Last Sunday of Epiphany, Year A: Matthew 17:1-9
Episcopal Church of the Holy Cross
February 23, 2020
Jonathan Hanneman
I had a hard time working through this week’s readings. In my research, I couldn’t seem to come up with anything significant. All I found were a bunch of pithy, not all that interesting connections among our three main texts. Exodus tells us that Moses was on the mountain six days before God spoke, and Matthew notes that Jesus and the disciples waited six days from Peter’s confession until the Transfiguration event. In our Epistle, Peter mainly addresses the reality of his experience of the Transfiguration. For the Gospel story itself, Jesus takes on the appearance of the “Son of Man” predicted in the book of Daniel, a close similarity to the description of one of the LORD’s appearances to Moses and the seventy elders of Israel before the giving of the Law. And while the whiteness of Jesus’ clothing likely implies purity, it could also suggest connections to the culture’s mourning or burial garments. Commentators remark that Peter’s suggestion of setting up tents shows this likely happened near the Feast of Tabernacles, the Hebrew harvest festival. And even though we hear the voice of God, it doesn’t tell us anything particularly new, simply hearkening back to Jesus’ baptism in chapter 3—although this time it does contain the additional instruction of “listen to him.”
As I said, these details may be mildly interesting. But none feel particularly significant. None of them could really grab my attention or hold my interest for long. I was left feeling kind of ho-hum about it all.
On the first Sunday of Epiphany we discussed the significance of Jesus’ full and genuine humanity. We considered the incarnate Son of God embracing his human self in its completeness, and in so doing, embracing all of humankind at large. This week it looks like the Lectionary wants to force us to talk about the divinity of the Christ. To me, it seems like an odd way to end Epiphany, the church season designed to celebrate the Incarnation, the “fleshiness” of Jesus as the Son of God.
And honestly, in the broader American Christian culture, we don’t really need more instruction about Jesus as God. We’ve got that doctrinal concept down pretty good. Too good, really. In a time when self-proclaimed believers tend to live their faith in their heads, focusing on the so-called “spiritual” to the detriment or even denigration of the physical (which is basically the revival and melding of the ancient heresy of Gnosticism with the Manichean religion), I find this sudden turn to Christ’s divinity to be unnecessary, somewhat dangerous, and—in keeping with my earlier theme—even a little bit boring.
In church we regularly hear doctrinal assertions that Jesus is truly God, the second member of the one, undivided Trinity, God’s Word made flesh. Most of us probably get that, as much as it’s possible. But while I can intellectually assent to all those statements, knowledge alone doesn’t drive me to action. Important as those doctrines may be, they don’t really tell me, as a human, how to see the world differently, how to be or live as a child of God.
Which leaves me wondering if Matthew and the people who put the Lectionary together weren’t trying to make a different kind of point this week. If Epiphany is the season of Incarnation, what if this reading isn’t supposed to redirect our thoughts toward divinity? What if we should be looking at this as another aspect of Jesus’ revelation of true humanity?
Hopping back to my earlier comment, both Gnosticism and Manicheism were serious contenders against the unity and authority of the apostolic Church in its first few centuries of its existence. Both had a typically intellectual emphasis on the duality of the spiritual and the physical. Gnosticism, in its various forms, held that there was extra, secret knowledge that Jesus had conferred upon a few unidentified followers, and one needed to be initiated into these “deeper mysteries” to truly return to God and ultimately free oneself from the corruption of the physical world. The Manicheans focused on a separation of “light” (the good things of God) from “darkness” (once again, mainly the physical world, viewed as a work of an equally powerful negative source). Upon death, its followers, if faithful enough, would escape from their bodily existence to an eternal, spiritual world of light. Although differing in details, both teachings are similar in ideology and outcome, with Gnosticism rising inside the Church and Manicheism arriving from outside of it.
Today we see these errors expressed in the broader Church as the idea of God (and/or the Devil) snatching people’s souls away from the earth to a disembodied “heavenly” (or hellish) existence. It also shows up in an overemphasis on requiring certain actions around communion, baptism, confession, and prayer, a kind of “secret” knowledge that leads to the exclusion or rejection of other practicing Christian groups. In one example of these errors’ practical implications, they lead to the idea that Christians don’t really need to take care of Earth’s resources or creatures that we now have because the Bible promises a newer, better world to the faithful.
