Last Sunday after the Epiphany / Transfiguration Sunday C:
Exodus 34:29-35; Psalm 99; 2 Cor. 3:12-4:2; Luke 9:28-36
The Rev'd Cameron Partridge
March 2, 2025
With the bread we need for today, feed us. In the hurts we absorb from one another, forgive us. In times of temptation and test, strengthen us. From trials too great to endure, spare us. From the grip of all that is evil, free us. For you reign in the glory of the power that is love, now and forever. Amen.[1]
Good Morning, St. Aidan’s and St. Cyprian’s. I begin this morning with this snippet from the New Zealand Prayer Book’s paraphrase of the Lord’s Prayer. Reading it, praying it, I was struck by how it names the context and the particular pivot point in which we stand right now. A prayer to be fed with not with just any bread but the bread we need for today and tomorrow. An acknowledgement of the hurts we absorb from one another in this world, and a prayer for forgiveness in the midst of them. A plea to be spared from trials we cannot imagine enduring, and to be liberated from the grip of evil in all its forms. All of this is offered to God, entrusted to God’s care because God reigns in glory – the glory of a power expressed here not by might or prowess but in love, power that is love. The domain, the space-time of this reign is God’s kingdom or dream, and we offer this prayer as a longing for the inbreaking of that dream, a reaching forth for its presence in this place and moment.[2] For this is Transfiguration Sunday, one of the great hinge days of the Christian liturgical year. It is a holy moment, a space in which to bask prayerfully in the glory that has flowed in the stories of Epiphany season before we, with Jesus, turn to make our way out and forward, to face Jerusalem and all the events that we know will lead to it, to be transformed all along the way.
I linger with prayer this morning because in Luke’s version of the Transfiguration story, prayer plays a uniquely prominent role. This is in keeping with Luke’s emphasis throughout his Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, which shares the same authorship. Recall the story of his baptism from the start of this season eight weeks ago: “Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased’” (Luke 3:21-22). Prayer grounds Jesus’ action. It is the place where he is met and sustained, where he is named, affirmed, saturated with love. That love marks the glorious power of the divine dream. In our mountainous story, prayer prompts his ascent in the first place. Why might prayer have been especially necessary in this moment? In the lead up to our passage, Jesus had miraculously fed five thousand (9:1-17), and then – again, in a context of prayer – had asked the disciples who people, and then who they, said that Jesus was. After Peter had answered “the Messiah,” Jesus had declared that he would be arrested and killed and would rise. Furthermore, any who would be his disciples would need to take up their cross and follow him (9:18-23). Finally, he said, “there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God” (9:27). Luke places our story directly after this exchange, noting that “about eight days” had passed (9:28). Eight is already a potential clue, as it is a number associated in early Christianity with the resurrection and the kingdom.[3] Into such a space and time, Jesus then takes Peter, John, and James up the mountain specifically to pray. The unfathomable difficulty and mystery of what was to unfold in the days ahead – Jesus’ suffering and death, the new life that would rise from it – suggested a need for prayer, for strength to make a way through it all.
But prayer also signals something else: it becomes the context in which these disciples were given a glimpse of the divine kingdom. All that then unfolded in the mountaintop in its glorious strangeness was in some way emblematic of God’s dream. As he prayed, Jesus was transfigured. “The appearance of his face changed,” we are told, and his clothes became dazzling (9:29). Divine glory shone in and through him—through his vesture and through his body. The incarnate One enfleshed in fragile humanity is revealed as the fully divine Son. He suddenly stands together with ancient forebears, Moses the law-giver and Elijah the prophet flank him in glory (9:30). Together they embody a joining and an extension of prophetic, liberating, life giving story. This extension is signaled by an additional dimension unique to Luke’s version of this story, in addition to his emphasis on prayer: the content of a conversation held by this trio. “They were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem” (9:31). The word translated as “departure” is exodos, literally “road out,” as Dorothy Lee notes in her study of the Transfiguration. The word “usually signifies death,” she comments, citing other contexts where the term appears. Yet the idea of this exodos being “accomplished,” or completed at Jerusalem, can inspire a multilayered interpretation of this term and of the Transfiguration more broadly.[4] Arthur Michael Ramsey, who went on to become Archbishop of Canterbury from 1961-1974, exclaimed of exodos, “what a wealth the departure of Christ at Jerusalem contains!” In his reading, the exodos in Jerusalem signals the cross, the death, resurrection, and ascension. And if we recall that exodos is a Greek rendering of the term for the Israelites’ journey out from Egypt, led by Moses, we can hear a further mystery in this prayerful discussion: all that Jesus was about to undergo was a passage “from bondage into freedom.”[5] There is an invitation to receive the Transfiguration story as a prayerful icon of the dream of God unfolding in and through the Paschal Mystery, a journey into and through death to liberating resurrection life.
