Today is transfiguration Sunday and it’s also the last Sunday of the season of the “Epiphany”, the manifestation of Christ. We conclude our season with this great manifestation that splits the Gospel in the two (This same story is told right in the middle of the three Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke). The transfiguration draws a line between the beginning of Jesus’ ministry and his descent to Jerusalem, his descent to his suffering and death – marked liturgically for us by the season of Lent.
There is much to say about the Transfiguration and it’s hard to stay focused on a single theme. To me, what is really interesting is that we actually have two stories here, not just a single one. We have the story of the Transfiguration and the story of the healing of the epileptic boy. It’s interesting because if we look at the way those two stories are told, we will realize that they don’t just follow each other, rather they sort of mirror each other and each one helps us to understand more clearly the other.
So let’s dive in!
The first thing we need to remark is that most of the time, when we talk about the Transfiguration, we stick to v28 to 36 (it’s actually an option to just read these verses for today). In this passage, Jesus’s glory is manifested on the Mount. Jesus in those verses appears as the new Moses, who also prayed on the mountain and whose face shone with God’s glory (see our first reading). Now Jesus talks with Moses, he is Moses’ equal and he is probably even more than Moses since God’s voice seems to show preference for him. He is the “chosen”. He is more than Moses and more than Elijah, to whom we learn that some people identified Jesus with as well (v.19). Moses and Elijah were the two greatest prophets of the Jewish people, so it was really extraordinary to think that a man could be more than them! Jesus was indeed divine, the son of God himself. That’s the way Paul explains Christianity to the Corinthians who, as you know now, used to be pagans: They don’t need to become Jewish first to be Christians, because they have everything they need in Jesus – the full glory of God has been manifested in him.
Now what we gather from the story is that God reveals God’s glory in Jesus before Jesus heads to Jerusalem so the disciples will feel comforted and encouraged in their faith, even as Jesus prepares to face his suffering and death (Jesus talks about his “departure”). The disciples need to be strengthened in their faith because their faith is going to be greatly tested. Peter wants to stay there (not to camp but to worship in tents as the Jews used to do during the Feast of Sukkoth), but we learn that the disciples will have to go down the mountain to face the crowd and the suffering of the people (told in the story of the epileptic son). In the same way, they will have to face the suffering of Jesus and face their own suffering. Yet the vision will sustain them. That’s the way we understand the Transfiguration. Mountaintop experiences aren’t meant to last, but they help to face difficult days.
Well, there is some of that, of course. Yet, if we look more deeply at the second story, the story of the epileptic boy, we will realize that clearly God’s glory is also manifested in it. The story of the Transfiguration combined with the story of the epileptic boy shows us how God’s glory is manifested on the Mount but also in the “valley” (remember that it’s an important theme for Luke – we saw that last week with the “sermon on a level place”). What we have here is not just the story of the Jesus’s transfiguration, it’s also the story of the transfiguration of human suffering.
Let’s look at it more closely:
1 – A man comes to Jesus to ask healing for his son. His cry echoes the voice of the Father in heaven. He is is only son, his beloved. Actually, it is quite amazing to realize that in the Gospel there are many stories of healing (and resurrection) of children, sometimes “grown up children” but still “sons or daughters of”, and they are healed at the request (and cries of despair) of their parents. I counted at least five stories. We see that these parents have a special place in God’s heart. They are seen and heard. Their love and care echo God’s love and care for his children. These parents know how it is to love like God and God knows how it is to love like them. God’s love and parental love mirror each other. This shows us that God’s revelation does not only happen when we find refuge away from the world – on a mountaintop. Even in our deepest sufferings and anxieties, as our hearts are broken, we are close to God’s heart.
2 – Jesus takes his disciples on a mountain to pray but we see that in the valley, the father of the boy is praying too and his prayer is heard by Jesus. Again, we have a tendency to believe that we pray better prayers when we are calm and collected or away from daily anxieties, and of course it’s important to be able to find some peace, but in this story we see that we may pray as well, and sometimes even better, when our prayers are a genuine expression of our love for others, when we intercede for them, when we feel the urgent need of God and God’s mercy. As I was reading the story I tried to imagine how scary epilepsy must have been at a time when people didn’t know about epilepsy and how indeed they thought it was a manifestation of an evil force. The anxiety of this father must have been through the roof – yet his prayer of compassion for his child is answered by Jesus’s compassion.
(As a side note, we are often shocked that in the Gospel healing happens “right away”, when in most cases it’s not our experience. Notice that the Gospel tells us about the day the healing happened, but most of these people have been sick for years and have been praying for a very long time before the healing occurs.)
3 – On the mount, the disciples don’t understand what’s happening and in the valley they don’t know what to do (v40 “I begged your disciples to cast it out but they couldn’t”). We may long for clearer manifestations of God in our lives, but really what helps us understand who is God is the quality of our heart rather than what we can see with our eyes. The man asking for his son’s healing hasn’t been on the mount yet he trusts God because he believes that God loves humankind in the same way that he loves his son. The disciples, with all their knowledge and all the opportunities they have to be close to Jesus, are rebuked (by the voice of God, by Jesus himself) whereas the man, who has probably no clue about Jesus, is welcomed and heard.
4 – In the end, Luke says that: “All were astounded at the greatness of God”. Jesus does not hide God’s glory on the mountaintop but takes it down in the valley for all the people to witness. And Jesus manifests God’s glory by lifting people up. I told you in the past weeks that in Paul’s understanding, Jesus’s Resurrection prefigures our own Resurrection. It’s quite clear when we bring together our two stories today. The epileptic boy is “dashed to the ground” by the demon but Jesus raises the boy up (and very likely the boy’s father with him!) from the ground to his two feet, from his crushing to full agency. It’s not so much the disease that is evil rather than the way Satan uses it against us: discouragement, anguish, loss of faith. On the other way around, Jesus uses whatever trials come our way to the glory of God, encouraging us, lifting us up and sending us back on our ways. In today’s words, we would say that the power of Resurrection is resilience – a foretaste of the moment where we will be fully able to behold God’s glory.