Notes on the Transfiguration

Icon of the Transfiguration, attributed to Theophanes the Greek
(15th c., Moscow) (Tretyakov Gallery)

"…and on the mountain he flashes like lightning, and becomes more luminous than the sun, revealing the mystery of the future"—Gregory of Nazianzus, Third Theological Oration (Oration 29), 19

I

While praying on the mountain, the Lord Jesus was transfigured before Peter and John and James.  They saw his glory when “his face shone like the sun” (Mt. 17:2) and his clothing became radiant white, flashing out like lightning (Lk. 9:29).  Although “Peter and his companions were weighed down by sleep,” they stayed awake and saw his glory and Moses and Elijah talking with him (9:32).  Did the disciples hear what was said?  Did they comprehend what was said of the Jesus’ departure?  Or were they like infants listening to the speech of adults?

When Moses and Elijah spoke with Jesus of his departure, did they speak of what they and all the prophets had declared concerning him?  Did they speak of how it was necessary that the Messiah should suffer betrayal and death before entering into his glory?  (Lk. 24:25–27)  Did speaking with them strengthen Jesus as the days drew near for his departure?  Did they strengthen him now as he set his face toward Jerusalem as the angel would at his agony in the garden?  (9:51; 22:43)

Yet the voice from heaven—”This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!”—spoke for the benefit of Peter and his companions, confirming Peter’s confession of Jesus as “the Messiah of God” and commanding they heed what he says (Lk. 9:35, 20).  For what Jesus had said recently was not easy to hear.  Only a week ago he had told them he must suffer and die and afterwards told them, “If any want to be my followers, let them deny themselves, and take up their cross daily and follow me” (9:22, 23).

II

St. Thomas Aquinas on the transfiguration:

“After having foretold his Passion to his disciples, our Lord had persuaded them to follow the path of his Passion.  Now in order for someone to go straight along the way, he must have some foreknowledge of the end; just as an archer will not shoot the arrow straight unless he has first seen the target he is aiming at. […] And this is especially necessary when the way is rough and difficult, the journey wearisome, but the end delightful.  Now Christ underwent the Passion in order to obtain glory […]; according to Luke, Was it not necessary that Christ should suffer and so enter into his glory?  To which glory he leads those who follow in the footsteps of his Passion; according to Acts, We have to endure many hardships before we enter the kingdom of God.  And so it was fitting for him to manifest his glorious splendour (which is to be transfigured), according to which he will configure those who belong to him; as it is written, He will configure these wretched bodies of ours into copies of his glorious body.  For this reason Bede says, By his loving foresight he prepared them to endure adversity bravely by allowing them to taste for a short time the contemplation of everlasting joy.”*

III

Peter sees the manifestation of the glory of the resurrection and finds it desirable, so he proposes staying on the mountain with Moses and Elijah.  But he spoke, “not knowing what he said” (Lk. 9:34), for his proposal entailed Jesus not going to suffering and death in Jerusalem.  In other words, Peter’s proposal is effectively the same as his rebuke of Jesus predicting his Passion, to which Jesus responded:  “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling-block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things” (Mt. 16:23).  Accordingly, Origen speculates that Peter was unwittingly playing into the hands of the Tempter, who sought to turn Jesus aside “from the dispensation whose characteristic was suffering that brought salvation to men” and “to draw away Jesus, as if calling upon him no longer to condescend to men, and come to them, and undergo death for them, but to abide on the high mountain with Moses and Elijah.”**

Following a similar line of thought, Augustine says that Peter did not understand that he would receive the rest he sought on the mountain through the work of love.  To remain with Christ is reserved for Peter after death, but he should come down from the mountain to follow his Lord in the way of suffering: “Come down, Peter…For now, Jesus says: "Go down to toil on earth, to serve on earth, to be scorned and crucified on earth. Life goes down to be killed; Bread goes down to suffer hunger; the Way goes down to be exhausted on his journey; the Spring goes down to suffer thirst; and you refuse to suffer?’”***

IV

The voice from the cloud said, “This is my Son, my Chosen; Listen to him!”  The Son, that is, who commands, “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another” (Jn. 13:34).

* Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 3a, 45, 1, co. [Blackfriars edition quoted.  Link to Benzinger edition here.]

