Ancient Church

Of course, for us new calendar types, the Transfiguration is receding into the liturgical rear view mirror, while for old calendar folks it is still a good ways in the future. And, needless to say, the 10th Sunday after Pentecost is past for us all. No matter. When you own the blog, you can be as capricious as you like.

Still, I acknowledge that there are some overbroad generalizations in this homily. It was too ambitious, and suffered for it. But in preparing it I was consumed with the question: have we lost the importance and the sweetness of the Transfiguration? This doesn’t adequately answer that. Hopefully a more subtle mind than my own will grasp the truth of the matter, in a more coherent fashion.

Tomorrow is the Feast of the Transfiguration. There is a bittersweet irony in the thought. The Transfiguration is one of the great feasts of the Lord, one of the most important feasts of the Church. Yet sadly, in our day and age it is easy to lose sight of its importance, particularly if it falls on a weekday. We do not see the churches packed, although many people remember that there was a time when things were different.

We may say that the problem is the pace and the stress of modern life. We have barely enough time to do what we must in any given day, and laying aside a day to commemorate and share in the glory of the Transfiguration is simply a bridge too far.

That is true. Our lives are complex and harried. But I wonder if there is not something else at play. I wonder if in the haste and the noise of our lives, what we have forgotten is not simply the Feast, but the meaning of the feast for each and every one of us.

Our Gospel reading today can help us to regain some perspective. Today’s passage actually falls immediately after the story of the Transfiguration itself. Jesus, accompanied by Peter, John and James, have come down from Mount Tabor, and walk into what must have been a tumultuous scene. There is a young boy, possessed of a particularly stubborn demon, who so torments the child that he sometimes throws him into the fire. His father has brought the boy to the disciples, begging for his healing. Around the boy are the disciples. They have been trying for who knows how long to exorcise the demon. They try and they try and they try, yet every time they fail.

Remember, by this time, the disciples had been given the ability to cast out demons. Jesus had sent out the Seventy, and they had returned exulting to Him. Christ expressed no surprise at their report. They had known success. They had known the inexpressible delight of being so close to Christ that they shared, in a sense, in His glory, in the power that derived from Him. Yet now, they found themselves defeated by a single demon, who resisted every effort that they could muster.

Unexpectedly, the disciples knew failure. While on the mountain, Peter and John and James had fallen face down on the ground at the revelation of the transfiguration of Christ. Meanwhile, back down in the valley, there was only failure to be seen. The disciples were bewildered and confounded.

Perhaps on some level we can identify with the futile attempts of the disciples in today’s Gospel reading, where they have tried and tried to cast out the demon which is plaguing the poor child, and are failing miserably. We all struggle and struggle, and we all feel at times like we are running into a brick wall. We may not be first century disciples, but we can readily identify with what the frustrated disciples were feeling that day.

Like the disciples, we have been granted every good gift. We have been baptized, we receive the Body and Blood of our Lord, we confess our failings and receive absolution, we live within the true faith. Every time we walk into church, the miraculous happens, even if we are so used to it that we no longer see it for the wonder that it is.

Yet despite those great and wonderful gifts and blessings, each of us has known failure. Each of us has known frustration. Each of us has felt, at some point, that our life was not in our control, and that we were powerless to do anything about it. Some of us have known despair, some of us have been consumed by anger, have drowned in our envy of others, have been overwhelmed by lust. And as we fall into that dark night that inevitably follows, we echo the disciples: why can’t I fix this? Or, as St. Paul put it, Why do I do what I do not want to do? In truth, what we, and the disciples, are really saying is this: where is God when I need Him? Why can’t I solve this problem that consumes me, that rules my life.

This is what Jesus finds when he comes back down off of Mount Tabor with Peter, John and James. Of course, Christ immediately healed the poor child, vanquishing the stubborn demon while his disciples look on in disbelief. Predictably, they take the first opportunity to ask Him the question that is bedeviling them: why couldn’t we get rid of that demon? Why couldn’t we help that child? You told us we could do it. Why did we fail?

