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Shine, Jesus, Shine

Transfiguration Sunday

Bethel 2/22/04

The Reverend Marc Sherrod

Last year a team of British scientists, assisted by Israeli archeologists, announced that they had fashioned an accurate image of the face of Jesus. They took skulls of Galilean peasants from the era of Jesus found near Jerusalem and proceeded to reconstruct the face of Jesus, based on those bones. Here’s the description offered by a teacher at Vanderbilt Divinity School who viewed this new image of Jesus with some of her students.

“We all had the same reaction. This Jesus looked very little like the Jesus of our imaginings – and not because we had assumed he was a blue-eyed blond. The purported “true image” [made by the scientists] wore a particular dumbfounded – one might say stupid – expression. His mouth was shown partially open and his wide brown eyes held a puzzled or somewhat worried expression. He seemed to be a dark, brooding figure. The caption “Who, me?” came to mind.” (Christian Century, 9/20/03)

Well, the impulse to truly “see” Jesus is nothing new, for by seeing truly we hope, thereby, to be able to create a likeness true to his physical appearance. I’d bet, for instance, that many of you have been enormously influenced by Walter Sallman’s head of Christ, an early 20th century image of Jesus that was mass-produced and distributed widely, an image of Jesus that I have regularly seen hanging in rural churches and displayed in a variety homes. In fact, I grew up looking at Walter Sallman’s version of Christ every day in our home, and I assumed for many of my growing up years that it was a kind of photographic likeness of Jesus with those dreamy eyes wistfully looking heavenward. And I must confess, that it is still hard to imagine Jesus otherwise.

All of the recent publicity, and with not a little bit of criticism also swirling about, concerning Mel Gibson’s new movie The Passion of the Christ is merely one in a long line of artistic attempts to create an enduring image of the historical Jesus, and thereby to promote a certain theological interpretation of what Christianity should be all about. This particular rendering focuses in excruciating detail on the last 12 hours of the life of Jesus, but some scholars wonder if its depiction of the Jews as the killers of Jesus will actually end up doing more harm than good for Jewish-Christian interfaith dialogue; other wonder about its historical accuracy. But Hollywood notwithstanding, the Gospels simply don’t give us any details about what Jesus looked like, nothing to satisfy our craving for an accurate devotional image nor an actual picture of Jesus that could be used to buttress our preferred theology.

In fact, there are passages in the gospel narratives that suggest Jesus was hard to recognize, especially after the resurrection. Mary Magdalene is cited as mistaking the risen Christ for the gardener. Two of the apostles walk the road to Emmaus with Jesus without realizing who he is. Jesus stands on the shore calling to the apostles in a boat, but from that distance they do not know him.

And if we are not in pursuit of what Jesus actually looked like, we at least want some kind of verifiable experience, dateable and trustworthy, that confirms he is a real figure of time and history. And so, each year thousands of pilgrims flock to the holy land to walk the steps of Jesus. They break bread at the site where Jesus transformed loaves and fish into food for a multitude; they endure a bumpy ride across the Sea of Galilee and imagine Jesus walking on the water; they visit purported sites of his burial; they stand on the sand where tradition says Jesus once stood.

All of that searching, in pictures and in journey, because there remains a deep and aching spiritual yearning for just a glimpse of the real Jesus, a glimpse of glory. We desire a clear picture of God, tangible evidence that God really does exist.

If only we could see Jesus standing before us in dazzling white clothing, then the tragic and the absurd in this world and in our lives might be just a bit easier to bear. If only the conservative Christians had a photograph or a video clip of a smiling Jesus leading a lost and wayward person to heaven; if only the liberal Christians had a photograph or a video clip of a social activist Jesus turning over tables, not in the temple, but in the capitol.

But Jesus is notoriously hard to pin down.

What we do have, especially today, is the story of what has been called the transfiguration of Jesus, a story that actually testifies to the changeability of Christ’s appearance. Jesus is not actually the same, after all, as what those three disciples first thought. They go up on the mountain, and then they come back down; he looks and talks and acts more or less the same; but in between, his appearance is altered by the clouds and by the glory of it all, and the disciples really don’t know what to do with what they have seen.

And so we get Peter’s tongue-tied suggestion to freeze the moment by building shrines to Jesus and to the two uninvited guests, Moses and Elijah, representing the law and the prophets, who have joined them postmortem on the mountaintop.

