Sunday’s Readings: Sunday next before Lent

Exodus 24.12-end; Psalm 2 (or 99); 2 Peter 1.16-21; Matthew 17.1-9

ON THE Sunday before Lent, Christians prepare for abstinence by the use of a vision of sunshine. Only Matthew and Mark describe it by way of “transfiguration” (in Greek, “metamorphosis”). Luke as a substitute refers to Jesus’s becoming “other”. John doesn’t record it directly.

As Jesus is transfigured, his “face did shine because the sun, and his raiment was white as the sunshine” (verse 2 is more accurate within the AV than within the NRSV). I normally consider this sudden brightness in Jesus as an indication of the divinity present in all humankind.

Every Christian known as to be transformed, transfigured. Both terms confer with a change of shape or arrangement, to not becoming something or someone completely different. We are to embrace being the identical person (the identical stuff, or essence, or components), but otherwise configured: to not reject what God has made us and called “good”, but to reshape the stuff of which we’re made, to rearrange it right into a higher pattern, in line with God’s true design. This is a message that what we’re just isn’t what we should always be. Somehow, we must learn to know ourselves as God made us.

There is a case to be made, based on the instance of Jesus on this Gospel, for the transfigured body because the truest and most lasting version of the self, while the “on a regular basis” body — which is untransfigured — is a passing self, subject to alter and decay. But there’s a risk in arguing that the transfigured self is the true self. It might imply that unusual, on a regular basis humanity is less authentic, and regarded with less honour, than the last word versions of ourselves which is able to find their abiding home with God.

That risk just isn’t unique to the transfiguration of Jesus, or to the ways during which we draw lessons for ourselves from it. It is potentially present in every theory or vision that divides the person, whether as body/spirit, “ego”/“id”, trans-/cis-, inner/outer — or another compartmentalisation. This is since it is a fundamental lesson of the resurrection to acknowledge the restoration and the divinisation of the entire person; not the abandonment or correction of some features of the human person (what we’d consider because the biological self) with the endorsement of others, resembling the transfigured self.

The Lenten journey will carry us to a conclusion that’s ever old and ever latest: that the message of the resurrection just isn’t considered one of the escape of the soul from its imprisoning body, or of the inner self from the outer. Rather, the resurrection points to the tip of the chosen self. Like creation itself, or holy scripture, we’re infinite in our complexity; so it’s a matter of human necessity to spotlight some features of our being while downplaying others, or setting them aside. But God knows us as all that we’re, not the edited highlights that we show to others.

Alongside the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s being transfigured, or becoming “other”, two other passages of scripture (each written before Matthew’s and Mark’s Gospels) reflect on the concept of Christian transfiguration/metamorphosis. One is Romans 12.2: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be ‘metamorphosed’ by the renewing of your minds.” The other is 2 Corinthians 3.18: “All of us . . . are being ‘metamorphosed’ into the identical image from one degree of glory to a different.” There can also be a trace of later reflection on the meaning of transfiguration in 2 Peter 1.16-18: “We had been eyewitnesses of his majesty . . . while we were with him on the holy mountain.”

Jesus’s clothing, Matthew says, becomes “white as the sunshine”. I picture him, on that mountaintop, on a cloudless day when the brightness causes the disciples to shield their eyes. When someone faces us with the sun behind them, their face is dark and unrecognisable. But, in my vision, the sunshine just isn’t behind Jesus, or shining on him as he looks towards us. It is pouring out of him, because he himself is “the Light”. Although John doesn’t describe the transfiguration in the identical way as the opposite Gospels, he alludes to it twice in his Gospel: “I’m the Light of the world” (8.12; 9.5).

One last thought. At the beginning of his ministry, Jesus follows his beatitudes (Matthew 5.1-12) with a development of that Johannine declaration that we will select because the hallmark of our Lenten transfiguration: “You are the sunshine of the world” (5.14).