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The Last Sunday After The Epiphany (Quinquagesima)
O God, who before the passion of thy only-begotten Son didst reveal his glory upon the holy mount: Grant unto us that we, beholding by faith the light of his countenance, may be strengthened to bear our cross, and be changed into his likeness from glory to glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
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Scripture citation(s): Exodus 34:29-35; 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2; Luke 9:28-36
A Sermon by
The Rev. Mark Schultz
on
Exodus 34:29-35; 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2; Luke 9:28-36
✛
Illumination of the Uncreated Light
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In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
There’s something really truly astounding about the Transfiguration.
It’s not exactly what it tells us about Jesus: that all the Law, signified by Moses
And all the Prophets, represented by Elijah
Point to him.
It’s not exactly that it reveals, insofar as the disciples can understand it,
The true divinity of Christ.
It’s not that it mirrors in some ways the revelation at Sinai,
Complete with a Mountain ascent
A cloud, a theophany and the voice of God.
All those things are present here and astounding in their own right
But it’s not any of those things that make this episode so extraordinarily astounding.
No, I think it’s this:
How apropos of nothing it is.
How completely out of nowhere.
How fantastically gratuitous.
One moment, Jesus is teaching about discipleship,
Eight days later (we don’t know what happens in those eight days)
Eight days later he says to three of his friends,
Hey come up here with me, I want to show you something.
And does he ever.
The experience, we’re told, leaves the disciples completely terrified.
So why does it happen?
What are we really supposed to be getting here?
Or is that even the right question?
Because I suspect that the brilliance of this episode in the life of Christ
Lies not in what we can get from it
But in what it asks us to give up.
Now I’m the sort of person who likes to know things.
Ever since I was tiny, I wanted to know everything about everything
I loved Sherlock Holmes—he was a hero
Partly because he saw, he noticed everything
And everything he noticed, he knew how it all fit together.
He could walk in a room and see mud on someone’s trousers or
Notice a stain on a carpet or
Casually spot an open window
And know precisely how the jewels were stolen
Or who the murderer was and why
Or just how someone preferred their tea
It’s really rather thrillingly absurd if you think about it.
But I found it exhilarating,
In part because it helped to articulate to me something I really wanted to believe about the world:
That it was actually, completely, and beyond any shadow of a doubt: Knowable.
If you just had the right perspective;
If you could notice all the right things;
If you could collect all the necessary information in order to make the most accurate deductions
And come to the correct conclusions,
You could know everything about everything.
I probably don’t need to tell you that this is a child’s fantasy about how knowledge works.
It’s impossible to know everything about everything.
We barely even know ourselves.
It’s perhaps in light of that–our diminished capacity for complete self-knowledge–
That the fantasy of the possibility of total knowledge of the world can be so attractive.
We may not be able to know ourselves, we figure,
But we can know pretty much anything else
Which is something of a comfort: we can be certain of some things.
We can come to understand ourselves as knowers, as ultimate subjects
And the world around us as known, an object full of objects.
This is one way of talking about power, of course,
And how humanity through the centuries,
Adrift, fragile and powerless in an uncertain and dangerous world
Has imposed a kind of stability and certainty onto that world
Achieving a fragile and tenuous domination over it
through knowledge.
Given this mindset
There’s a temptation, when we encounter theology
To assume that it fits in seamlessly with other forms and sorts of knowing,
A temptation to consider God as pretty much any other sort of object
A particularly challenging object,
But nonetheless: an object,
A thing to be known like a star or a biological cell or any other sort of thing
As if in counting up all the things in the universe and reaching some preposterously high Number, it would be possible to say at some point:
Oh, golly, I forgot something: it’s God!
We should add a celestial plus one to that preposterously high number!
But this represents a fundamental misapprehension of who and what God is.
God is not a thing like any other thing.
And knowledge of God isn’t the same sort of knowledge that we have of any other thing.
For the most part, knowledge of the world and its stuff, is a means by which we grasp the world
A means by which we hold it, control it, use it, find our place in it.
But knowledge of God is meant to grasp us, to hold us, to use us.
Most normatively scientific knowledge is telescopic,
allowing us to look closer, more deeply at a thing, at reality
Knowledge of God is not a lens or a telescope:
It’s a net in which we ourselves are caught
To be delivered out into the arms of the capital R Real,
The Reality that conditions and informs all we experience as real.
Theology is not about having an illuminating thought about God
It’s about being illuminated by God.
It’s not a means of grasping God
But a way by which we are grasped by God in love.
It’s not even an articulation of what can be known or unknown about God,
Who, not being a thing like any other thing, is neither completely knowable nor unknowable:
But theology is a means of undoing knowledge.
