We Have to Look: The Transfiguration of Jesus

“He was transfigured before them.” The Greek word is not fancy. It is the word “changed,” Metemorphothe. From which we get the word metamorphosis. We say, the caterpillar is changed into a butterfly. It is a metamorphosis.

That’s what seems to have happened to Jesus. The caterpillar Messiah who was poor and persecuted, who once said of himself, “Foxes have holes; birds have nests, but the Son of Man has [zero] nowhere to lay his head” is suddenly changed from caterpillar to butterfly. Suddenly, he is—beautiful—shining like the sun.

This is no parable of seeds hidden in the ground. This is not a prophet on a donkey. This is Epiphany’s aurora borealis. God takes to the mountain (as God will do) and there, with the great lawgiver Moses on one side, and the great prophet Elijah on the other, the three stand there like stars on God’s Walk of Fame.

Several learned commentators have used a disturbing word with which to describe the scene. The word is “pointless.” One of them asks, “What’s the point?” It’s an irritating question, but even irritating questions deserve an answer. If you’ve ever been on a tour gazing at something fabulous like the Eifel Tower, a Picasso, or a great cathedral, isn’t there always one person in the group who asks, “But what’s the point?”

Now, the scholars who ask this don’t mean to be sacrilegious. It’s just that, in most of the Gospel stories about Jesus, Jesus does something. He is always performing: demons are cast out, sick people are healed, the dead are raised. Wasn’t that the point of his ministry? And isn’t it still the point, when we think of our own expectations of him? In one of the Gospels (Mark), we have the story of a man with a withered hand. He asks Jesus to fix it, and he does. Now, imagine you (or I) are that person in the Gospel, and a voice from heaven says, “Which would you rather have, a supernatural vision of unspeakable beauty or the use of your right hand?” Most of us would say, “I’ll take the hand.”

In his memoir, A Whole New Life, the late writer, Reynolds Price, tells about a vision of Jesus he had in the early morning hours of his first radiation treatment. Jesus appears to him, bathes him in water, forgives his sins, and heals him. The analytic mind pounces: was this real or a hallucination or a dream, the product of that liminal space between sleeping and waking? Who knows? Let’s call it a gift. Throughout his long ordeal with chemo, radiation, drug dependency, searing pain, panic attacks, and irreversible paraplegia Price refers six different times to his vision of Jesus and its power to sustain him. Nowhere does he use the word “pointless.”

I’m thinking of a little girl who is about to perform in her very first flute recital. She is shaking like a leaf, so nervous she can barely hold on to her instrument. Just as she is about to begin her performance, she sees her mother, who is seated at the rear of the auditorium, stand up and move to the aisle. There she stands, her arms are folded, she smiles, and looks confident. The mother did not teach her daughter to play the flute; and she can’t perform the recital for her, but at the moment of truth, she is simply there, where she needs to be, as a kind of lighthouse by troubled waters.

Or let us think of a person who is facing the end of life. In his last days, the number of visitors dwindles; now he has his memories keep him company. They swirl around him like fireflies. One by one they disappear into the dark until only one figure remains. The room grows dark, but the one standing at the edge of his bed is sheathed in light.” I think this is what the Gospel means when it says, “And when they looked up, the “saw no one but Jesus only.”

Whoever wrote “pointless” about the Transfiguration didn’t understand how much courage and encouragement we need every day of our lives.

The Epiphany season that began with the twinkling of a star leading the Magi to Jesus ends in a blinding vision of him.

Traditionally, we Lutherans don’t exactly know what to do with a vision. We are People of the Ear. Trained to distrust the eye. Martin Luther himself said, “Faith is an acoustical affair.” “Stick your eyes in your ears,” he said, “and just believe.” (I’ll pause for a moment to let you consider that image!). Of course, he is following Paul in Romans, who says, “faith comes by hearing,” who continues, “How are they to hear without a preacher.”

Transfiguration replies, “How are they to see without a vision?” In the book of Revelation, the writer is a Seer, that is, a See-er. He writes, “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth .” “I saw the holy city coming down to dwell on earth.” And strangest of all, the prophet Habakkuk (who we don’t hear much about) is commanded to “write the vision and make it plain.”

