Because that’s what a cartoonist has to draw, if he wants his readers to recognize God.
Now where did Matt Diffee and all his colleagues get that image? If you think it’s in the Bible I think you need to join us more often for Adult Ed. Actually, it’s very new. And I can pinpoint the artist, the place, and even the year for this very common Icon of God. It is exactly five hundred years old this year. It is Michelangelo’s portrait of God the Father, one of the first times the First Person was even depicted, stretched on the Sistine ceiling. It is Matt’s seriously unfunny prototype: a stern mesomorph with a formidable white beard and a sort of blue negligee, which somehow doesn’t ruin the sheer ponderous machismo of it all.
I know, I shouldn’t use irony here. Michelangelo’s painting is magnificent, and I very much like it–as a work of art. As a work of theology–well, I sometimes wish he had not created it.
Because a great many people think that’s what God looks like. And lots of others think that’s what we think God looks like, which may be even worse. A solemn, humorless, powerful authority in the sky as their God.
Today’s Gospel gives us a good alternative. It’s much much older and much much better. The Icon of the Transfiguration.
Today we close the season of Epiphany–the season where we ponder the ways in which God shines through, they way God dawns upon us. And it always culminates in the vision of God we just heard in Mark’s Gospel. The Transfigured Christ. The Transfiguration completes Epiphany. For it is the ultimate self-revelation of God. And we need that right now. Let me explain exactly what I mean.
When I was very young television was also very young, and that meant radio was still the primary medium. I can remember the old radio serials, where all you heard was the voices of the characters. The visual was supplied by your imagination. Your own mind got to work, and in a way cooperated with the writers and the actors. Sometimes you were a little disappointed if you happened to see a picture of the actors doing the voices–because those voices now belonged not to them but to your imagination. It was a very creative and absorbing experience and I am sorry that it’s gone for good, replaced by hightech high resolution flat screen television, that does all the creative work for you.
A great teacher, Eric Auerbach, said that the Hebrew Scriptures are like radio. You hear everyone’s voice but very rarely do you see anybody. And above all, of course, you never see God. When God makes an appearance, it is in some symbolic form: a burning bush, smoke filling the Temple, or the fire, earthquake and whirlwind Elijah suffers in our first lesson today–and is probably quite surprised because that time God was not in those things.
Most of the time, in the Old Testament, we hear God. From the tiny quiet voice Elijah finally hears in the story to the friend in conversation Adam knew to the thundering voice of the Commandments, God speaks and we listen.
And with the Incarnation, or when Christ arrived, all this changed. God had appeared–visible and tangible for that matter: they saw him, they touched him. There was a very famous controversy in the Orthodox Church, where a number of sincere Christians noticed that everyone was breaking the second commandment by making holy images. Those who loved these offered many arguments in their defense but the best was, God has obviously suspended that commandment because he has broken it himself–the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.
We began this season of Epiphany remembering God’s appearance to the Magi. That was the first Epiphany. And what we celebrate today is the ultimate Epiphany–the Transfiguration.
Here’s the Icon: Christ, radiant, and in dazzling white. St. Bede says this was the moment that showed how the Incarnation works, because he did not cast off his garment of flesh, but he did put on the garment of glory, the one that Adam had left in the Garden of Eden. Between Moses and Elijah, the Law and the Prophets, Bede says, showing that in that same flesh he was everything the Scriptures had promised–that he was as he said the fulfillment.
And Peter, James, and John–those three very flawed, very holy disciples–stunned and scared. That’s us, by the way. If you will meditate on this Icon, just choose and a disciple and enter the scene. How would you have reacted, if Christ were suddenly clarified, as Martin Luther’s trans has it, before your very eyes on top of a very tall mountain and was joined by Moses and Elijah? You would be confused and scared, that is how. You would shut your eyes with holy dread, as Coleridge puts it–you would know what fear of the lord feels and maybe tastes like. But it would be a delicious fear, a thrill, one you wouldn’t trade for a thousand delights down below. St. Chrysostom said that God was giving them at that moment the fullest of dose of the divine as they could handle–what a wonderful idea. It was to paraphrase the Waste Land as much of God as humankind could stand–without dying on the spot.
