Feast of the Transfiguration

August 6, 2023

Today is The Feast of the Transfiguration, when the church commemorates the mysterious, ethereal appearance of Elijah and Moses with Jesus. Jesus’ appearance was transformed—hence, transfigured—and appeared “dazzling white” as our gospel reading relates. This is actually the second time this year that we have heard about the Transfiguration. It is also always the gospel reading on the last Sunday before Lent. Today, August 6 is its feast day, and the Book of Common Prayer stipulates that when the 6^th falls on a Sunday, it supersedes the customary lectionary readings.

Today is also the 78^th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. That’s an event that has returned to our cultural consciousness with the recent release of Christopher Nolan’s bio-pic Oppenheimer about the leader of the Manhattan Project, the effort to harness the power of the atom for military use. I’ve not seen the movie yet, although I have read a great deal about it. In case you were wondering, I’ve not seen Barbie, either—In fact, I’ve not stepped inside a movie theatre since the pandemic.

Among the many things written about Oppenheimer, one commonly noted observation is that the film does not go into any detail about the horror unleashed by the bomb, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Also left untold is the impact on the local community of the creation of the facilities at Los Alamos—the dispossession of native and Hispanic residents; their employment at the site, and the effects of the radiation on those workers and the local population as a whole; a danger from they which were not given protection, unlike the white scientists and employees.

For people of my age or older, the image of mushroom clouds, the description of the flash of light of detonation, are firmly fixed in our memories. We remember air-raid shelters, the threat of nuclear war, of mutually assured destruction. The awesome, horrible power of an atomic bomb was never far from our thoughts or fears until the gradual thaw of relations between east and west and the end of the Soviet Union, fears that began to rekindle with the invasion of Ukraine last year.

The mushroom cloud, the blinding light of explosion, the invisible radiation that continued to devastate the bodies of survivors for the rest of their lives, seem to confirm the famous quote from the Bhagavad Ghita that Oppenheimer used to make sense of the bomb and his role in it: “Now, we are become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

The horrific, literally blinding, brilliance of an atomic bomb explosion offers a dramatic contrast to the brilliance described in today’s gospel reading. If we were able to make a film of the scene, we might be inclined to make use of the special effects and CGI now common in Hollywood, and exploited by Director Christopher Nolan in showing the explosion of the first atomic bomb. And it might lead us to conclude that Peter’s response to this experience, “to make booths or dwellings” for the three heavenly beings, is completely inappropriate and misguided

But in fact, there’s more to it than that. Our reading from Exodus points us to the larger biblical and Jewish context for the Transfiguration. The lectionary is probably intended to have us look for parallels between the Transfiguration of Christ and the changed visage of Moses after his encounters with God on Mt. Sinai. Our translation is strange enough, with the mention of the veil that Moses wore over his face when speaking with the people. In the traditional Vulgate, the dominant Latin translation used throughout the Middle Ages, it reads that Moses’ face was horned; which explains why in so many works of art, most notably Michelangelo’s sculpture of Moses, he is depicted with horns.

But there’s another, equally significant connection between the story of the Transfiguration and Moses on Mt. Sinai. When Peter says, “Let us make booths, or dwellings…” –the word Peter uses here can also be translated as “Tabernacle” which was the symbol of God’s presence among the Israelites during their time in the wilderness, including Sinai. Tabernacle, booth, dwelling, is also an allusion to the Jewish Festival of Sukkoth, or Tabernacles, which commemorates the Israelites time in the wilderness.

So, rather than not getting the point, as is usually assumed with regard to Peter in this story, and elsewhere in the gospel, it may be that Peter is trying to make sense of this event, and to interpret it in light of his own experience and categories of understanding. A good Jew, encountering Christ’s transfiguration, and encounter with Moses and Elijah on top of a mountain, might readily assume that this was somehow connected with God’s appearance to Moses on Sinai and the traditional ways the Jewish community observed that event.

As we have been reminded so often in recent years, cataclysmic, unexpected, unthinkable events can change everything—Whether it’s the pandemic, insurrection, the reality of global warning that has been predicted and denied for so many years and now confronts us headon. But often those cataclysmic events, even when greeted with the response that “nothing will be the same after this” can lead to denial or escapism. We want things to return to the way they were, we want to pick up our lives right where they were left in abeyance. We want to reinterpret those events, downplay them. We want, like the Israelites responding to Moses’ shining face, to hide it behind a veil, to find ways to ignore or forget it. We want not to be reminded of the horrors, the awesome power, the way such an event changes us and everything around us.

That may be why the disciples told no one anything about what they had seen. They couldn’t understand it, they couldn’t find words to describe it, or their response to it. But they remembered.

Luke’s version of this story offers an additional insight into its meaning for the gospel as a whole and for us. Luke is the only one of the gospels to mention what Jesus, Moses, and Elijah talked about while they were together. We’re told: “they were speaking of his departure”—the word used here for departure is Exodus. It’s another allusion back to Hebrew Scripture but it also points to the deeper theme of Exodus—liberation. 

When they come down from the mountain, Jesus and his disciples will make their way to Jerusalem, to the cross and resurrection. It is a journey, an exodus, of liberation. It is a journey he invites us to join him as his followers and disciples. It is a journey into an uncertain future and into a challenging world. The disciples who experienced Jesus’ transfiguration had that experience to strengthen them, to give them courage and hope along the way. But the other disciples, the ones who didn’t go up the mountain with Jesus, had no such certainty. They accompanied Jesus nonetheless.

 Some of us may, like Peter, James, and John, have had spectacular experiences of spiritual enlightenment or clarity. We may have seen Jesus. But many of the rest of us may never had such high moments. We have no memories of such certainty to fall back on; and some of us, who have had such experiences, may no longer feel their power.

 Even so, Jesus calls us to walk with him on this journey of liberation, this exodus from the world we have inhabited, a world dominated by violence and evil, symbolized by the horror of the atomic bomb;  to a new world, the world of God’s reign, where God’s beauty and glory are made manifest in events like the Transfiguration; a world in which justice, peace, and love prevail. May our journeys liberate us from the bondage of the past, and free us to be the people God calls us to be.