Transfiguration revisited

Bottoming out at 1,410 feet and ten inches below sea level, the Jordan River valley is literally the lowest elevation on the face of planet Earth. It was there that Jesus was baptized, a feast we celebrated last month, and a voice came from heaven, saying, 'You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.'

The precise identity of the Mount of the Transfiguration is not identified in the gospel accounts; scholars have variously identified it as Mount Tabor or Mount Hermon, which are not among the world's tallest peaks, but either is plenty tall that when God again speaks and says, 'This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!' it certainly communicates range and contrast: God's word extends from the depths to the heights.

This is a strange story! 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.

If we think it's strange, imagine how strange it must have been to Peter and John and James! This teacher they've been following around has seemed special. He taught with confidence. He even performed miracles. But as far as they could tell, he was still definitely in "special teacher" territory, not something more unusual than that. And then, they go up a mountain with Jesus, and they see… this. And what are they supposed to do with it? They're overwhelmed, and Peter, God bless him, stammers out his incoherent response to what they saw, only to be met with nothing less than the voice of God themself, proclaiming about Jesus 'This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!'

But perhaps most disturbing, now that they know that they're in the presence of God's own son, is the subject of the conversation they overheard between Moses, bringer of the Law, and Elijah, greatest of the prophets: they were talking about Jesus's departure which was to be "accomplished" in Jerusalem.

Oh great, think Peter and John and James. We are finally in the presence of God, and what's he talking about? Leaving. The Messiah's job description might be muddled in many regards in terms of what people expect, but one thing is clear: he shall reign forever and ever. Whatever else the Messiah is or isn't, Jesus's followers expect that he will not be taken away. Not be betrayed into human hands and die. That can't be how the glory that was revealed on the mountain top ends up. God forbid!

This conflict of exceptions about what a Messiah is supposed to be and do lies at the heart of the clashing worldviews of God and Empire. What is glory? What is power? What is peace? The peace of God which passes all understanding doesn't look like the peace we come to expect when taught by the powers and principalities of this world.

And yet, at the end of today's Gospel, Jesus set his face to go to Jerusalem, where these things are all going to play out. And that's where we stand today: at the beginning of a long march toward an ending the disciples are dreading and hoping is impossible. Messiahs are supposed to win. Messiahs are supposed to reign in glory. Messiahs who are transfigured in glory like Peter and John and James saw Jesus just can't suffer and die. 

It's a long walk. They have plenty of time to think about it. And that's where we find ourselves in this story: at the start of a long march.

The calendar even tells us that we are at the beginning of a 31 day March, but somehow today on the calendar seems to point to so many other days also. Today's story of the transfiguration points toward Palm Sunday, when Jesus's march that begins today ends when he arrives in Jerusalem. It points Good Friday and Easter. Every year, we hear the transfiguration story the Sunday before Lent begins, because this story marks the point in the Gospel where Jesus's ministry shifts gears from teaching and healing, and he sets his face for his journey toward Jerusalem, where he knows he will die. Despite this yearly reading of the Transfiguration story on Sunday, this is NOT the date the church has set aside as the Feast of the Transfiguration. 

The theological influences that most shaped my life so far have established August 6 as something of the moral axis about which the modern world revolves. That day is the feast of the Transfiguration, Jesus's transformation in dazzling light into a glorious preview of the splendor of the Reign of God. The day set apart to honor the particular Gospel we heard today. But 80 years ago on that day, in dazzling brightness accompanied by a towering mushroom cloud that reached up to the heights of the heavens, the city of Hiroshima was transfigured to oblivion in a radiant display of the apex of humankind's death-dealing powers.

So because of the accidents of the calendar this gospel has become inexorably intertwined with the contrast between Imperial Peace and Christian Peace. The Reign of God, that for which we pray for each time we pray the Lord's Prayer, always stands in contrast to the reign of the powers and principalities of this world. When we call Jesus King of Kings, Lord of Lords, and Prince of Peace, we use titles that Caesar had claimed for himself. When the Angels proclaimed to the shepherds outside Bethlehem that they carried good tidings of great joy which shall be for all people, they drew on the formula used to announce the ascension of a new Roman Emperor. When Jesus rode into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday on a donkey and the people waved branches and threw their coats on the ground to make a path for him, shouting "Hosanna to the King of Kings," the whole scene was a subversion of a Roman military procession that would have likely happened before passover each year.