To do theology, which is to say: to practice the faith
Is to find yourself undone
To find your subjectivity, your knowingness
Gradually transformed by another
By one who knows you even when you cannot know yourself
In whose knowledge you suddenly know yourself as fully known because fully loved.
Paul in second Corinthians, just a few verses after our reading this morning,
speaks of the “light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ”
into which, as we heard today, we
“are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord”
There’s a lot we could unpack there,
Not least of which is this lovely use of light
As a way of understanding both knowledge and glory.
Now light is a curious thing.
Without something to bounce off of,
We wouldn’t notice it.
Light illuminates, distinguishes, reveals
But is itself unilluminated, undistinguished, unrevealed.
What, really, does light look like?
We know it only by the things it touches.
All this makes light, physical light, a brilliant (pun-intended) metaphor
for the Uncreated Light of God’s glorious presence,
A light that mystics evocatively call a superluminous darkness, the Light Inaccessible.
Yet in the face of Jesus Christ,
We know what the Uncreated Light of Glory looks like
Not because we grasp it
But because it grasps us
It shines on us.
In the face of Jesus Christ
We find ourselves illuminated
We suddenly know ourselves, to the depths of our being
We discover the wretchedness of our sin
Our true misery as sinners who have fallen short of the glory Christ shows us
And in falling short have become subject to sin and death
And yet we see in this brilliant light of Christ’s face
How we were made in that light’s image and likeness
How God has always desired us to partake of his goodness
How God loves us regardless of however far we’ve fallen
And how on account of that love
Jesus Christ, the very glory of God
Suffered and died for us on the cross, on account of our sins
On account of our appalling and murderous preference
For the objects, the dead gods and worthless idols
that so neatly conform to our knowing, our death-infected imaginations
And who answer so conveniently, so readily, to our tastes and hates and prejudices
Ratifying them and endorsing all we think we know about anything:
We preferred them over the One who would transform our minds and our knowing into his own
Who, beyond our wildest imaginings
Knew us, and knowing us, loved us,
Transforming the shame of the cross into a sign of divine glory,
Even the glory of the Only Begotten Son of God
In whose human face we see at last
Our true humanity
Our true selves
And the consummation of every hope and every desire we could ever imagine as good
And every joy and every bliss we could never dare or even think, in our blindness, to hope for
Revealed by the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
This is why, I think, the apostles were terrified in the brilliance of the cloud:
Because they suddenly knew Jesus as more than they could know,
more than they had previously imagined
In that scintillating and glistering Unoriginate Light,
Perceived not through any created physical sight, but through the opening of the eye of the heart, They knew, beyond every expectation, their friend as their God
Yet still their friend.
And they knew themselves as known
In all of their sinfulness
And in all of the beauty and goodness God had always intended for them.
It was too much for them
They found their certainties less certain
Their world undone
Their sense of self less solid
And yet, somehow
They knew themselves, in Christ, as more themselves than they could have ever hoped to be.
The Transfiguration remains a gratuitous episode
And it should remain a gratuitous episode
Not simply because our gospeller was keen to make some important theological points here
But because its gratuitousness is a formal acknowledgement of the excessive
Overflowing
Boundless and Boundary-breaking
Upending
Uncreated
Light of God.
It doesn’t quite fit into the narrative
Because we will never be able to fit
The infinite light of God’s glory into our finite comprehension.
It will always elude our grasp
But will always invite us to be grasped
Held
Known
Loved.
And being loved, transformed by Love,
We find ourselves no longer content merely to know or think we know…
We find ourselves empowered to Love.
The reality is, in that Self-Existent Infinite Well of Divine Light
Not seen with created senses, but perceived with spiritual sight
Our Lord is revealed, but we are the ones transfigured.
We are the ones illuminated and empowered with real vision to see our lives,
the lives of our neighbors, and the life of the world around us as it truly is:
Flooded with the Uncreated Glory of Love.
The question, then, is not what we’re supposed to be getting
Knowing
Learning
Understanding in the Transfiguration.
The question is: what, in the light of God’s glory, we might be asked to give up
In order that, in his light, we may indeed both see and become light. The question is:
Whether in God’s awesome light, the Light of Mount Tabor
–which is here, now, where you are, unconstrained by time or space, filling all and in all–
Whether we, dumb-struck, terrified, reeling with wonder
Standing, like the disciples, at the edge of an ever-widening abyss of Love and Light,
The question is whether we might yield ourselves to it:
Our prejudice, our vainglory, our envy, our hatreds our desire for power, for knowledge
Our very subjectivity, anything that might obscure our vision,
Whether we might yield all of it to the love of God, and, finally illuminated by it
Discover ourselves falling upward into light
Held and Known by the Knower
Loved by the Lover
Transfigured by grace,
Into living members of the Wounded and Radiant Body of Jesus Christ.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