We’re them. Why? Well, let’s ask an even bigger why. Why the Transfiguration? Why did God do this thing then? What was it for? Here Leo the Great gave the correct answer. The Orthodox Church, who make much more of this event than most western Christians do, has been repeating his words ever since. The purpose of the Transfiguration was to sustain the disciples through the terrible and humiliating events which were about to happen. It was a moment outside time, a glimpse of heaven: for as Gregory Palamas puts it, it points back, to the Old Covenant; it clarifies the present, for this is what Christ really looks like, and this is the opposite of an hallucination; and it points ahead, to the Resurrection, his, theirs, and ours–which is the next time he will look like this, and which is what Peter and James and John look like now, and which is how we are going to look.
And this is the other reason the Church reclaims this Icon, even though there is also our Feats of Transfiguration, on this last Sunday of Epiphany. Because the events of Lent are shortly to happen for us, and at the end of that time we will recall the dreadful events James and John and Peter were about to witness.
The Transfiguration was above all a preview of the Resurrection.
And I think we need this Icon for more than Lent this year. I had a difficult time getting into the swing of things this semester, which is a little weird for me, usually I relish getting to work after a break. And several of my students said the same thing. A few of them perhaps still haven’t got themselves moving. And of course the problem is the same one every one of you is feeling. We are deeply anxious right now about the state of the economy and the condition of the world. In fact I think I would say it is moving beyond anxiety into a kind of dull dread: we find ourselves expecting bad news on the front page everyday; we find ourselves expecting to see more stores closed and projects abandoned; we expect there will be more revelations about powerful men and prominent leaders that will make our hearts sick. There is a word in Yiddish that really sums it up: tsouris. It means trouble, but it has a nuance that says, well, trouble–and why me? Why us? This is a time of tsouris. It’s why I so much wish we could agree to use the contemporary Our Father–which says not Lead us not into Temptation, but rather what the Christ really said: save us from the time of trial.
WE are in a time of trial now. There have been worse but not in our lifetimes. And you and I have a duty concerning this time of trial. Someone asked me what I though the other day and either my Angel or else the Holy Spirit put the words in my mouth before my ironic brain had time to think of an answer: I think a lot of good is going to result from this.
Why? Because I am an upbeat, optimistic kind of fellow? Surely you know me better than that. But I know it is our Christian duty to believe this and I am working hard as I can on it, and praying. Hope, you see, says Paul, who had his own vision of the transfigured one, is one of the three virtues that we have to practice. Hope does not mean optimism. Optimism would be vaguely and blithely assuming it will all turn out for the best. Hope means seeing a world transformed by the crisis: a world of renewed values, a world that puts a new premium on honesty, a world that puts less effort into gadgets and toys and more into art and science; a world that cares for those who hurt and is more careful about those it rewards. And a nation that will never again the sort of person who jokes that the only people he’s aware of who are hungry are people trying to lose weight.
No, I am not imagining the kingdom of God. That will be infinitely better than what I have just depicted. All I am imagining is a secular world that has been cleansed a little by this hard time, where the suffering, drop by drop, has brought wisdom to its heart. The Greek poet Aeschylus said that, in a play that makes me believe there was plenty of Christianity everywhere before Christ came.
So I urge you. Take the Icon of Christ transfigured with you. Read Mark 9 over and over until it is there before your eyes. Or buy, or print out, one of the many Orthodox Icons of the Transfiguration and put it literally where you will see it daily-through Lent, and through these days of crisis. Etch it into the heart: our Christ in dazzling white, shining against the night sky.
I think a lot of good is going to come from this crisis, precisely because of what happens the moment Lent is over: the ultimate prototype of God drawing something very, very good out of something very, very bad.
Leo the Great says that’s why God gave us this vision. I believe he is right. And I believe it’s the best way to picture God. For as Clement of Rome puts it, Christ is the lens through which we see the Father’s face.