** Origen, Commentary on Matthew 7.40.

*** Augustine, Sermon 78.6.

"Lord, teach us to pray": A sermon for the Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

Gloria, Lord's Prayer, and Creed (plus alphabet!),
'Shaftesbury Psalter' (12th c., England)

Preached at St. Andrew's Anglican Church, Moscow, Russia, on 28 July 2013.  (In preparing this sermon, I was surprised to learn that the readings—Genesis 18:20-32; Psalm 138; Colossians 2:6-15, (16-19); Luke 11:1-13—were the same as those for one of the first sermons I preached as a seminarian [here]; the three year lectionary cycle has gone by quickly!)

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“Lord, teach us to pray.” — Luke 11:1

When the Lord Jesus teaches his disciples how to pray, he gives us a prayer that contains and patterns all other prayers.  It has been called “an epitome of the whole Gospel,”[1] a summary of the teaching of Jesus.  As “an epitome of the whole Gospel” the Lord’s Prayer shows us how to order our desires toward the love of God and neighbor.  In it our Lord teaches us what to ask for and what to desire.  To pray his prayer is to ask for what he wants us to ask, to seek what he wants us to seek.  Put differently, in the language of Paul’s letter to the Colossians, learning to pray the Lord’s Prayer is one of the ways in which we who have “received Christ Jesus as Lord” continue “to live in him” (Col. 2:6), because in praying this prayer we are drawn close to the heart of Jesus, close to the heart of God.  As we learn from the Lord Jesus how to pray, he makes us more like himself.  So this morning, I want to look with you at how our Lord teaches us to pray, in order to see what he would have us desire, what he would have us love.

To begin, Jesus teaches us to address God as “Father.”  He teaches us to become what we are in him by grace.  That is, by the grace of adoption in Christ, we are made worthy to name our Creator as Father.  As St. Paul says, “God sent his Son….so that we might receive adoption as children.  And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’” (Gal. 4:4–6)  So when we say, “Our Father,” we remember the great love the Father has given us in adopting us as children, the love from which absolutely nothing can separate us.  So to pray, “Our Father,” is the greatest of gifts.

And it is also a great responsibility, for we show by our actions that we are God’s children.  “Love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return,” Jesus teaches, “...and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked” (Lk. 6:35).  To pray “Our Father,” then, is to ask to become like God.  St. Maximus the Confessor put it this way: to pray “Our Father” is to be “eager to set on our life the features of the one who gave us life.”[2] “To set on our life the features of the one who gave us life.” We most truly pray “Our Father” to the extent that our lives are conformed to the life of Jesus the Son, the perfect image of God.  Jesus teaches us to seek to become a people whose entire lives say, “Our Father.”

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"Go and Do Likewise": Imitating the Good Samaritan, Imitating Christ

Detail of miniature, Good Samaritan, Rossano Gospels, Folio 7v, (6th c., Italy)

“[Jesus said], ‘Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?’ He said, ‘The one who showed him mercy.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Go and do likewise’.”  —Luke 10:36–37

Jesus uses the parable of the good Samaritan to show what it means to be a neighbor.  The parable shows that it was the Samaritan— “the one who did mercy”—who “was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers” (Lk. 10:36–37).  To be a neighbor is to do mercy, and the Lord commands us to “go and do likewise” (10:37).  

In calling us to imitate the good Samaritan, the Lord Jesus calls us to imitate himself.  He calls us to be like the one in whom the God of Israel has fulfilled his promise to do mercy (1:72), in whom “the tender mercy of our God” (1:78) has dawned upon us.  He asks us to be like the Samaritan who was filled with compassion (ἐσπλαγχνίσθη, lit. ‘moved from the bowels,’ 10:33) when he saw the half-dead man on the road to Jericho, just as Jesus had compassion (ἐσπλαγχνίσθη, 7:13, cf. 15:20) when he saw the mother of the dead man in Nain.  He commands us to, like the Samaritan, “love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return” (6:35).  In calling us to do like the Samaritan, he says effectively, “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (6:36).

