Transfiguration

 Last Sunday before Lent, 2026

Readings

Exodus 24.12-18

Ps 2

Matthew 17.1-9

In the 1979 movie, A Picnic at Hanging Rock, a group of schoolgirls with their lady teachers all dressed up in dreamy period costumes disappear on a school outing on Valentine’s Day 1900.  It’s a powerful and timeless movie, with its finely balanced portrayal of the tensions and unspoken understandings between the characters, the hints of impropriety, special friendships and hostilities; contradictions sharpened by the awkward imagery of pretty crinoline dresses clambering up a granite outcrop in the middle of the Victorian Alps, claustrophobic scenes of lost girls clawing through spiky undergrowth - and pervading the movie the dizzying emptiness of the Australian bush.  I guess the brooding uneasiness of the movie mirrors the ambivalence and barely suppressed fear of the Australian bush felt by early white settlers.  We get the sense that the mountain itself is protecting some sort of secret, that human experience is vulnerable and unreliable in the face of some great and ancient mystery that the landscape is protecting.  Frustratingly, but very skilfully, the movie never answers its own questions, and we never do find out what happened.

Human beings have always seen mountains as places of spiritual connection, inhabited by spirits or local deities - as high places, both literally and mystically. Maybe the particular mystical experience of high places is something we inherit from the Hebrew roots of our tradition – for example, the story of Abraham on Mount Moriah, where he learns that the God he is bound to in covenant is not a capricious deity who requires the sacrifice of his only son.  Or the story of Moses coming down from Mt Sinai with the tablets of the Torah in his hands, his face shining from his too-close-for-comfort encounter with God.  The hill shrines of the Canaanite peoples, with their sacred pillars, and the folk-religious practices of the Hebrew peoples who set up altars and sacrificed to Yahweh in the high places. 

In high places it seemed to Hebrew people that the divine and human worlds seemed to intersect; much like what Celtic peoples have called ‘thin places’, special places where the dividing line between the human and divine worlds is permeable and fuzzy. And in the same way, the hill-top and the obscuring cloud of today’s Gospel story convey the sense of being on a plane set apart from the experience of everyday, 

Hence the timeless, otherworldly quality of today’s Gospel story, which Christians for centuries have noticed and argued over.  Is this just a literal story of something that happened on the long road to Jerusalem? Or is it a mythological insert into the Gospel story that’s trying to convey a sense of how the disciples came to experience who Jesus really was? Or could it, as some scholars suggest, originally have been a story of the risen, resurrected Jesus appearing to his disciples, a story that somehow got out of the right sequence?  Certainly, the story of the Transfiguration has got something about it that reminds me of my own habit when I’m reading a nail-biter and can’t wait to get to the end - my very, very bad habit of flipping to the last page for a sneak preview because I can’t stand the suspense any longer, or because I need to reassure myself it’s worth the effort of reading it all the way through.

I don’t really think the story of the Transfiguration is just a resurrection story that got put in the wrong place.  If anything, it’s a story that seems more coloured by the imagery of the long-awaited climax to human history, when the rabbis expected Moses and Elijah to reappear.  Certainly the appearance in this story of Jesus with Moses and Elijah is a way of saying, ‘actually, there’s nothing new here.  Jesus is the fulfilment of the tradition and the long-expected outworking of what the Law has always been about.’  The shiny Jesus would remind Matthew’s Jewish readers straight away of the shiny-faced Moses coming down from Mt Sinai.  The shininess of Jesus in the Gospel story of the Transfiguration is the brightness of the end of the age, because the end of the age is when heaven and earth coincide.  So if it’s a glance at the last page, it’s a glance at the very last page. ‘Look’, it seems to be saying, ‘if you’re feeling discouraged halfway along the journey, just see how different everything is going to look from the perspective of eternity’.  This is a very good reminder for us as we prepare to begin the journey of Lent, that the Jesus who we follow on his journey to Jerusalem and the cross is the one who we already know as risen and glorified.

But for Matthew in particular, who makes a few subtle changes to the story he inherits from Mark, the Transfiguration isn’t just a look forward, it’s also a scene that sends us scurrying all the way back to recall the baptism of Jesus, with the voice from the cloud that utters the exact same words, ‘This is my beloved Son, I am very pleased with him.’  It’s a reminder that Jesus is the one in whom heaven and earth intersect – or to put it in language more familiar to the spirituality of our own age, Jesus is the one in whom the depth dimension of human experience rises to the surface and becomes visible. Jesus’ baptism, for Matthew, is about the revelation of who Jesus really is. It’s also about destiny - where Jesus is headed; Jesus’ insistence on doing his Father’s will, and his acceptance of the consequences of that decision.

But I think one of the most helpful things to notice about the story of the Transfiguration is that - first and foremost - it’s a helpful story for disciples, a story told from the fairly shaky and not fully comprehending perspective of Peter, James and John.  Matthew gives the disciples a much better rap here than Mark, who never misses an opportunity to remind us how scared and witless they are.  Mark, for example, tells us Peter blurts out his suggestion about putting up a row of tents because he is terrified and talking nonsense.  Matthew leaves out the editorial comment. Actually, there was some sense to Peter’s suggestion, in view of the connection between the Jewish Festival of Booths - or tents - and the expected coming of God’s kingdom to encamp amongst his people and unite the nations of the world.  

I guess, though, we can’t pass over the fact that Peter’s response is a fairly typical human reaction – we do want to make our experience solid and reliable, to pin down in bricks and mortar the essentially un-pin-downable experience of God’s presence with us.  And anyway, in Matthew’s version of the story, Peter’s somewhat missing-the-point suggestion gets a very profound answer.

The first answer is the voice from the cloud, ‘This is my Son – listen to him’.  And when the cloud lifts the disciples see just Jesus.  No more Moses, no Elijah, no more disturbing brightness, just the very human, very vulnerable Jesus who, as we know very well, has got a long and fearful road ahead of him.  The point is this – without heavenly companions, without the unearthly brilliance, Jesus himself is the tabernacle, or as St John’s Gospel puts it, it is in Jesus that God is pitching a tent and living among us.  The Transfiguration is the revelation of Jesus both in power and in vulnerability, which is the only way he can be of any use to us as one both human and divine.

And the second answer is in what Jesus does next.  The disciples, as you can imagine after having been addressed by a voice from heaven, were feeling just a bit overwhelmed.  Matthew tells us they fell to the ground in fear, and fair enough.  What Jesus does next is to touch them, to help them up, and he says to them - something he often says, actually - ‘don’t be afraid’.  This, I think, is the most profound and intimate moment of the whole story.  In Jesus, God gets what it means to be us.

Partly why I think A Picnic at Hanging Rock was so touching was because it showed, very clearly, the fear that underlies our human experience of the vastness and the mystery of the world we live in.  We are afraid because we feel alone, because we are not in control.  We feel afraid when we touch, just for an instant, the limits of our existence.  We are afraid when we think God doesn’t exist, and then we feel afraid all over again when we experience the sudden certainty that God is an ever-present reality of our lives.  In the story of the Transfiguration, we encounter something profoundly beautiful: human beings being overwhelmed by the mystery and the power of the divine, and then receiving the gift of grace and reassurance.  “Stand up.  Don’t be afraid’

For me, this story of heaven and earth touching one another on the top of the mountain finds an echo in another story – when Jesus, leading them towards a new understanding of their own lives as being about love and service, washes his disciples’ feet.  The story of the Transfiguration, in a sense, is the opposite of A Picnic at Hanging Rock – touching the limits of our experience, we find there unexpected grace, reassurance and new strength.