God’s Glory revealed in the face of Christ. The Transfiguration

God’s Glory revealed in the face of Christ.

Sermon for the Sunday before Lent at S Marks Hamilton Terrace.

S Mark's church burnt down in 2023 and the community worships for the time being in the church hall.

There are two sorts of barbers. Those who are silent and those who talk. Of those who talk there are those who talk and cut and those who only do one thing at a time. If you get one like that then you are sunk. It is going to take all morning just to get a short back and sides. The place I go to used to have a chap there who would talk but not cut, and one who was silent. I would always try and get to the silent one – but I did not usually manage it as the talkative chap loved to talk religion and I was to him as a honey pot is to a bee. I went one 6th August and he told me that today – he was a Greek Cypriot – was a great festival, the feast of the metamorphosis. You don’t have this festival in the West he said, yes we do said I it’s called the Transfiguration no metamorphosis Peter and James and John went up on to the mountain etc. And so it went on until I caved in and let him believe that in the benighted west we don’t keep the metamorphosis.

Here in the moment of the Transfiguration the glory of Jesus is revealed to the disciples on the mountain. God’s Glory revealed in the face of Christ.

But careful. Jesus is not God hidden by a veil. What is revealed in the moment of transfiguration is not some hidden inner reality. What we see here is humanity revealed as it really is: we see humanity as it was made to be, unfallen and glorious.

Let’s explore this.

S Irenaeus said that a human being is made flesh, soul and Holy Spirit. We were created and made to love God and be loved by Him, to worship Him and serve Him. That is why S Paul writes to the Corinthians God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ.

But we have fallen from this. God made us to be loved by Him and to love Him That is why we have free will: love cannot be forced or it is not love. And the tragedy is that we exercise that freedom not to love God, and not to love our neighbour whom He loves. Instead we assert our own power and knowledge and independence and say, we can do without you, we can be free of you. Remember the Garden of Eden; Satan tempted them with the fruit which was forbidden, and said, if you eat it you will be like gods: you will not be beloved and loving: you will be free. Not contingent creatures, but self-sufficient; not with the identity God gave you which unites you with Him and with neighbour, but with your own identity; with your self. The serpent said ‘you will be like gods.’

And the backbiting and the conflicts and the murders and the wars and the jealousies and the miserable uncertainties of who and what we are flow from this fall. And there is more, because when they chose an identity that was separate and independent of God, then they became less than themselves.

Think about Voldemort in Harry Potter or the Ringwraiths in the Lord of the Rings. Their evil dehumanises them; makes them small, reduces them to shadows. These characters are icons of the secular mindset- the assertion of personhood apart from God is not a freedom, but enslavement, reduction, loss. When we assert ourselves, when we try for existence which is not in Christ, we are abandoning the purpose for which we were made, and our humanity is reduced. We are right when we speak of terrible crimes as being inhuman. But all sin is inhuman: all disobedience brings us away from what we have been made to be.

In Christ we see what happens when our human nature is perfectly united with God. God was born into our human nature to redeem it, to restore it to glory. On the mountain Peter and James and John saw the glory of God displayed in the face of Christ: the saw God’s glory displayed in our humanity; they saw the fall undone, and what humanity is when restored by obedience and the destruction of sin. S Irenaeus said that the glory of God is a man fully alive: this is that man, and this is what in Him we can be.

This is why this scripture is given to us as Lent is about to begin. Our Lenten discipline calls us to a deliberate turning from the sinful search for self-fulfilment and focus on our independence from God, to a humble return to our identity in Him. Fasting, prayer, simple things like the daily repetition of the Lord’s prayer – thy will be done – these things will bring us gently away from what is inhuman and help us grow in His image.

God’s Glory revealed in the face of Christ. It was only for a moment. Our humanity is as yet not glorified as His is. We will be changed from Glory to Glory, but what we are to be has not yet been revealed. Now we see what is to be as in a glass darkly, like a glimpse in a mirror of. We see moments of transfiguration, but then we have to go down the mountain. We feel frustrated, have a sense that we have lost something.

This is something here at S Marks we are going through in terms of our church: not merely our building, but our need of God’s love. We are His people but we have a lot to do and a lot to manage which is beyond us. Your external circumstance is a parable of the Christian life as a whole, which is the experience of the need of God. This incompleteness is a sign that we have been made for more than the fleeting glimpses of this world, and are called to the glory which is revealed in the face of Christ. But Jesus said, take heart little flock. This insufficiency is where we are most being helped, because in it we know our need of God and the inhuman self-sufficiency of the fall is undone. That is why it took the cross: why the consummation of the passion was the cry of need: my God my God why have you forsaken me?

Humanity is never great in attainment; the moment we are satisfied with ourselves, with anything, we begin to drop below ourselves. We are always greatest in our need, and in our striving after what is above us, when we look for the Glory of God revealed in the face of Christ.