This iconic glimpse of liberative mystery is not only about Jesus and for his disciples, of course. It is also for us. This prayerful vision is a gift to us, and to all creation.[6] It is a gift that transforms, and not simply at the end of all things, but in the here and now as God’s dream breaks through to us, calling us to join it especially in the valleys of this life, in its shadows, and not simply its mountaintops.[7] It is a vision of splendor that can radiate out in and from our lives even in anticipation of and amid struggle. In theologies of the Transfiguration, he Apostle Paul’s words in the second letter to the community at Corinth have long been interpreted to reflect a transfigurative dimension in our own spiritual lives: “all of us… seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit” (2 Corinthians 3:18). The verb “transformed” reflects the Greek word metamorphosis, a term used by the other gospels (though intriguingly not Luke) to describe Jesus’ transfiguration.[8] In other words, Christ’s transfiguration in all its multilayered mystery is a gift for us and all creation that is also meant to emerge in and through us.
How does this emergence happen? First of all, through prayer. Gradually over the course of a lifetime, we are transfigured in our life of prayer, as we seek the face of Christ in all things – particularly, I believe, in the midst of struggle, as we long for consolation and strength to carry on. As we seek “not [to] lose heart,” as Paul writes (2 Cor. 4:1). As we pray for the nearness of God, offering to God all that we are, all that God would call us to be in this world, we become. We are changed. We are transformed. In Paul’s words, rendered through the great Wesley hymn we are “changed from glory into glory.”[9] Made in God’s image, we can grow closer to Christ’s likeness over the course of our lives. Living into the authentic embodiment of our humanity; as we strive to press back against oppression in this world; in our loving connection with one another all along the way; we too are in some sense transfigured. In this prayerful process, we can become light to one another and to a wider world stifled by so many shadows. We can live the transfiguration as a participation in the divine dream
This has been a difficult week in our world, dear friends, in the midst of many before and undoubtedly more to come in the months and years ahead. As I have prayed about all that has happened, about how disheartened I do indeed become; as I have longed to see prayerfully transfigured community in this moment; I have turned again to the wisdom of Bishop Steven Charleston whose book Ladder to the Light we read in Advent. A particular scene, a vision from his book spoke to me, and I would like to close today by sharing that vision with you:
Imagine you walked onto a large open field at night when there was no moon. Standing there silently in the darkness were hundreds of people, each holding an unlit candle. Only you were carrying a candle that was burning, a single light alone. How quickly would the field be glowing once you used your candle to light others, and they used their candles to do the same, and all the people began sharing their light with those around them? You may never know exactly, but you do know overtime what the outcome will be: a field aglow in the darkness where people can see one another clearly. Your life matters. What you have started will carry on. You are a source of light. You help others in ways that will continue. You are a single candle, but you are stronger than darkness.[10]
May we never forget that. We too are transfigured.
[1] A New Zealand Prayer Book / He Karakia Mihinare o Aotearoa (San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins, 1989), 181.
[2] As always, the phrase “God’s dream” is inspired by Verna Dozier, The Dream of God: A Call to Return (Cambridge, MA: Cowley, 1991).
[3] For example, the 1st-2nd century Epistle of Barnabas (15:8-9) depicts God speaking of a new iteration of sabbath “in which I will give rest to all things and make the beginning of an eighth day, that is the beginning of another world. Wherefore we also celebrate with gladness the eighth day in which Jesus also rose from the dead, and was made manifest, and ascended into heaven.” Trans. Kirsopp Lake, The Apostolic Fathers Vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1912, 1998), 395-397.
[4] Dorothy Lee, Transfiguration (London: Continuum, 2004), 73. Re: other examples of exodos Lee cites Wisdom 3:2, 6; 2 Peter 1:15.
[5] Arthur Michael Ramsey, The Glory of God and the Transfiguration of Christ (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1949), 123
[6] “This metamorphosis, moreover, is not only for human beings but extends to the whole creation. The sheer materiality of the incarnation, and the translucence of Jesus' body on the mount of transfiguration, ensures that nature itself is caught up in the deification of human beings: ‘the entire cosmos will someday partake in the fruit of the incarnate.’” Dorothy Lee, 134, quoting Hans Urs von Balthasar, Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. 7 (T & T Clark, Edinburgh, 1989), 273-4.
[7] C. Partridge, “Luke 9:28-36: Being Transfigured” in eds. Masiiwa Ragies Gunda and Jim Naughton, On Sexuality and Scripture: Essays, Bible Studies, and Personal Reflections by the Chicago Consultation, the Ujamaa Centre, and Their Friends (New York, NY: Church Publishing, 2017), 85.
[8] The verb is μεταμορφούμεθα
[9] Charles Wesley, “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling,” in The Hymnal 1982 (New York, NY: Church Publishing, 1982), 657. Similarly, the collect for the day reflects this: “Grant to 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.”
[10] Steven Charleston, Ladder to the Light: An Indigenous Elder’s Meditations on Hope and Courage (Minneapolis, MN: Broadleaf Books, 2021), 12-13.
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