This Sunday is “Transfiguration Sunday,” which always means the Epiphany season is in our rearview mirror, and Lent is quickly approaching. We will read about Jesus’ transfiguration experience when he climbs the mountain, is consumed with fire and power, feels the full presence of God, and walks back down the mountain a changed person. We have no idea what actually happened, other than an intensely private moment between Jesus and God, so private that much of it happens in a cloud. There are witnesses of course, but what they see they misunderstand – and then fear.
As theologian Sam Portaro puts it, “the Transfiguration is an artistic struggle to give voice to an intangible insight.”
All we know is that God surrounds Jesus, overcomes him, takes his breath away, and sets his heart on fire. We know that encounter with God changed Jesus profoundly. “After that strange experience on the hill,” Portaro writes, “Jesus possessed something he had not known or evidenced before. He bore within, and expressed without, the unmistakable assurance of one who knew his place; he knew he was loved…by God. That knowledge was his authority and the core of his integrity; he knew it so surely, he could never relinquish it, even to the power of death. He was changed, and everyone who saw him saw that change. He was transfigured. The brooding shadow of doubt – doubt over his own place in God’s order and affections – was replaced (forever) by the clear light of assurance.”
I like to think that what Jesus experiences in that cloud is an encounter with the living God, an encounter that changes him completely. What if it’s not really our job to try to decode exactly what happened in the cloud that descended around Jesus, but to enter into that cloud ourselves, if we’re not there already? What if we approached the Bible as less a book of certainties than a book of encounters? A book in which a staggeringly long parade of people run into God, into each other, into life – and are never the same again?
Whether these encounters register in human consciousness as “good” or “bad,” they have a way of breaking biblical people open, of rearranging what they’re convinced they know for sure so that there is room for more divine movement in their lives. Sometimes the movement involves traveling from one place to another. Sometimes it means changing their angle on what is true and why. Sometimes it involves the almost invisible movement of one heart toward another. In this re-arranging and in these encounters, certainties become casualties. At least those certainties that involve clinging to static notions of who’s who, what’s what, where we are going in our lives, and why. Things can shift pretty dramatically inside the cloud of unknowing, where faith has more to do with staying fully present to what is happening right in front of us than in being certain of what it all means.
Blessings,
The Rev. Devon Anderson
Interim Rector