The good Samaritan, then, is a figure of Christ.  As the Venerable Bede puts it, “the Samaritan, giving a helping hand to the man found on the road and covered with wounds, is a figure of Jesus Christ, who, in a more worthy and sublime sense and with a special love, became our neighbor by taking upon himself our wounds to heal them.”*  Christ, who did not deny it when he was called “a Samaritan” (Jn. 8:48), comes to us, who are half-dead from sin, and heals us.  He bears us on his flesh to the inn, “the pandochium [πανδοχεῖον] —that is, the Church, which accepts everyone and denies its help to no one.”†  For our healing, he gives the “two denarii” of the love of God and the love of neighbor.‡  He cleanses us that we might produce good out of good hearts (Lk. 6:45), to become “tenderhearted” (Eph. 4:32), to share in the compassion of God.  “We love because he first loved us” (1 Jn. 4:19).

Christ is our neighbor:

“Let us, therefore, love him, for he is our Lord and God; let us love him as our neighbor, since, being our Head and we his members, he cannot be nearer to us. Let us also love those that follow him, and show that we love our neighbor as ourselves by giving them all spiritual and temporal help in our power.”§

* Bede the Venerable, Homily on Luke 10:23–27.  Bede draws on an ancient tradition of figural interpretation of the parable, reaching back through Augustine and Ambrose to Origen in the early third century.

† Origen, Homilies on Luke, 34.7.  The Greek word for “inn” (πανδοχεῖον) is compounded from the words “all” and “receiving.”

‡ Cf. Augustine, En. Ps. 126.11.

§ Bede the Venerable, op. cit.

A Meditation for the Fourth Sunday in Lent

Rembrandt, The Return of the Prodigal Son (Detail)

When he had spent everything, a severe famine took place throughout that country, and he began to be in need. (Luke 15:14)

As usual, the Pharisees and the scribes are grumbling that Jesus is welcoming and eating with tax-collectors and sinners (Lk. 15:1–2).  So Jesus tells three stories about people rejoicing over finding something that was lost: a sheep, a silver coin, a son.  The three stories share a common, explicitly-stated theme: God delights in the repentance of those who wander from him (cf. vv. 7, 10).  Each story is also implicitly directed against the grumbling Pharisees and scribes, who like the elder son in the last story, are indignant (v. 28) at the welcome Jesus gives to the prodigals who come near to listen to him (v. 1).  Our Lord welcomes the tax-collectors and sinners because they come near to him, because they have felt their deathly hunger and come seeking nourishment from him, who is the bread of life.  Perhaps they are still a long way off, but he is running towards them.

Perhaps the story of the prodigal son is the paradigmatic story of conversion, metanoia.  At least it was for St. Augustine when, in his middle age, he reflected back on his life.*  He had been the prodigal son, turning away from God, becoming to himself “a region of destitution” (regio egestatis), of need, lack, poverty (Conf. 2.10.18).  As he confesses to God:

My hunger was internal, deprived of inward food, that is of you yourself, my God.  But that was not the kind of hunger I felt.  I was without any desire for incorruptible nourishment, not because I was replete with it, but the emptier I was, the more unappetizing such food became.  So my soul was in rotten health.  In an ulcerous condition it thrust itself to outward things, miserably avid to be scratched by contact with the world of senses. (Conf. 3.1.1)

Apart from the Creator, he could find no life in the created order, which had become to him “the region of death” (ibid., 4.12.18).

In that region of death, Augustine, as it were, heard the voice of the Lord Jesus, the Mediator, “he who for us is life itself [and who] descended here and endured our death and slew it by his abundance of life” (Conf. 4. 12.19).  In his hunger, he hears the voice of the Lord calling to him, “‘I am the food of the fully grown; grow and you will feed on me.  And you will not change me into you like the food your flesh eats, but you will be changed into me’” (ibid., 7.10.16).  

But Augustine does not find the growth that is required, until he begins to grow in humility by embracing “the humble Jesus” (ibid., 7.23.24).  As he despairs of his own strength and falls prostrate before “the divine weakness” of the Word become flesh, he finds true nourishment and rest.  Like the tax-collectors and sinners, Augustine finds himself welcomed by the humble Jesus when he humbly comes near to feed on him.  

With them, let us become weak, prostrating ourselves before the humble Lord that we might share in his life.

* Only retrospectively, in the light of grace, could Augustine see himself in the prodigal.  Barth: “Known sin is always forgiven sin, known in the light of forgiveness and the triumph of grace...Unforgiven sin, or sin not yet known to be forgiven, is always unrecognised sin. We repent only as we have already found the God of grace and realised that we are His creatures. Any other penitence moves hopelessly in a circle. For the knowledge of sin is itself an element in the knowledge of grace.” (CD 3.2, 36)