|Home| |Pericope Studies|
PERICOPE STUDY
CENTER FOR THEOLOGY, LRC
The
Transfiguration of Our Lord
February
6, 2005
1.
The event
of the Transfiguration of our Lord (parallels in Luke 9:28-43 and Mark 9:2-9) is
the epiphany that conveys—to Peter, James, and John—the divine
authentication of Peter’s confession to Jesus, six days earlier on the road to
Caesarea Philippi, that “You are the Messiah.”
Whatever confusion might have remained among the trio about “who Jesus
is” took on radical clarity in the presence of the austere giants of their
heritage. The text does not suggest
how it was that the disciples were given to know the identities.
It only reports that “he was transfigured before them, and his face
shone like the sun, and his garments became white as light.
And behold, there appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him.”
Perhaps the words of the conversation disclosed them as Moses and Elijah.
Perhaps it was that Jesus confided who they were.
Perhaps God, the Author of the moment, simply revealed it to them.
No matter. They knew.
2. Peter’s nervous suggestion intrudes into the privileged conversation a proposal that is at once both awesome respect and comic relief: that they mark the occasion with three booths, “one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” God heightens the tension as a “cloud came and overshadowed them, and they were terrified as they entered the cloud. Then from the cloud came a voice that said, ‘This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.’”
Can
you imagine their awe, their terror? With
Jesus they were familiar, if yet a bit uncomfortable in the presence of someone
of whom they had been obliged to declare, “even the wind and the seas obey
him.” (8:25) With Jesus they had ventured a response, as above, from Peter,
that “you are the messiah.” (9:20) This was an affirmation of respect and
great hope, that the Anointed One of God had come and was present in the person
of their itinerant rabbi, but not, surely, a notion that the messiah was
anything more than a man whom God had chosen.
A man with unusual powers and teaching, with habits a bit disconcerting,
as in eating with “sinners.”
But
here was a setting of a different order: the
presence of personages whose stature was without parallel in the annals of their
history, two of the five most prominent men in their story (absent Abraham,
Israel, and David) and the symbols of the two anchors of their faith—the Law
and the Prophets.
And
now, the voice of God, from the overshadowing cloud. God’s cloud and voice solved the problem of what the
disciples should “do.” They
kept silent. In that moment and
afterward, about the event. Silence
appropriate in the presence of God. Luke
says it well: “And they kept
silence and told no one in those days anything of what they had seen.”
The
cloud lifted. They were again alone
with Jesus. No words recorded until
they were on their way down the mountain. In
Mark, the silence is broken by Jesus’ instruction that they should “tell no
one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the
dead.” (9:9)
In Matthew, Jesus is more specific, not so much as to instruction as to
what they had experienced: “As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus
ordered them, ‘Tell no one about the vision until after the Son of Man has been raised from the
dead.’” (9:36b)
3.
What Jesus calls a vision is susceptible to designation as “myth.”
This is not a vulnerability of recent vintage, say in Reimarus or Hume,
or Bultmann, or the Jesus Seminar. St.
Peter is aware of it, on later reflection.
He asserts (II Peter 1:16-18) “For we did not follow cleverly devised
myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ,
but we had been eyewitnesses of his majesty.
For he received honor and glory from God the Father when that voice was
conveyed to him by the Majestic Glory, saying ‘This is my beloved Son, with
whom I am well pleased.’ We
ourselves heard this voice come from heaven, while we were with him on the holy
mountain.” – The key in the assertion is having been among the
“eyewitnesses of his majesty” rather than being obliged to “follow
cleverly devised myths.” The
author of the epistle asserts eyewitness credibility to precisely the event of
the Transfiguration. Already in the
first century—or early in the second—the author knows several things:
a)
That the event of the Transfiguration has about it the appearance of
myth, bringing together as it does both the law and the prophets and the
fulfillment of both: Moses, Elijah, and Jesus;
b)
That the force of eyewitness testimony runs counter to the suspicion of
myth; and
c) That the content of the emerging faith is radically historical, surrounded as it was by myriads of mythic accounts of dying and rising saviors, gods and goddesses, epic stories.
One can argue
(has have the Form Critics and fellow travelers, both in their insights and in
their reductionisms) that the worldview of these people, of this apostolic
writer, was itself mythological—pre-Einsteinian, pre-Newtonian, and even by
nearly 1500 years pre-Copernican. But
one cannot assert that the author was innocent of the notion of myth, blithely
wandering about in wonder in a world enchanted with demons and angels, unaware
of the difference between myth and fact, or myth and occurrence.
Peter himself is self-conscious
about the notion of myth. Further,
he is clear to distinguish his account from the mythic.
He even recognizes differences among myths, some being cleverly devised
and others, no doubt, more primitive and clumsy.
We were there, he testifies, on the mountain.
We saw the vision.
This, he
declares, is no myth. We were
there, eyewitnesses: “we ourselves heard this voice come from heaven, while we
were with him on the holy mountain.” Is
the assertion made the less credible if the author is not Peter himself but a
disciple of Peter? Or simply
someone of the second generation (or at the beginning of the third) who writes
from the point of view of Peter but who himself did not hear from the
Apostle’s mouth that “I was there, an eyewitness,” but who heard it from
one who did? In a court of law, perhaps.
But
the apostolic witness was ever characterized by unanimity over the events. No
dissenter rose in their ranks, even under external threat or pain of death or
persecution. No apostle became
defector and wrote to disparage. The
variations in the accounts owe less to faulty memory or deception than to the
redactory skills of the Evangelists. At
the very least, the author of the epistle is both careful and bold to assert
that this is no myth. He knows the
difference between what is mythic and what had eyewitnesses.
This had eyewitnesses. This
we saw.
4. What did they see? They saw an epiphany that suggested a lot more than the power of this man to heal diseases. Or to turn water into wine. More, even, than authority over wind and wave. They saw, and understood that they saw, Moses and Elijah, the men who signified the Law and the Prophets as God’s covenant and God’s word to their ancestors. The saw and recognized, in the vision, two men long dead—a sign to which they were able later to link Jesus’ reference to resurrection. A sign of God’s intention for His beloved. A sign that God is stronger even than death.
In two of the
accounts (Matthew and Mark), Jesus overtly links the incident to the
resurrection: tell no one about this until the Son of Man has been raised from
the dead. (Matt 17:9) Tell no one about having seen Moses and Elijah—the
fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets in the Messiah—until God announces
new-covenant resurrection by means of THE Resurrection.
More still:
what did they hear? They
heard the voice of God from the cloud, saying precisely who this was that they
had followed, however curiously, however tentatively thus far. “This is my
beloved Son; listen to Him.”
The vision was theirs. They heard the voice. The message comes directly to us: “This is my beloved Son; listen to him.” The resurrection did indeed occur, as St. Paul insist so beautifully in the first letter to the Corinthians. They can talk about it now. So can we. And with St. Francis: “Go and proclaim the Gospel. And when necessary, use words!”
JLY
– 02.29.00 … revised 02.19.01 … revised 02.22.04 …revised 01.31.05
|Home| |Pericope Studies|