Feast of the Transfiguration
Posted on
February 11, 2018
Trinity Church, Hartford
Feast of the Transfiguration
2 Kings 2:1-12
2 Corinthians 4:3-6
Mark 9:2-9
Psalm 50:1-6
The Rev. Dr. Frank G. Kirkpatrick
This is the day on which we celebrate the event known as the Transfiguration of Jesus. As dramatic as this event must have been, however, it is one whose meaning is not entirely clear. Some would add it to the list of major events in Jesus’ life alongside his birth, baptism, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension. Some have used it to develop what is known as a Christology, a philosophical theory about who Jesus was in relation to God. Searching for such a theory eventually led to the calling of a conference of bishops by the Emperor Constantine in the year 325 at Nicaea, near modern day Istanbul, known to history as the Nicaean Council. It was out of that council that the bishops created what we now know as the Nicaean Creed which defined what the Church considers to be orthodox or correct belief. But why should we recall that council today, almost 2000 years later? Because it reminds us of both the importance and the dangers of searching too hard for precise formulas for articulating what we as individuals believe about Jesus. It is important to know who Jesus was (and is) because he is the core of what we believe as part of the Jesus movement. But the conviction that we have gotten our knowledge of Jesus down pat once and for all in a creedal formula in words and language that are beyond revision has, unfortunately, led to the labelling of some as heretics and others as orthodox depending on whether they can accept these exact words and formulations. And the fate of heretics in church history is not pretty. We often hear Don welcome those who come to our worship no matter where they are on their journey of faith. That seems to suggest and rightly so, that we are not all at the same place on that journey. We may all be coming to Jesus in our own unique ways but we might not have all signed on to a single, perfectly formulated set of phrases depicting who Jesus is, even though there are such phrases in the Nicene creed.
As someone who spent almost a half-century teaching theology as a professor of religious studies, I am clearly sympathetic to the urge to define our faith as carefully and as truthfully as possible. To state with accuracy and fidelity to the various attempts by our predecessors what they came to believe about Jesus is a responsibility we all share. Some of you would even say that I value precision of thought and articulation to a fault. But looking back over my career I have become increasingly more sympathetic to the limits of the search for precise theological language that claims to be the final formulation, once and for all, of what we want to say about Jesus. This sympathy for a less systematic or final formulation of our faith is driven in no small measure by the sadly lamentable fact that once people are convinced that they have an absolute grasp of the truth they often feel justified in condemning those who don’t share that particular version of the truth. Intolerant fanaticism is the ugly side of religious certainty.
Of course the truth about anything is important: we can’t live successfully on the basis of lies or deceptions. Alternative facts or fake news are nonsensical, and when they become the basis of actions they are dangerous and perverse. Facts and truth matter a great deal. Without them we are subject to the demagoguery of tyranny. But it is one thing to search honestly and openly for the truth: it is something else to believe we have found it absolutely and then use it to bludgeon others into submission to the truth we believe we have found.
Once some members of the church believed that they had seen the truth about Jesus in the stories of the transfiguration which we heard this morning, or read their belief back into those stories. They then used that belief to hammer out creedal statements that required strict adherence to every word and phrase if one did not want to be labelled a heretic and thus subject to persecution.
But any revelation of the truth about Jesus requires not only a revealer of what is transfigured, but it also requires acceptance by the one to whom the revelation is made, a personal transfiguration of the recipient. Unless God simply rams the truth into our minds without our consent or understanding, we are left with the very human situation of having to interpret through our finite limited ways of understanding what is presented to us by God. Not only was Jesus transfigured but those who see him must be transfigured in their lives as well. God gives us the space and freedom to respond to his revelations as they speak to us in our own individual life-situations with all the particularities of who we are, by where we are on our individual journeys of faith. The life situation of the seeker after truth is uniquely personal. It is the filter through which one’s interpretation is formed and developed. But interpretations exist in a sea of various other interpretations, no one of which contains the fullness of truth in absolute purity and completeness.
