Glory to God, whose power working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine!
I’m a glory junkie. There’s no getting around it.
I love the word. I love the images of glory. I love to feel the light on my face when my eyes close in prayer. I love being near God’s glory, and I love giving glory to God. I love glory.
So the Transfiguration has always been a special feast for me, my favorite after Easter. I don’t just imagine the light shining from Jesus, I feel it. My heart fills, my breath gets a little short, my spirits lift. All that glory.
But glory is not something you can capture. Part of the power of epiphanies is their fleeting quality. You glimpse God in another person or in creation or in your prayer, but then you blink and it’s gone. And it’s supposed to be that way, I think.
When I visited Israel I went to the Mount of Transfiguration. I was so excited, so full of anticipation. But when we arrived I found a huge church had been erected there. It was a nice enough church, big enough for the hordes of tourists to file through and pray. Outside were gardens, some with covered areas like arbors to afford a little shade. It was a beautiful shrine. But I couldn’t find the transfigured Jesus there. It was as though I had read a really good book and then I went to see the movie. The movie didn’t tell the story the way I saw it in my mind, and its solidity blocked my own version. I found it hard to find the Transfiguration there at the shrine.
Peter is only the first in a long line.
All around me on that mountain were people taking photographs, trying to build a shrine on line.
When very special moments occur in our lives, they can be bigger than we can take in. So we try to get them to a size we can live with.
A wedding video, a scrapbook, or just a rock from a river.
They’re great, but they aren’t the same as the event.
In fact Peter’s desire to capture the moment, to bring it to a size he can comprehend, runs the risk of missing it altogether. God breaks in to stop him, because God has a bigger plan for Peter than building a shrine.
God has bigger plans for us too.
The scary part of the Tranfiguration for me comes when I remember that Jesus became what we are that we might become what he is. Jesus is God incarnate, showing me my divinity.
The Transfiguration is about God’s glory in me, in all of us, as much as it is about Jesus.
It’s easy to be awed by the glory. It’s easy to “work for Jesus.” We can build human shrines as well as shrines of stone. But what if we are meant to be transformed, to shine?
I believe many people in and out of our churches want to experience the divine, the transcendent, the holy. And I believe we long for healing and transformation, for a new heaven and earth. But we also fear it. Transformation is a big word for change. Conversion, a churchy word for change. And change is scary, even when it’s enticing.
So we live between the hunger for the glory, and the fear of what it might do to us.
Jesus’ transfiguration is not just a moment of power and might. He is profoundly vulnerable in his exposure. I don’t know what it was like for him, but he’s shining like a beacon. I don’t believe he was just cool and calm. He will not be so vulnerable again until he is glorified on the cross.
Transformation is like that. We’re deeply vulnerable at those times.
The most perilous times in the life of a lobster come when it has to shed its shell. It leaves the shell, and for a while it is soft and easy prey until the new, larger shell hardens. If the lobster could choose, it might choose not to leave its old shell at all.
But it can’t choose that. If the lobster doesn’t leave its shell, it will die. It would be too big for its shell, and the pressure would kill it.
The lobster doesn’t, as far as we know, deliberate about this. It just leaves the old shell and takes its chances.
But we get to choose. We can hold off growth forever, if we choose. We can die in our old shells, stuck as our 5-year-old self or our teenage self or our bitter, resentful self. And we can build shrines to some ideal vision of Jesus.
Or we can listen to God, pick up our cross, and join Jesus in the journey of transformation.
Just before the Transfiguration, Jesus told the crowd that any who want to follow him will have to take up their cross and lose their life. After it, he tells the three not to tell anyone about what they’ve seen. We can’t really tell the story of the glory without these two pages.
The biggest danger for Jesus is that people will make him so different from themselves, so holy, that they exempt him from humanity. He came to show us our condition, both the glory and the misery. He did not come to be special. He came to undergo everything we undergo, to show us what we do to God when we crucify one another. He could not be exempt.
Shrines get in the way of Jesus’ message. Whether they are buildings, or liturgies, or theological treatises, or denominations, shrines isolate and contain what cannot be contained. They substitute devotion for picking up our own cross.
We’re not meant to hang on to the glory. We’re meant to journey with Jesus. That journey will take us to glory, but the route leads back down the mountain and up a hill.
What is the transformation calling you this Lent?
What is the shrine you’ve been tempted to build instead?
What do you have to do to let go of it and follow Jesus?
May God give you the strength and courage to follow Jesus into glory.
