Transfiguration and disfiguration

Luke 9.28-36

Today, August 6, churches across the world keep the Feast of the Transfiguration, recalling the time when Jesus took his disciples Peter, James and John to the top of Mount Tabor.

There Jesus was transfigured, his face ‘shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white’. While on the mountain top, Moses and Elijah appeared, symbolizing that Jesus was the one to whom the Law and the Prophets pointed.

His closest disciples were overcome with the glory that was revealed to them. They glimpsed the transfigured Jesus on a mountain top before they witnessed the horror of the disfigured Jesus on the cross.

Perhaps this was an encouragement to them, and to us, that the struggles and sorrow of the present day are not the whole story. There is a greater life into which we are called.

Christians enter into the suffering and death of Christ through our baptism and discipleship but share also in the triumph of his risen life. The transfiguration is a striking story pointing to the transforming power of God’s love and the glorious future that is yours and mine, through God’s grace.

Today is also the 76th anniversary of that dreadful moment when for the first time in history a city was subjected to a nuclear attack. Hiroshima Day remembers how, in a blinding flash, around 80,000 people were obliterated by an atom bomb. Many more would die from the effects of burns and radiation in the years that follows.

August 6 thus juxtaposes two starkly conflicting visions. One the one hand, transfiguration – the glory of God as revealed in Jesus Christ, in whose image we are made, and the transfigured life in which we are called to share. On the other, disfiguration – the darkest side of human nature that creates the weapons of hell, the very existence of which diminishes us all. May the former vision be the one that sustains us and shapes our life together.

(Accounts of the Transfiguration can be found in Matthew 17.1-9; Mark 9.2-8; Luke 9.28-36).