Common as these ideas might be in our era, they are not the historic teachings of the Church. Jesus told us “What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops.”[1] The Church does not (or at least ought not) have any secret teachings or practices. For example, despite our ordination and seminary training, neither Jim nor I have “magic hands.” Not even the bishop does. We are not somehow better, more spiritual, or more enlightened than anyone else. When we prepare the Eucharist, we do so only under the authority and consent of you, the gathered people of the Church, who have collectively set us apart for that purpose. If at the Great Thanksgiving we say, “The Lord be with you,” and no one offers the response “and also with you,” we cannot rightly continue the service. Bishops, priests, and deacons are not the embodiment or power of the Church. It takes the entire community of believers to make up the Church, coming before God as one, united body.
Likewise, the ultimate separation of soul and body is not an accurate expression of the teaching of the Church either. Rather, we emphasize their equal importance as two aspects of a unity. Humans are not primarily spiritual beings, nor are we primarily physical beings. God created us as a strange, inseparable amalgam of both. Modern science shows us how the invisible (spiritual) aspects of our lives affect our physical well being and how our physical health impacts our emotional (spiritual) state. Overemphasizing one or excluding the other leads to the damage or destruction of both. The Christian hope is not one of a continued spiritual existence in some other realm after departing from or casting off “this body of death.”[2] The Christian hope, offered through Jesus, is resurrection, the continued unity and existence of embodied life beyond the control and authority of death.
And I wonder if that isn’t what we should be looking for when we read about the Transfiguration. Maybe Jesus’ transformation (which is all that “transfiguration” means) is less about a display of superior divinity overwhelming inferior humanity and more about a revelation of another level—a more extensive way—of being human. What if, in the Transfiguration, Jesus was showing the apostles the fullness, the eternal, undimmed reality, of what it is to be human—the divinity inherent within humanity itself.
Nowhere does our text describe the Transfiguration as anything other than a physical event. The term for “vision” here is just as validly translated as “sight.” It isn’t the spirits of Moses and Elijah talking with Jesus. It’s Moses and Elijah actually there in person with bones and flesh and breath. Likewise, there’s nothing to indicate that the Christ somehow becomes noncorporeal in this incident. Instead, as the disciples smash their faces to the ground in fear, while none of them can see whether or not this overwhelming manifestation is still continuing, Jesus physically touches them, telling them there’s no reason to be scared. Even God’s voice links Jesus to our unified physical-spiritual existence. Spirits are not like people. They don’t breed. They can’t have children like people do, yet the voice calls Jesus God’s Son, a physical title. Despite the glory, the splendor, and—let’s face it—the weirdness of the Transfiguration, Jesus remains embodied throughout the episode—he remains fully and genuinely human. He’s showing us the reality of what, through the power of God, humanity can be.
With that in mind, look around the room right now. Look at the person sitting beside you—the one in front of you or behind you. Maybe you’ll need to squint your eyes or catch a glimpse through your peripheral vision. But can you see it? Can you see their dignity—the spark of divinity inseparably bound to the humanity of each person here? Now look at your own hands and take a moment to pause in wonder. Consider the power of God’s gift of Life moving within you. Think about what it is that makes you more than a pile of dust and bones, more than just emotions and intelligence, and reveals you to be a complete human being, a true union of the physical and the spiritual. Ask yourself how you would live if you could see your neighbor that clearly all the time. How would we treat one another? How might you treat yourself?
In the Transfiguration, the Gospel reveals to us yet another aspect of the reality of being, completely and truly, Children of God. As we head back to our homes and daily life later today, let’s remember who and what Jesus has shown each of us to be, offering thanks and bringing glory to God throughout our week by living into the reality of the fullness of this mysterious gift it is to share in Christ’s nature—the wonder it is to be human!
[1] Matthew 10:27
[2] Romans 7:24b