The Pax Christi, the peace of Christ, stands in direct contrast to and subversion of the Pax Romana, the Roman peace carried out through the establishment of widespread fear across the known world of Rome's ability to dish out death to any who dare to defy them. The Roman peace through strength and fear is the polar opposite of the peace of God which passes all understanding and operates not through the fear of death but through the life-giving power of self-sacrificial love. Jesus is precisely the anti-Caesar (which is very much to say that Caesar, and his imperial successors today, are the anti-Christ).

When Christians make the sign of the cross to mark our lives as belonging to God, we subvert the greatest weapon in Caesar's arsenal of terror, a dreaded instrument of torture unto death the mere threat of which could cower peoples into line with the Roman dictates. When we make the sign of the cross, we proclaim that love is stronger than death, that hope is stronger than fear, and that the worst the powers and principalities of this world can do to us cannot break us nor destroy us, because Christ has beaten down death by victory, and death's sting is gone.

From the days of Moses, God has called heaven and earth to witness that humankind has been offered life and death, blessings and curses, and invited us to choose life so that we and our descendants may live. Do we seek to thrive by increasing our grasp on the mechanisms that can deal out death to those we would seek to control (the essence of idolatry), or do we seek to thrive by emptying ourself and submitting to a life of humble service and even to death -- death on a cross! -- for the wellbeing of all God's creation, even those who would call us enemies? Do we seek what Caesar calls "peace" through power over others, or do we seek the true peace of Christ through love and service? Does peace come from our capacity to nurture life, or from our capacity to dole out death?

From the theological perspective that shaped me, the feast of the Transfiguration is where these two worldviews collide: from the moment of the Transfiguration onward, Jesus set his face toward Jerusalem, toward the death on the cross that he knew was the destination ordained by the life of liberation he led, knowing that the powers and principalities of this world would not consent to coexist with his ministry that set the prisoner free and proclaimed good news to the poor. This feast marked Jesus' pivot from the gathering phase of his ministry to the final showdown with the forces of death, a showdown that could only lead to the resurrection, but could also only lead there through immense suffering. This feast marked Jesus embrace of the vulnerability that would lead to his ultimate triumph.

But also on that feast day, August 6, 1945 we marked a milestone in humankind's ability to kill one another, to transfigure our world into an uninhabitable hellscape of fire and brimstone beyond Dante's imagination with the added feature of deadly radiation bringing painful later death upon those who survived the first wave death or even visiting its devastation upon the children of survivors, themselves warped by the deadly impact of the bomb's radiation.

If Moses set before us the choice between life and death, the nuclear arms race marked humankind's fullest embrace of the capacity to kill -- to overkill with an arsenal whose lethal capacity numbers beyond the population of the world, with the ability to kill each person on the planet multiple times over and still have more bombs in reserve.

Given that the wages of sin are death, the embrace of nuclear arms is most firmly the fruit of the most capital of sins, the capacity to kill not a just single person, as Cain first did, bringing murder into the human story and God's curse upon himself, but the capacity to kill all of humankind and render the earth uninhabitable.

Thus, I was shaped to believe that as sin is equated to dealing in death, nuclear war is the ultimate sin and the chiefest moral problem of our age.

What people in the generations that have come after me have known almost instinctively but it took me much longer to figure out is that humankind's capacity to make choices that could render our world uninhabitable does not stop with the atom bomb. Climate change is the new atom bomb. Humanity's collective ability to kill off so much of life on earth no longer relies on someone deciding to pull the trigger, to launch the missiles, to fail to reach the conclusion that when it comes to nuclear confrontation, the only winning move is not to play. Every day that goes by without dramatic action to rein in greenhouse gasses is taking a step toward the equivalent of a nuclear missile launch that will someday (but we do not know when) become irreversible.

I hadn't seen it. I hadn't seen how the moral urgency behind preventing nuclear war is the precursor to the same moral urgency behind preventing catastrophic climate change. And as individuals, we feel powerless in both struggles, able to shape neither national policy about nuclear weapons nor global policies that shape the emissions that could be destroying our livable world. But in each case, God calls us to faithful resistance to the powers and principalities of death. In both cases, God calls us, as we make the Transfiguration present here and now through our storytelling, we who take and eat the Body of Christ in Eucharist are transformed into glowing agents of God's love and light, to resist the forces of death and denial that would deny our collective human descendants the chance to live in the glory for which God created us.

God has set before us life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life, so that we and our descendants may live.

Amen.