Transfiguration Sermon
2 Cor 5:16 – 21 In Christ, there is a new creation
Luke 9: 28 – 36 Transfiguration
There are verses in the New Testament which haunt the imagination. A few weeks ago, if your preacher followed the Lectionary, you will have heard that verse from St Luke’s gospel, describing how, after Jesus had so angered his fellow-villagers in Nazareth that they slung him out of the town, ‘But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.’ It is one of those verses that in a seemingly artless way probes to the depths what it is like to live in the presence of the resurrected Jesus. ‘He passed through the midst of them and went on his way.’ I sometimes feel that that is the story of my life.
And today, we have another such verse – not in the easy story-telling language of St Luke but the pharisaic logic of St Paul (it’s 2 Corinthians 5 : 21): ‘For our sake, he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.’
I remember in my very first appointment we had a man whom everyone called Uncle Arthur – lovely man, who had worked for decades in the Junior Church with generations of children. Uncle Arthur asked me after church why I hadn’t preached on the Old Testament text which, I think, was one of the servant songs from Isaiah. I replied, ‘Well, I really don’t think I’m ready to preach on that yet, Arthur.’
Thirty years down the line, I find myself in a similar position with this verse from St Paul: ‘For our sake, he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.’
I’m not sure that I am in a position to say what it means. But this morning, if I may, I’d like to crawl towards it in your presence.
The easy, cynical response top a verse like this is to say it is very clever-sounding paradoxical nonsense. I might once have known a man who might have said something like that. I like to think that he knows a little better now. What is it Frances Bacon says? ‘Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.’
Christianity is very odd. It is most peculiar, is it not, that for two thousand years, a very considerable proportion of the human race has held that the death of one man is the key to everything?
‘For our sake, he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.’
We are being offered the benefit of some sort of transaction here. It echoes those enigmatic verses in Isaiah: he was wounded for our transgressions, by his stripes we are healed, he has borne our iniquities.... . A transaction between Jesus’ death and our lives.
In our reading this morning, St Paul also says: So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away: See! Everything has become new!
The suggestion is that if we can (as it were) hold the death of Jesus correctly – see it – dwell in it – make it ours - in the right way, then it can transform us – save us – give us new life – everything can become new.
Does it go like this? On the mountain of the transfiguration, as we heard this morning, the disciples saw Jesus transformed – they saw that the life of this wandering rabbi was, in fact, utterly glorious. It became a new thing before their eyes.
And now St Paul tells his friends in Corinth : ‘So, if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away: see – everything has become new!’
The disciples on the mountain of the transfiguration only looked on at a spectacular vision. They were only bystanders. They were not a part of it. St Paul seems to be saying that if you are in Christ you can actually be part of this wonderful new thing – you can live it from the inside rather than just look on from the outside.
And how is this achieved: there is no getting away from it. Christians have always believed that it is somehow tied up in how Jesus died. ‘For our sake, he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.’
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I have to say that what follows isn’t really theology: it is more my personal reflection and response to all this.
It seems to me that Christianity is all a bit of a mistake. A serendipitous one, but a mistake none the less. Christianity was never intended to last this long, and that it has is very remarkable. We were Christians were born, we were not, out of an agony of fear and mourning when Jesus was killed. Every time I take a funeral, and I read Jesus’ words in St John’s gospel, ‘Let not your hearts be troubled ..... and if I go and prepare a place for you I will come again..... .’ I am stuck by the fact that this is how it is for all of us as we view our end in sight. Jesus is preparing his friends to cope with his death. The humanity shines through despite the formalism of John’s words. ‘I’m not really going to leave you completely. I’ll always be there for you. Please let me go. We will be together again, won’t we? Please don’t be too upset.’ This is the language of dying that is common to us all. This is what it is to be human. This is what it is to love.
And then Jesus’ death, and the darkness and the fear that follows it. How is life to be lived now that the heart has been torn out of it? Again, an utterly human question.
And then the appearances: at first it seemed as if he physically was there, just as he’d always been – with Mary in the garden, with the disciples in the upper room. That sense of physicality – of bodiliness - soon went away, but the sense of his presence never left them. It seems to me that anyone who has loved deeply and mourned deeply understands the biblical language. It isn’t particularly religious – it’s just human. ‘I in you, you in me, that we may be one.... in life and in death too.... ,’ - this is just how it is. This is love.
It is possible, is not, for a life to be utterly transformed by the death of someone precious. I’m sure you’ve seen it happen. But have you listened by any chance, to Laurence Dallaglio, the rugby player, talking about the effect on his life when his beloved sister was drowned in the Marchioness disaster on the Thames? First it destroyed him, and then it transformed him. And in an importance sense, she shares his transformed life. Only a total idiot would say ‘How could she. She’s dead. You’re talking nonsense.’ There is a lot of difference between not being able to make sense of the words, and the words being nonsense.
Is this too mawkish – I’m trying to make connections with St Paul –
She who was so alive, became dead, and now he, gloriously, lives her life.
I’m reaching for this change-over that St Paul encapsulates for us:
‘For our sake, he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.’
Try replacing ‘sin’ with ‘death’ or ‘dead.’
‘For our sake, he made him to be dead who knew not death, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.’
Of course, an important point is that Dallaglio knew his sister. The disciples knew Jesus. What is so extraordinary is that their transformation was so powerful that others, who had never known Jesus in the flesh, were caught up in it – they too seemed to fall in love with this man, mourn this man, rejoice in this man, and be transformed by this man whom they had never known.
Is that not what we are doing here, this morning – loving, mourning, rejoicing in, and being transformed by this man whom we have never known? Two thousand years later we, and half the population of the world, are caught up in the power of what overwhelmed that little band of men and women as they struggled in the full flood of mourning.
A woman burst into tears when I was preaching the other week. I thought ‘What on earth have I said?’ After the service I discovered it was nothing to do with me. What had happened was that right out of the blue she’d been overwhelmed by the sense of her late husband coming and sitting on the seat beside her. Not mad. Or even sad. Just wonderfully human. A precious, and deeply holy, moment for her.
We Christians used to have an expression to describe this. We ditched it in the brutal paring down of language that occurred in the sixties. Holy Ghost.
It seems to me that we are a people who are haunted by Jesus. True, there are times (like St Luke says) when he passes through the midst of us and goes on his way, leaving us lost, and baffled and confused. But there are other times when he is just so gloriously there. And we are haunted and transformed by his holy presence.
From now on, therefore, we regard no-one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away: See! Everything has become new!
Thanks be to God
