The Transfiguration

The Collect
O God, who on the holy mount revealed to chosen witnesses your well-beloved Son, wonderfully transfigured, in raiment white and glistening: Mercifully grant that we, being delivered from the disquietude of this world, may by faith behold the King in his beauty; who with you, O Father, and you, O Holy Spirit, lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The Psalm
99

The Readings
Exodus 34:29-35     +     II Peter 1:13-21     +     Luke 9:28-36

Now about eight days after these sayings Jesus took with him Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray. And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to him. They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.

~Luke 9:28-30

In his wonderful little book, The Dwelling of the Light: Praying with Icons of Christ, former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams writes:

So as we look at this icon (of the Transfiguration) and let it shape our prayers and reflections, we can think first of that infinite 'hinterland' that is the background, the inner dimension, of Jesus' human life. It doesn't stop being human in any sense; but it is a humanity which in every moment 'performs' God's own life. When we see that, we see that every act and suffering of Jesus is part of the act of God, embraced feely in God's journey towards us out of his depths. We can also think of how the shape of our own lives is finally going to be in God's hands, not ours: like Moses and Elijah, we don't know yet (in St John's words) what we shall be. Our time, our stories about ourselves, our histories are the best we can do from where we stand and look; but God's perspective can do strange things with history, and we are not the best judges of the meanings of our lives, what really matters to God, what shows God to the world. But we are given a glimpse of what God can do in this rare moment of direct vision, when the 'door of perception' is opened by and in Jesus, and the end of the world is fleetingly there before us. And finally, we can let ourselves contemplate the fact that the divine freedom shown us in this vision tells us both that there is no escape from the world in which we have been put as creatures and that there is nowhere from which God can be finally exiled. This is the great challenge to faith: knowing that Christ is in the heart of darkness, we are called to go there with him. In John 11, Thomas says to the other disciples, 'Let us go and die with him'; and ahead indeed lies death--the dead Lazarus decaying in the tomb, the death of Jesus in abandonment, your death and mine and the deaths of countless human beings in varying kinds of dark night. But if we have seen his glory on the mountain, we know at least, whatever our terrors, that death cannot decide the boundaries of God's life. With him the door is always open, and no one can shut it.

 

Closing Prayer

Help us, Lord Jesus, in the midst of uncertainty and disquietude, to see you, and to walk confidently in the light of that vision. Amen