confronted the basic absurdity of human existence. (Vanity of vanities. All is vanity and a striving after wind.) Christianity tended to continue the dispute, while trying to synthesize the two views: the changes of history were meaningful, up to a point, that point being Christ, the fulfillment of prophecy and Wisdom herself in the flesh. But since the Ascension, we are all pretty much back in the slough of meaningless cycles – just waiting for the Second Coming as we live our own lives that, though historically meaningless, are not absurd, since in Christ we at least have individual transformation and the promise of personal transfiguration into His likeness and everlasting life.

But, for much of the past two thousand years, the only meaningful transformation we Christians have acknowledged has been the soul’s inner journey to God, through the Church. We didn’t expect any significant changes in the world before the End of Time. Until recently. In the 18th and 19th Centuries, Europe came up with a new paradigm: historical progress. Just as in nature, human society evolves; that is, the changes it undergoes are genuine transformations, significant in that they are leading somewhere. The account of these meaningful changes is what we call history. And history has a direction and a destination. It is not just an endless repetition of patterns. The 20th Century picture of the cosmos with its Big Bang and expanding universe seems to imply a purpose.

But just then, the Postmodern paradigm comes around to rebuke this progressivism and to revive the eternal cycles: the universe will expand until it collapses again, and then there will be another Big Bang and expansion and so on – a pulsating universe, an endless series of cycles, as pictured in ancient Hindu texts. And biology students are now taught never to speak of “higher” or “more advanced” forms of life, but only of “more adaptive” ones. Evolution must not be described so as to imply any direction or purpose.

I find both of these paradigms – ways of seeing of reality – in the story of the Transfiguration. I have come to regard it as the Third Great Mystery, after the Trinity and the Incarnation. The Transfiguration, which speaks of the Work of Christ in the world, was the first of these Great Mysteries to be revealed to the Church. The chosen inner circle of the Apostles witnessed it personally on the Holy Mountain, just before the final journey to Jerusalem and the Death and Resurrection of Jesus. It was only later, reflecting on all of these things, that they came to understand Jesus as fully divine and fully human. And much later before their thinking about the Incarnation would lead them to adore God as Three-in-One and One-in-Three. The Transfiguration came first, chronologically.

In one sense, the Transfiguration is fairly ordinary, as supernatural mysteries go! Mountaintop visions are pretty commonplace, and certainly not confined to biblical religion. People see God on mountains wherever there are mountains, from Greece to India and Tibet to Arizona and South Dakota. The Apostles, being Jews, would know that God spoke to his messengers the prophets on mountains. So, amazing as the experience must surely have been, it was not exactly unprecedented, not without a referent in their experience. As if to underscore the reference, with the transfigured Jesus appeared Moses and Elijah, two men who had previously talked with God on mountains. So, however rare an occurrence, the Transfiguration was still a pattern repeated, nothing new. In this sense, it relates to the inner journey of the soul to God, and Peter responds appropriately: “let’s stay here and build some houses! What more could we ask than this Glory? What more could there be?”

But there is more. Much more. Peter’s ecstatic, but premature willingness to enter the Divine Life plunges him back into the murky, earthly consciousness we call “reality.” Immediately his vision clouds. Darkness and fear come back. The Glory disappears and all that is left is hearing and obedience. The Transfiguration may, in fact, be all that Peter or we could ever desire, but it is also more than that: more than Peter’s, or anyone else’s, spiritual fulfillment. What is different in this mountaintop encounter with God is the topic of his conversation with His Messengers: They…were speaking of His Exodus, which He was about to accomplish in Jerusalem. Yes, the word we translate as departure is the same word that is the title of the Second Book of Moses, in its Greek translation. In other words, the pivotal event of God’s liberating intervention in human history was identified with what Jesus was about to do in Jerusalem. We know what that turned out to mean: something completely new and supremely meaningful, a unique transformation, the most significant event that has ever taken place – the Death and Resurrection of God-in-the-flesh, for our sakes.

The Transfiguration is a mystical revelation of the meaning of Christ’s work of Redemption. On Tabor, the Apostles saw the Son as the Father eternally beholds Him. As St. Irenæus was to exclaim, The Glory of God is a Living Man. The perfect Beauty of the Glory of God is the fundamental fact of Creation. Human sin is the author of ugliness, Creation’s disfigurement. The New Adam will shortly destroy the grip of sin and restore Creation to her original dignity and beauty, including us humans. And the last state of that New Creation will be better than the first.

And we will be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. We shall see Him as the Apostles saw Him on Tabor. We shall see Him as the Father eternally sees Him. But NOT as a private, mountaintop vision. When the Glory of the Lord shall be revealed, all flesh shall see it together. All flesh, from the tiniest sub-atomic energy particle to the most distant galaxy at the very edge of the Cosmos, all things - ta panta - shall see it together, and be conformed unto the likeness of His Glory.

Our sad and suffering world is now and always surrounded by this Glory, as a child in its mother’s lap is surrounded by her love. The material world is rooted in it, begins and ends in divine Love and Glory, as does our human consciousness. The world and our lives are permeated by the Light of Transfiguration. The created world in its succession of transformations, humanity in our historical path toward the Kingdom of Peace and Justice, and every soul’s journey from birth to death is shot through with that Light, suffused and ultimately transfigured in it. All other appearance is illusion – the sleep that weighed down the Apostles in the story. They only saw The Lord as He is because they fought off that sleep. Our everyday, waking life is a kind of dream. All who have ever come back down from the mountain, from whatever culture or religious tradition, say so. The only Reality is the Glory of God; the Love made visible and revealed in the Face of Jesus.

To Him be all glory, now and ever and unto ages of ages.

# posted by billteska : 8:45 PM  0 comments