The Transfiguration of Humanity

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

Sunday 19 February 2023

The Transfiguration by Raphael

Matthew 17.1-9  
Exodus 24.12-18  

Émile Coué, the French psychologist and pharmacist,

            popularised a famous mantra, and say it with me if you know it:

"Every day, in every way, I'm getting better and better.

            Every day, in every way, I'm getting better and better".

Coué encouraged his patients to repeat this to themselves twenty times a day,

            as part of his psychoanalytical technique called optimistic autosuggestion.

The idea was that positive reinforcement of optimistic belief

            could have genuine health benefits.

Strangely enough, at a medical level, he may well have been onto something;

            as the placebo effect is now well documented:

                        when people believe something to be helpful,

                        they will often show a measurable improvement.

I tend to think that something like this lies behind

            many of the stories of faith healing that get told,

                        both within and beyond Christianity;

            people believe that prayer for healing works,

                        and so, at least to some extent, it does.

I mean, I’ve never seen someone grow an arm back after being prayed for,

            but I can understand how people might show improvement

            in other, less tangible, ways after being prayed for.

Interestingly, Coué’s ‘trick’, as he called it,

            was consistent with the idea of social Darwinism,

            as popularised in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This is an extension of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection,

            where the biological concept of ‘the survival of the fittest’

            becomes a model for understanding the development of society

                        and the individual who lives within it.

Social Darwinism finds its origin with Thomas Huxley,

            or ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ as he was sometimes known,

who took Darwin’s theory of the origin of species,

            and made it into a kind of philosophical model

            to explain human society without the need for belief in God.

Huxley, the famous agnostic, almost single-handedly

            created the division between Christianity and evolution

                        that comes down to us today,

            with many Christians still believing

                        that it is incompatible with their faith

                        to accept an old-earth evolutionary understanding

                                    of the origin of humanity.

He was unwittingly aided and abetted in this by the then Bishop of Oxford,

            Samuel Wilberforce, whose famous jibe at Huxley,

                        as to whether Huxley was descended from an ape

                                    on his mother's side or his father's side,

                        did much to create the animosity between faith and science

                                    that we still live with today.

Huxley won that debate, replying to Wilberforce

            that he would rather be descended from an ape,

            than to be a man who misused his great talents to suppress debate.

I think, on this and on many other things, Huxley had a point!

I’m one of those who thinks that evolution by natural selection

            is a perfectly adequate model for explaining

                        the biological adaptation and speciation

                        that we can observe in the natural world.

I just don’t see any conflict between it and my faith in God

            or my understanding of the Bible.

But what I don’t like

            is the use of evolution metaphors for societal and spiritual development.

I simply don’t think it’s true

            that every day, in every way, we’re getting better and better.

Surely the first world war was ample proof

            of the human capacity to descend into hellish madness at the drop of a hat;

and the links between social Darwinism

            and the eugenics programmes of the Third Reich

            are terrifying and deeply chilling.

I have occasionally joked that I do wonder

            if the fact that I was born with no wisdom teeth

            might mean that I am part of the next evolution of humanity,

but it turns out that this is simply a recessive mutation

            that arose about 300,000 years ago.

Or possibly, as some have suggested, Liz!, it is simply indicative

            of the fact that I have no corresponding wisdom!

So, with all of this in mind, what on earth is going on at the Transfiguration?

            What strange new humanity is coming into being here?

Our story, told for us today by Matthew,

            and drawing on the similar story from Mark’s gospel (Mk 9.2-8),

describes Jesus and three of his disciples going up a mountain

            to have a very strange experience indeed.

Listen to Matthew’s words again:

            ‘And he was transfigured before them,

                        and his face shone like the sun,

                        and his clothes became dazzling white.’

As I said, what on earth is going on here?

There are a number of clues in the text to which we need to pay attention,

            if we’re to begin to get to grips

            with what Matthew is trying to do with this story.

The first thing to realise

            is that this description of Jesus is not unique in the Bible;

rather it is drawing on a long tradition, stretching back into ancient Judaism,

            of visions of God in human form,

            and of encounters between humans and the divine on mountain tops.

We heard earlier the story of Moses going up the mountain,

            to meet God and receive the tablets of stone

            with the ten commandments written on them.

If we had read on a bit further in the book of Exodus,

            we would have heard that,

            ‘when Aaron and all the Israelites saw Moses, the skin of his face was shining…

            and Moses would put the veil on his face again,

            until he went in [back] to speak with him.’ (Exodus 34:30, 35).

