Early in my time as a seminary dean I had to attend a “New Presidents Seminar” in Savannah, GA. The seminar was OK, but Savannah was the star. It’s an 18th century city set in a tropical climate: imagine Boston surrounded by Florida. We were then living in Chicago, so we experienced Savannah in January as a gift.
Savannah also boasts two great native citizens. It is the birthplace both of songwriter Johnny Mercer and author Flannery O’Connor. While I was learning the ropes of educational administration, Kathy was learning all about the city. Having read the novel and seen the movie, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Kathy wandered into a themed gift shop filled with movie souvenirs, and with true southern hospitality, the proprietress said, “Hon, I’ve got to run an errand. Can you watch the store while I’m out?” And she left Kathy on her own in the otherwise empty shop for a half hour. Imagine doing that on Hollywood Boulevard.
When the program ended, Kathy and I went to see O’Connor’s family home, a modest 19th century townhouse. There wasn’t a lot to see there, but the visit rekindled my longstanding love of her novels and short stories. Flannery O’Connor was a lifelong pre-Vatican II Catholic, and she wrote fiction that embodied deep theological truth. When I taught English at UCLA, I regularly used her short story collection, A Good Man is Hard to Find. They’re pretty gruesome stories, but it was a sneaky way for me to get undergraduates to think both about religion at least once in their college careers.
In the title story “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, a hardened criminal, called “The Misfit”, hijacks the car of a family heading to what will surely be a dismal vacation in Florida. The grandmother is a hateful, crabby old lady, and manages to make everyone in the car miserable. In the course of the abduction, she finally gets a close look at The Misfit and sees that he is a man wracked with spiritual agony. She suddenly cries out, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children.” In that moment, her understanding is transformed. She no longer sees The Misfit as subhuman but now as a fellow sufferer. She experiences a kind of grace that calls her out of her constricted self and offers her a new expanded vision of life.
If you know Flannery O’Connor, you also know that notwithstanding this moment of grace The Misfit will shoot her anyway. He then observes, “She would of been a good woman . . . if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
There are no Misfits in today’s Gospel [Matthew 17: 1-9], Matthew’s version of the Transfiguration story. But there is a similar big moment of grace: just as the story’s grandmother sees The Misfit revealed as a real human being, so Peter, James, and John now see a Jesus whose “face shone like the sun”, and whose “clothes became dazzling white”. Something important is revealed here, both about Jesus and about his three friends. No one is quite the same after this mountaintop encounter.
The transfiguration story tells us something about Jesus. When you read the earlier parts of the gospel narratives, it is easy to think of him simply as a profound teacher and healer. Jesus healed lepers, restored sight to the blind, made the lame walk. In a world filled with suffering and pain, who wouldn’t be drawn to such a figure?
But, as we know, there was more to Jesus than that. Shortly before this transfiguration story, Peter has confessed Jesus to be the Messiah, the anointed, the promised king and savior of Israel. Today’s Gospel gives us the fulfillment of this Messianic revelation: Jesus appears before them in visual glory, and a voice from the cloud verifies it. “This is my son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased. Listen to him!”
Peter responds with a bizarre offer—“I will make three dwellings”—and this reminds us that our first response to holiness and beauty is often to try to freeze them in place. Peter wants to stay with the transfigured Jesus (along with Moses and Elijah, who also appear) because he wants to hold on to this moment of transcendent holiness. Who among us would not? God knows what Peter would have done with an iPhone. Imagine the selfies.
But Jesus is not going to let them build a triumphal arch on the mountain. He is going to take them back down to sea level. They are now embarked on a process that will take them away from Galilee and toward Jerusalem, where Jesus will be arrested, tried, crucified, and risen. We now see Jesus revealed in his true glory, not only as teacher and healer, but now as savior, too.
The Transfiguration story also tells us something about us humans. Peter and his companions now see and understand themselves in a new way. It is easy for us to think of the Transfiguration as a spectacle, but it is more than that. It is also a call and a commission. Jesus is bringing his companions into a new life of liberation and service. God’s transformative power is now at work in them, too. They are to be bearers of God’s light, blessing, and hope in an often dark and broken world.
There are times when we suddenly see things in a way that changes everything. This is one of them.
Only very rarely do we get a glimpse of the reality of God. Only very rarely do we get a true glimpse into ourselves. As St. Augustine says, “Of course you don’t understand yourself. You are a mystery because God is incarnate in you, and God is a mystery.” In today’s transfiguring moment, we too have been caught up into the divine life of God and sent down the hill to bear witness to the glory which shines in God, in Jesus, and in every human being. God’s light will now shine in the world primarily through us. We don’t always understand it, but we help bear it into the world.
Lent begins with our observance of Ash Wednesday this week, and Lent is the season we have been given to think about the implications of our encounter with the transfigured Jesus. There is more to him than meets the eye. There is more to you than meets the eye. You, too, are caught up into this divine mystery, and in this mountaintop encounter you can hear God saying two clear things which are trustworthy in a dark time: “This is my son, the beloved. Listen to him.” If you want to see the truth, then keep your eyes on Jesus, the one whose love is the light of the world. And then Jesus says, “Get up and do not be afraid.” Look also into yourself and see that you, too are a bearer of that light. Go out and bear God’s light where you are.
The Savannah gift shop proprietress clearly saw something in my wife Kathy that Kathy did not see in herself. In the same way, God sees something in you that you don’t even know is there, and Lent is the time to find and explore it. We will always be a mystery to ourselves, but this transfiguring moment as we perch on the edge of a new season assures us that God sees us, knows us, loves us, and calls us to be light and love bearers too. Amen.
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