Saturday, September 03, 2016
Feast of the Transfiguration
Sermon for the Sunday
after the Feast of the Transfiguration
August 7, 2016
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
Peter and his companions were weighed down with
sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw His glory and the two men who
stood with him.
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided
Trinity
This strange story may illuminate the dilemma
of whether we must try to change the world, or concentrate on changing
ourselves. Three details are essential, though they may seem accidental:
· The Apostles were sleepy, but stayed awake
· The three heavenly beings discussed Jesus’s “departure,” which He
was about to accomplish in Jerusalem
· Peter wanted to build three temples, whereupon the vision ceased.
Let’s take them in reverse order:
Peter’s response
was natural, but wrongheaded. As soon as he expressed the desire to take up
permanent residence in the Transfiguration, he stopped seeing it, and was
ordered to obey. He could no longer see the Glory of God, but fell back to the
level of hearing and obeying. In a
sense, he fell back asleep.
Peter knew
something unprecedented was going on, but he didn’t comprehend it. Who could? We can’t really blame him for his
diminished understanding, He wasn’t completely awake, but weighed down with sleep, so that he had no idea what the three
transfigured creatures were discussing. He must have found out later because
the Gospel tells us that the agenda of the Council of the Transfigured was
Jesus’s imminent “departure” in Jerusalem. So on to the second point.
Departure. This translation is
correct, but misleading. Anyone reading the original would find the same Greek
word that names the pivotal event of the Old Covenant: the Exodus from slavery in Egypt and all that went along with that
earlier Departure: the Passover of the Angel of Death, the terrifying Shekinah the visible appearance of God
as the Pillar of Fire, the parting of the Red Sea and the great walls of water
on either side, the annihilation of the forces of enslavement, the Manna in the
wilderness and the encounter with God on Sinai, and so on. THAT is what Jesus
was about to reënact, to recapitulate, to ”accomplish in Jerusalem.” The two
other transfigured humans, represented the two poles of Hebrew religion, the
Law and the Prophets. What Jesus discussed with Moses and Elijah was nothing
less than a whole new Exodus, extending the Covenant to all flesh – ta panta.
This was not just about
raising the consciousness of Peter, James, and John – though it was about that,
too. Sleep and awakening is a common metaphor for enlightenment. Buddha, I understand, just means awake. Which brings me to the first
point. There is consciousness that is to ordinary human consciousness as waking
is to sleep. The drowsy Apostles were somewhere in between ordinary, somnolent
consciousness, and the higher level of vigilance or being fully awake. Full
vigilance is connected to the New Exodus. A new consciousness – a higher consciousness – is a feature of the
new deliverance.
One of Dostoyevsky’s
characters in The Brothers Karamazov
says “the tragedy of human life is that a paradise of beauty blooms around us
and we fail to see it.” This may be
related to an older theological observation that what changed on Mt. Tabor (the
traditional name of the Holy Mountain of the Transfiguration) was not Jesus
Himself, but the Apostles’ view of Him. After all, the text itself says not
that He changed, but that His appearance
changed. What changed was how His Apostles saw Him. As we now agree, our senses
receive external stimuli, which are then translated into perceptions in our
brains. These stimuli are waves of sound or light, or tactile sensations having
to do with pressure and temperature. But is that how the world really is? There
is no way to tell. This is not to say
that there is no reality out there
but our perception of it is only in here.
Things
are not as they seem. Long before Immanuel Kant taught us that
what we perceive is in our minds, and that we cannot really be sure how our
perception relates to the things themselves, the theologians understood that
Jesus always radiated the Uncreated Light, but human beings lacked the ability
to perceive it. Just as some animals can apparently hear things we can’t, so
there are levels of awareness that human beings must develop, a higher faculty
that must be brought online, if we are to see the Glory of God in the Face of
Jesus. On Tabor, the sleepy Apostles
enjoyed that faculty, temporarily.
Human consciousness is
Creation becoming aware of itself. But our consciousness is a work in progress.
It is Peter’s mistake to imagine that the purpose of this process is our own
individual awakening. To think so is to fall back into sleep. The goal of the
process is the New Exodus, also called the New Creation, in which all Creation,
down to the humblest atom of dust, reaches its fulfillment, transfigured in the
Love of God. Our occasional glimpses of Divine Beauty may be ravishing, but
that ecstasy is merely a foretaste of the ultimate Transfiguration of the
world. What the Apostles saw with their
human eyes is called the Uncreated Light.
That is, the Glory of God, that has no beginning or end and that always
radiates through the Creation. On the Holy Mountain the Apostles saw this Glory
radiating from creatures. The Apostles saw the Glory of God suffusing and
radiating from humanity, not only from the humanity of the Godman, but from the
other two as well. That is significant: Jesus was not transfigured alone, but
in conversation with other human creatures. St. Irenaeus put it this way:
On the one hand, the Glory of God is living humanity; on
the other hand, the Life of humanity is the vision of God.
This vision – this waking up
– is real human life, but it is contemplating the communal transfiguration of
the whole world. This is the New Exodus: the communal transfiguration of the
cosmos. Dostoyevsky’s character may have been right – Divine Beauty radiates
constantly from creation, though we fail to see it, just as the Uncreated Light
shone in the material world from the Nativity on, without interruption. Humans
can learn to perceive this New Creation. We can wake up, so that creation may
become conscious of the Divine Glory that surrounds and infuses it. The paradox
is that in so learning, the creation itself is gradually changed into what it
has always been: the Glorious Body of the Risen Christ. Wherever a human being
wakes up in this way, the whole cosmos benefits. The Communion of Saints is real – and not
confined to those who call ourselves Christian. The Spirit blows where She
will.
There is an old argument
about whether we should try to change the world or concentrate on changing
ourselves. Genuine spiritual guides agree that the two cannot be separated. It
is futile to dispute about which comes first, action or contemplation, because
they are effective only together – two sides of the same coin, two poles of
Redemption, like Moses and Elijah. The Glory of God shines through creation.
That is the deep mystery of the Incarnation. Our life is the Vision of God, but
what can be seen of God – the Glory of the Uncreated Light – can be seen only
in Living Humanity, which I take to mean all humus, the entire material cosmos.
Peter’s understandable error was to want to
enjoy the new consciousness by himself, and forget about the rest of creation –
and to institutionalize his forgetting: IT
IS GOOD FOR US TO BE HERE – good for US, you see. To hell with everything
else. That is NOT higher consciousness: it is going back to sleep. So Peter slipped
back into hearing and obeying. If the Transfiguration is a change in our own
consciousness, it cannot be separated from the topic of the objective
conversation of the beings Transfigured: what was soon to happen in Jerusalem,
the Passion and Death and Resurrection of the Godman. Peter briefly saw the
Glory, but he misunderstood its meaning.
Individual enlightenment is
not the purpose of human life, but a tool in the liberation of the whole
cosmos. There is no enlightenment without liberation – in every sense of the
word – social, political, economic, and cosmic liberation. Our enlightenment,
our awakening, our own transfiguration is our participation in the New Exodus,
which He was to accomplish in Jerusalem.
AMEN
MARANATHA
COME, LORD JESUS!