Whether we like to admit it or not, I think that we are mostly children of the Enlightenment and scientific rationalism, for whom seeing is believing, and the proof is in the touching and the knowing beyond the proverbial shadow of a doubt. We prefer the lab to the cloud covered mountaintop; we are more drawn, I suspect, to the findings of the archeologist who unearths the skulls of Galilean peasants than to gospel stories about ghost-like appearances and foggy encounters.

Our Sunday School faith certainly allows us accept the transfiguration as gospel truth, but I, for one, suspect it is not a story that is high on our top ten list of bible passages that have shaped our moral values or even a story that seems finally all that important when it comes to the tenets of what we believe about Jesus or the Christian story.

What, then, is the point of this incident? Scholars will tell you that this narrative about the transfiguration is the hinge of the gospel, that the life of Jesus will now take a decidedly different turn as he sets his face to go up to Jerusalem. Is it, then, like the baptism in the Jordan, just one more time that Jesus will hear the voice of God’s confirmation and commissioning to continue his messianic mission? Or, is it primarily a story to test the faith of the followers, to get Peter and the others to declare their loyalty or to expose their very human inability to reckon with the truth of who Jesus really is and what he is all about?

Each of those are good and acceptable interpretations. But perhaps the real value of the transfiguration is to remind us of the importance of stepping . . . beyond belief – beyond belief – which can be one of the hardest things of all to do.

So much of our history and our life in the Church are based on believing. The scriptures and church doctrine have been used as ways to try to describe in an intellectually palatable fashion the very nature of God or they have been used to define who’s in and who’s out in the church, who are the heretics and who are the true believers.. The creeds, like the one we will repeat a little later, are a perfect example. The word creed comes from the Latin, credo, meaning “I believe.” Even the word “faith” often gets interpreted as “belief,” when, in fact, faith is much more than just belief as assent or correct definition.

If we were to ask some of our friends who have stopped going to church why they stopped, they might tell you that they could no longer pretend to believe such things. Some stories just simply stretch our credulity to the limit, and in the chronological flow of the gospel story, the transfiguration would have to be considered exhibit A when it comes to a tall tale.

So much of what we think the church should stand for is based on believing.

But perhaps, there is a different B word that we should add to our vocabulary. That is the word “behold.”

One of the best selling religious books of last year is entitled, Beyond Belief, an analysis by the author Elaine Pagels of how it was that the church came to privilege believing over beholding, written down and codified revelation to that of continuously unfolding revelation. Her argument is that there is a hidden Christianity, an experiential, mystical way of coming into God’s presence that, early on in Church history, was moved to the margins in favor of defining beliefs in the mad rush to determine who were the heretics. This hidden gospel is one based more on the journey of seeking, and not the destination of belief.

There is, for instance, in her book, a chapter on the little known Gospel of Thomas that never made it into the canon of scripture, but which depicts a Jesus who talks about everyone having within them the divine light since all have been made in the image of God. You won’t find such a reference in our synoptic gospels nor the Gospel of John. Now, to be sure, this Gospel of Thomas offers only cryptic clues, not answers, to those who seek the way to God. The journey, therefore, is open-ended and mysterious, able to absorb multiple, even paradoxical, meanings. But the Gospel of Thomas does seem to say that the capacity to discover the truth always resides within the individual.

And thus it is for us when we approach something like the transfiguration of Jesus. The question is not, what do you believe really happened or what do you believe Jesus looked like, but rather, the question is, are you, like Peter and the others, willing to go up on the mountain to experience something that you have never before experienced, to see Jesus in a way that you have never seen him before, and, perhaps, to have your own countenance radically altered in the process?

Christianity really began in the act of beholding that which was beyond belief. “Behold, I bring you good news of great joy,” said the shepherds. “Behold, the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,” said one of the early disciples. “Behold, this man was truly the son of God,” said a centurion at the cross.

These were people who “beheld his glory” without knowing what it was all about, and they followed him without being able to explain to their adversaries exactly why they did what they did. Beholding Jesus meant trusting him, even if it went against the grain of an inherited belief system.

To behold Jesus anew on the Mount of the Transfiguration doesn’t mean we have to abandon our beliefs. But we do need to recognize that God has left the boundaries between this world and other worlds porous on purpose, that we have been given eyes to see, if not science-defying miracles, at least the miracles of ordinary life on earth, which include occasions of such truth and beauty, that it is often impossible to believe they have our names on them.

All these gifts come to us from the One who exists beyond all our beliefs, who beholds us with a love surpassing all understanding. In the dumbfounding mystery of the Word made flesh, even in the transfigured flesh on the mountain, we see God’s glory face to face. And whether we consciously affirm it, or not, we all have been changed. And so, shine, Jesus, shine.

In the name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit. Amen.