Jesus is characteristically to the point: Because, He said, of your little faith. Notice that he did not tell them that they had no faith. He knew that they had faith, but it was a cautious faith, one hemmed in by too much logic and too much doubt and too much fear.

“If you really had faith,” He told them, “you can move a mountain simply by telling it to move.”

We are told that certain saints, such as St. Mark the Ascetic, actually did move mountains. But for the Church Fathers, the mountain of which Jesus speaks is our own hard-hearted soul, weighed down by passions. Our soul is a mountain exalted and made high by our pride. Like the pagan high places of old, our soul becomes the high place of our own vainglory and imaginings. Yet inevitably, when things crash around us, and we come to repentance, it is as though we have awakened at the base of that dark and looming mountain of sin and of fear. We look up at our own folly and pride, and wonder how we can ever free ourselves from that brooding presence. Yet Jesus tells us that if we but have faith, we can move it. We can remove the massive stone from our hearts, and be healed. We will see the demon smashed by faith, and the passions fall lifeless.

It is truly a miracle. The bitter person can sweeten her spirit. The angry person can wrest control from the spirit of anger. The greedy person can learn to give, the despairing person can discover hope. Our faith, if it is simple and pure like that of a child, can be sufficient to overcome our most ingrained passions and our most habitual sins. We can do this, because Jesus, who was Transfigured on a mountain filled with Light, meets us on our own mountain of darkness. The God-man comes to our aid, uses our faith, and heals our weaknesses. Even as we wander in our own wilderness, we can, through our faith and through our cooperation with God Himself, cause the mountain that confronts us to disappear.

That is what the Transfiguration means, for you and for me.

That’s an oversimplification, of course. The Transfiguration has layer upon layer of meaning. We could teach a course on the multiple meanings, the unending significance of the event that happened on the side of that mountain. Christ is revealed as God, standing along side Moses and Elijah, the law and the prophets. He is the fulfillment of all things, the Alpha and Omega, His Father acknowledges and glorifies Him, and in the unimaginable radiance of the uncreated light that surrounds Him, Peter, John and James fall to the ground, unable to bear the glory that stands before them.

Yet in the glory which Christ showed on that day is the promise of our own transfiguration. Christ was revealed as God, but He is also man. Never before had human flesh ascended to the throne, never before had human kind gazed on the glory of God without instantly dying. Not only was God glorified on that mountainside, but human flesh and human spirit, being a part of who Christ is, was raised to a dignity and potential undreamed of by the children of Israel.

It is because of Christ’s divinity that we have hope of being healed of our weaknesses and sins and passions. It is because of Christ’s humanity that we have hope of approaching God. St. Peter, writing many years after the events of that day, told us to be partakers of the divine nature, to remember Christ through whom we are called to His own glory and excellence. It is in the Transfiguration of Christ that we see the hope and the promise of our own transfiguration. As St. Paul said, we are called from glory to glory. It is the Transfiguration that transports us.

For you and I, our transfiguration starts in the Church. It is nourished by the sacraments. It is fueled by our struggles. It is, ultimately, completed by God.

As I wrote this I was reminded of one of the pre-communion prayers that we read, one by St. Simeon the New Theologian. It is a long, poetic prayer, and one part of it forcefully came to mind. You know this prayer as well as I do:

I know, O Saviour, none beside
Hath sinned against thee like as I,
nor done the deeds which I have dared.
But yet again, I know this well,
that not the greatness of my sins,
nor my transgressions’ multitude,
Exceeds my God’s forbearance great,
Nor his high love toward all men.
But those who fervently repent
Thou with the oil of lovingness
Dost cleanse and causest them to shine,
and makest sharers of thy light,
and bounteously dost grant to be
partners of Thy divinity;
and though to angels and to minds
of men alike ‘tis a strange thing,
Thou dost converse with them ofttimes –
a friend with thine unfeigned friends.

For us, on the cusp of the Feast, this is why we should welcome the day with gladness, and humility and enormous joy. The Transfiguration of Christ is the pledge and the promise of our own passage into eternal joy.