It seems that, in some way, Moses’ encounter with God changed his appearance,

            it changed something about the nature of his being.

We might say that he was transfigured by his encounter.

But it’s not just Moses on the mountain that lies behind

            Matthew’s story of the transfiguration of Jesus.

In Daniel’s vision of heaven, he describes how,

            ‘thrones were set in place, and an Ancient One took his throne,

                        his clothing was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool;

                        his throne was fiery flames, and its wheels were burning fire.’ (Daniel 7:9).

The use of the colour white here is very deliberate,

            and is often used in the Bible to indicate righteousness.

So for example the book of Acts

            tells the story of the ascension of Jesus in similar terms,

            with two angels in white robes standing beside the disciples:

‘when he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up,

            and a cloud took him out of their sight.

While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven,

            suddenly two men in white robes stood by them.’ (1:9-10).

And Earlier in Matthew’s gospel itself, in chapter 13,

            we can read the promise that

            ‘the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.’ (13:43).

And Matthew’s version of the resurrection story

            is told in similarly dramatic and apocalyptic tones:

‘After the sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning,

            Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb.

And suddenly there was a great earthquake;

            for an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven,

            came and rolled back the stone and sat on it.

His appearance was like lightning, and his clothing white as snow.’ (28:1-3).

And in the book of Revelation,

            we have several descriptions

                        both of the divine-human figure called the Son of Man,

                        and of those who follow him,

            all wearing white shining clothes which indicate their righteousness.

Just listen to these few sentences:

‘His head and his hair were white as white wool, white as snow;

            his eyes were like a flame of fire,

            … and his face was like the sun shining with full force.’ (1.14, 16)

‘If you conquer, you will be clothed like them in white robes,

            and I will not blot your name out of the book of life. (3.5)

‘Around the throne are twenty-four thrones,

            and seated on the thrones are twenty-four elders,

            dressed in white robes, with golden crowns on their heads.’ (4.4)

‘After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count,

            from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages,

            standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white.’ (7.9)

‘These are they who have come out of the great ordeal;

            they have washed their robes

            and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.’ (7.14)

‘And the armies of heaven, wearing fine linen, white and pure,

            were following him on white horses.’ (19.14).

My point here is that Matthew is not writing in a vacuum.

From Exodus, to Daniel,

            to the Jesus tradition, to the apocalyptic literature,

the story he gives us of the transfiguration of Jesus

            is part of a wider literary tradition of humanity transfigured

            through encounter with the divine.

Or, to put it another way, when people meet with God,

            something profound and tangible changes within them.

Now, don’t hear me wrong here;

            I don’t think that Jesus was, or even is,

            the next evolution of humanity.

His transfiguration is not some kind of fusion

            of the physical and the spiritual

                        resulting in an ability to exist on a higher plane

                        than the rest of us mere mortals.

Neither is it a mystical experience for us to seek to emulate

            in some quest for enlightenment or esoteric knowledge.

That way lies heresy, I’m afraid.

But nonetheless I do think that there is a new humanity

            coming into being in Christ,

and it is revealed at his transfiguration.

Paul, I think ,was onto this when he described Jesus as the new, or second, Adam.

            Listen to how he puts it in his letter to the Romans:

‘Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man,

            and death came through sin,

            and so death spread to all because all have sinned …

much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace

            and the free gift of righteousness

            exercise dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.

Therefore just as one man's trespass led to condemnation for all,

            so one man's act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all.

For just as by the one man's disobedience the many were made sinners,

            so by the one man's obedience the many will be made righteous.’

            (Romans 5:12, 17-19).

Paul places Jesus in contrast with Adam,

            the symbolic first human from the book of Genesis.

Humanity came into being through Adam,

            and the new humanity comes into being through the new Adam,

                        the Son of Man, the Messiah who was transfigured

                                    in the presence of his disciples

                                    on the mountaintop in Matthew’s story.

But hear this, and hear it clearly:

            it is not about evolution, it’s about transfiguration.

The new humanity does not arise by natural forces,

            red in tooth and claw (as Tennyson put it),

            from the redundant carcass of the old humanity.

It does not out-compete its predecessor,

            nor does it vanquish it by might and right.

Rather, the new humanity arises by grace and through love.

            It emerges in the midst of our sinful fallen state

            as a gift from God that transfigures our lives and our world.

God, in Christ, is transfiguring humanity.

A new way of being human has come into being in Christ,

            and it has the capacity to utterly transform our way of being in the world.