It would perhaps have been nice if after the transfiguration Jesus had handed out an instruction manual on how to interpret what had happened. Unfortunately he didn’t leave us with a theological treatise in which the definitive meaning of his revelation was spelled out in excruciating detail leaving nothing to be interpreted by us. Instead Jesus left it to his followers to work out ways in which he could be understood and responded to in their own personal lives. It’s significant I think that Jesus takes only 3 of the disciples with him up the mountain to view the transfiguration. If he’d really wanted a definitive consensus on the meaning of this event he should have taken no one with him because the more observers there are the more interpretations there will be.
The responses we make to the story of the transfiguration can take two forms: one is theological. The other is existential or personal: the way of precise conceptualization and the way of engaged meaningful living. While not totally opposed to each other and always in need of integration, they are two paths with different emphases and orientations. Too often, I’m afraid, the church has chosen the way of theological sophistication (to which I confess I have contributed over the years). In the process we, the church, have often neglected the nitty-gritty realities of our complex, variegated, complicated and messy lives in which we are challenged daily to make sense of Jesus for ourselves, here and now, in the actual situations that make up who we are. It may be true, as the majority of bishops at Nicaea insisted, that Jesus was of the same substance or being with the Father (or in Greek homoousia) and not of a similar substance (homoiousia). The difference between these two Greek words is the addition of the Greek letter for ‘I’, or iota in one of them, leading Constantine to remark at one point during the debate that he couldn’t see an iota of difference between them. But I’ve probably already lost you in this theological word-salad of foreign and virtually incomprehensible terms. This formulation regarding the substance of Jesus and God became the orthodox definition of Jesus which was later elaborated in a mid-fifth century church council at Chalcedon. There the official theological language about Jesus asserted that he was and I quote from the official text: “at once complete in Godhead and complete in manhood, of one substance (homoousios) with the father as regards his Godhead and at the same time of one substance with us as regards his manhood, recognized in two natures, without confusion, the distinction of the natures being in no way annulled by the union, but coming together to form one person and subsistence, but one and the same Son and only begotten God the Word.” [And I’ve edited out a lot of additional language]. And to think I got paid to explain this stuff. In many ways this Chalcedonian formula was an important step toward theological precision but I suspect that for many of us it doesn’t stir our souls, inflame our hearts, cause our blood to grow warmer or help us to come closer to the love of Jesus in our lives. Many of us are not ourselves transfigured by this theologically sophisticated language. We may be more like those people, later called Arians, who saw in Jesus more of a big brother, a somewhat less than divine companion on life’s journey; who saw no need to engage in metaphysical attempts to tie Jesus down to a precise theological formula that in their opinion overstressed the identity of substance shared by Jesus and God. In hindsight we can say that Arianism failed to do justice to the divinity of Jesus but the final vote at Nicaea revealed divisions in the thought of the assembled bishops there. These divisions did not prevent Arianism from being called a heresy and the eventual persecution by other Christians of those who refused to denounce Arian views. There is clearly truth in the orthodox position. But is it possible that we can accept that truth and still welcome those who find Jesus in some other way than through theological formulas that, so far on their journey of faith, make little or no sense to them or don’t speak to their personal questions and life-situations? We don’t need to rush to judgment against those who are not fully reconciled to the theological concepts and words that have defined the so-called orthodox position of the Church. If Jesus did not himself give us a complete owner’s manual or treatise of orthodox theology, then let us be willing to admit a variety of interpretations of who Jesus was and is for us. Because that is what is important: how do we at a deeply personal level, encounter and relate to Jesus as one who meets us where we are, as one who welcomes us person to person, not concept to concept. The only thing we would expect of those who are seeking Jesus is that they are doing so sincerely, faithfully, honestly, and because they desire something that will make their lives fuller, richer, and more fulfilling. They want to see Jesus as one who illuminates what it means to be fully human. As Saint Irenaeus reminds us, "the glory of God is a live human being and a truly human life is the vision of God.” In whatever way seekers find Jesus who will provide that model of a truly human life, they can be celebrated, and not made the subject of heresy trials and exclusion. Let us welcome all those who are truly seeking to find a Jesus who can transform and transfigure their lives no matter how loosely they define him in theological language. It is the personal, spiritual, and fully human encounter with Jesus that really matters. Existential personal transfigurations in our own lives are worth more than all theological formulas if the latter do nothing more than distract us from the business of living as Jesus would have us live.