On Christmas Eve we honor both ear and eye. We listen to the beautiful Christmas story; then we turn out the lights and light candles, and for a moment our faces are transfigured in light. There is a verse in Psalm 34 that should be read every year on Transfiguration (and Christmas): “Look upon him and be radiant.”

Let me tell you a story about a vision. On May 8, 1373—that’s almost exactly 650 years ago—a priest was called to administer last rites to a young woman in Norwich, England. We don’t know what her name was, but through history she has come down to us as Julian of Norwich. Julian has lain near death for three days. She is unable to move or change expression. All feeling is gone; her head is rolled sideways onto her shoulder. Her mother is preparing to close her daughter’s eyes. The priest has seen this before: in the Black Death. He has brought a boy with him to carry the crucifix. It is a wooden pole with a cross to which is affixed a figure of Jesus. The boy holds the crucifix where she can see it, and the priest intones, “Daughter, Look upon him who died for you and me.” With her eyes fixed on the cross, something very surprising happens: the little figure on the cross begins to bleed.

Thus begins a rolling series of visions that Julian will experience over a 24-hour period. The young woman will see vision after vision of the glory of God, the suffering of Jesus, the royalty of Jesus, dressed in blue. She will see the whole world no bigger than a hazelnut, as she says, in God’s hand.

Julian of Norwich did not die that day. She lived another 50 years, sharing with anyone who would hear the content of one day’s revelations. Like the prophet Habakkuk, she literally wrote the vision. She became the very first woman to publish a book in the English language. She called it “Showings.” She wrote in a time when it was controversial (to say the least) for a woman to teach about God and theology. Yet she says, “Just because I am a woman and a poor one at that, does that mean I cannot tell you what I saw?” (paraphrased). “I saw all that God has made; it is vast and wide, fair and good.” Most famously, Julian said, “I saw that all will be well, and all manner of things shall be well—” Isn’t it a wonder that for 650 years and counting, people in every walk of life, including me, have drawn a blessing from a young woman’s vision.

You can live a long time off a vision. Just ask Julian; ask Reynolds, ask the people of Guadalupe in Mexico or Fatima in Portugal, whose visions have nurtured the faith of our Catholic brothers and sisters. We too must look. It is why we look at sacred paintings and sculptures of divine things. It’s why we have these beautiful windows in our sanctuary: So we can look and see.

But there is much else in this world we must look at, from which we dare not avert our eyes. A few weeks ago, it was as if the entire nation paused to watch a video recording of a young man being beaten to death while begging for mercy. From my own reaction to the video, I could understand the reactions of leading government officials and one law enforcement official who said, “I could hardly stand to watch it.”

But watch we must.

For it is our civic duty in the service of justice, even when it brings pain. And that is not all we watch. We watch an earthquake in Turkey, we watch a war in Ukraine, we watch mass shootings in America. This is our human duty, too—to allow ourselves to be touched by what we see.

Alas, we also watch an enormous haul of simulated, mindless violence online, on TV, Netflix, Prime and all the others. Gore by the buckets. What these eyes have seen would have astonished those of just a generation ago.

I can’t prove it, but I believe there’s a secret passage that runs from the eye to the soul. I believe that what we watch can, over time, produce a callus inside us that makes us insensitive to the violence all around us.

The great fear is that we and our children might become what we watch.

That’s why God gives us an alternative vision. Transfiguration is not an escape from the real world. Jesus does come down the mountain, where he immediately encounters human suffering in the form of a little boy in the throes of a seizure and a distraught father. God gives us the vision not to escape the suffering of others, or our own, but to strengthen us in the midst of them.

This Wednesday we enter the season of Lent; I pray that even as we are marked with the ashes, we will remember the Transfiguration of Jesus. For Lent does not end with the gore of the cross, but the glory of the resurrection. Nor do our lives.

Your life and mine will not merely stop like an unwound clock. Our lives will culminate in resurrection. In First John, in the New Testament, the writer says, “Beloved, we are God’s children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be, but when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.”

Transfiguration adds the exclamation point: “Yes,” it says, “and it will be spectacular.”