The clues are all there for us in Matthew’s text,

            which as we have seen is rich with the resonance of ancient stories,

telling of God’s journey with humans

            from their very beginning

            to this crucial, decisive moment of transfiguration.

The mystical moment on the mountain occurs,

            we are told in the first verse of our story, on the ‘sixth day’.

The echo of the creation story from Genesis

            is too strong to ignore here.

According to the ancient myth,

            God created humanity on the sixth day,

            before resting on the seventh.

And in Matthew’s story,

            the new humanity is brought into being on the sixth day.

Then, the transfigured Jesus is seen talking with Moses and Elijah,

            whose symbolic presence speak of the law and prophets,

            fulfilled in the presence and person of the transfigured Son of Man.

The whole of human history is here in this story,

                        contained and completed in this moment,

            and the whole story of human attempts to encounter God

                        is reflected in the glory shining from the face of Jesus:

                                    from creation itself and the first Adam,

                                    to Elijah the prince of prophets,

                                    to Moses the giver of the Law.

It all comes down, for Matthew, to this one moment on the mountaintop

            with Jesus and his three disciples.

Like the narrowest point in the egg-timer of history

            the past funnels to the future through this one moment of transfiguration.

And so the new humanity is born.

The second Adam is transfigured from base human flesh,

            in the company of history, and baffled disciples.

And it’s not about genetics, it’s about inheritance; which is very different.

            It’s about covenant not country.

And any nation, tribe, or people

            who claim exclusive or privileged access

                        to the revelation of God in Christ

            are missing the point of the transfiguration.

From God Bless America,

            to God Save the King,

                        to One Nation under Allah,

God will not be so constrained.

Because God’s people are all people,

            they are humanity transfigured.

And all we need to do to see it, and to see our own place within it,

            is to open our eyes, look to the mountain,

            and see the moment of glory reflected in the face of Jesus.

Paul’s vision of Christ on the road to Damascus

            opened his eyes to the one who appeared to him as

            ‘a light from heaven, brighter than the sun,

            shining around [him] and [his] companions.’ (Acts 26.13)

And what Paul realised in this moment of his personal transfiguration,

            as his eyes were blinded to his old life, and opened to his new one,

what that God was not confined to one people,

            and that the call of God goes way beyond the ‘chosen nation’ of the Jews

            to encompass all the nations of the Gentiles as well.

And so Christianity as we know it was born,

            as Paul set off on his journeys to change the world.

And I think that brings us to today,

            to a gospel with no barriers, no exclusions,

            it brings us to the freely given love of God

                        extended to people of every nation,

                        from all tribes and peoples and languages,

                        of all genders, ethnicities, backgrounds, and sexualities.

This is the new humanity that comes into being in Christ.

We’re it! We are the new humanity,

            and we don’t worship a parochial God who exists to serve us and those like us;

            neither do we follow a partisan God

                        who is defined over and against the wisdom of science.

Honestly, I have had it with ‘little Christianity’:

            ‘Me and my Christian mates, we’re the only ones that are right,

            and the rest of the world is wrong and going to Hell’

Blow that for a game of soldiers!

            That’s not what it’s about.

God is so much bigger than that.

            In Christ, God is revealed as so much bigger than that.

The disciples didn’t really get it;

            they decided that they were going to try and build some little huts

            for Jesus, and Moses, and Elijah to live in.

The human response to this vision

            of the whole of history coming down to this one person,

            is ‘I know! Let’s build him a house so he can live with us, with his mates!’

We constantly take the big God, and we make him into the little God:

            our God, the God who goes with us, and stays with us,

            and dwells with us, and proves that we’re right and everybody else is wrong.

This is not what it’s about.

            It’s not about God of this nation, or that nation,

                        or this people, or that people,

                        or this denomination, or that denomination,

                        or this religion, or that religion.

This is not God over creation,

            it is God in creation, transforming it from within.

This is not a philosophy of gradual optimistic self improvement,

            we don’t become the new humanity

                        by just mutually encouraging ourselves,

                        by singing our happy mantra songs

                        (or whatever it is that we have a tendency to do

                                    in our various Christian traditions).

This is a gospel of the radical transformation of humanity

            without which there is no hope.

Because this is the transfiguration of humanity

            reflected in the glory of transfiguration of the Son of Man.

This is us, we are humanity transfigured.

            And so are they!

And our task is to proclaim the truth

            that there is a much bigger, wiser, more gracious,

            more loving God than any of us have ever grasped.

That it is our calling,

            and it is our only hope.

That is the gospel of Jesus Christ,

            and we should live it.

This is Christ transfigured for our sake,

            and for the sake of the world.