[Sermon delivered at the 2022 General Chapter of the Anglican Order of Preachers,
Morning Prayer, The Feast of the Transfiguration, August 6, 2022]
✠ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, the Trinity, one in Essence and Undivided. Amen.
Greetings on this Feast of the Holy Transfiguration. This may be one of my favourite feasts of the Church year, behind Easter and rivalling Pentecost. The Feast of the Transfiguration is all about light, specifically the Uncreated Light of God. St. John’s Gospel is full of references to the Light, for instance this text from our readings today:
“The Light is with you for a little longer. Walk while you have the Light, so that the Darkness may not overtake you…While you have the Light, believe in the Light, so that you may become children of Light.”[1]
It is a continuation of a major theme of this Gospel, the Light’s victory over Darkness delivering Humanity from its deadly grip, a theme introduced in the Gospel’s Prologue:
“In Him was Life, and the Life was the Light of men. The Light shines in the Darkness, and the Darkness has not overcome it.”[2]
The Transfiguration is an Epiphany. Both in the account of the Transfiguration itself and in our reading today, God reveals Himself again much as He did at the Baptism of Jesus in the Jordan. In this passage Our Lord Jesus indicates that these revelations are for the benefit of those who experience them. After centuries of speaking indirectly through prophets, God once more rattled heaven and earth throughout the ministry of Jesus to impress upon us here below that something wondrous is happening. As Jesus puts it, God has given this particular revelation to impress upon us that judgement has come and the ruler of the world, that is, Satan and his henchman Death, are to have their butts handed to them.[3]
Powerful words. Mighty words.
But before His listeners get a chance to misconstrue what He said, Jesus upends their understanding by saying that He would be lifted up. Oddly, in Hebrew, and in Greek, and in Latin the word for “lifted up” both means to be exalted, and also to be executed by lifting up either on a gibbet or a cross. Both meanings lurk within that verb in any of those three languages and using it in a pronouncement is perceived as ominous or threatening. For example, after Octavian obliterated Marc Antony’s opposition at Actium, Cicero had stated that Octavian should be similarly exalted; justifiably, Octavian, now Caesar Augustus, thought such a veiled threat would have less impact if Cicero had no head. The same sense is true here. When Jesus said, “I shall be lifted up,” this would have filled the hearers with foreboding or confusion or both. After all, had Jesus not just said that judgement was coming? If the Messiah, whom many listeners here identified as Jesus, were to be executed, then who was going to kick Rome to the kerb? He then further confuses them when he says that the Light will be with them just a little while longer and that they walk with that light so the Darkness would not overtake them.
By now, we can be sure, many of the listeners were totally confused and discombobulated. They heard Jesus say the Messiah was going to remain only a short while and be killed. They heard at the same time the ruler of the world would be driven out. They then were told to walk in the Light while they still had the Light so they could persist in the Light when the Light was gone. At this point, one might imagine a few even of the Twelve to have gotten a bit surly about the whole thing.
This confusion is the result that no one understood who the real enemy was.
Everyone in Judah knew, or thought they knew, that the REAL enemy was Rome, and that Rome was just the current bad guy in a long list of bad guys: Antiochus Epiphanes, Nebuchadnezzar, Sennacherib, just to name a few. They understood that God always provided an anointed leader, a Messiah, in His own time, to get them through the crisis. They just had to be patient and the new Messiah would lead them to kick Rome out of Israel and that would be the end of it.
Not quite.
The real enemy is not Rome but the Darkness. The ancient power that oppressed Israel, indeed, all of humanity was what Our Lord came to drive out and to judge. As St. Paul tells us in the letter to the Romans, “As Sin therefore entered the created order through one human, and Death through Sin, so also Death entered into all humans, and because of Death all humans sin.” [We can talk after the service about this passage being mistranslated for centuries.][4] This Darkness is Death, its Agent is the Devil, its Companion is Sin, and its remedy, well, is not what first century Jews universally expected. While a Messiah could lead in a campaign to drive out Rome as David drove out the Philistines or the Maccabees drove out the Greeks, Sin, Death, and the Devil are not exactly vulnerable to armed resistance and require a different approach.
The thing about Darkness is that it is nothing. It is a void. It is Unbeing. When a light is introduced, darkness is destroyed, darkness vanishes. In the case of a created light, the darkness is held at bay until the fuel source for the light is exhausted, and once the light is removed or extinguished, the nothingness of darkness returns. When the Light is the Uncreated Light, the Eternal Energy of the Infinite God, the Darkness is permanently obliterated, and this is what Jesus meant. It is the whole thrust of the Gospel. With Sin, Death came. While Death rules, Sin continues. The cycle must be broken, and it may be broken only in one way. With Jesus, Human Nature, which is subject to Death, is perfectly united in His Person with Divine Nature, which is emphatically not subject to Death but in fact is inimical to Death. So when Jesus was lifted up on the Cross, Death opened wide its mouth to swallow and found itself suffused with the Uncreated Light, which obliterates the Darkness. So the Ruler of the World is judged, thus the Ruler of the World is driven out. “O Grave, where is thy victory, O Death, where is thy sting?”[5]
Jesus tells his listeners that the Enemy, the real Enemy, has come under judgement and by His sacrifice this Enemy has now suffered a decisive and permanent rout. He then follows up with the final point for his listeners, that they are to walk with the Light to become children of the Light. It is not enough that Jesus defeat the Darkness, that He drive the Darkness out, but that the people for which He does so will then choose to walk in and partake of that Light. This is no hollow victory, where Satan’s assassination of Humanity be avenged but not rectified, that Death and Sin be defeated and destroyed but Humanity still lost to God. No, Jesus specifically states that His listeners need to turn from the Darkness, to turn from walking with Death toward their destruction, and instead turn to the Light, to turn to walking with Jesus toward Life eternal, because by His Death and Resurrection He has made all things new.[6] The choice is clear, still to pursue a path of despair, or to fall in behind Jesus, the author and perfecter of the faith, and so walk with the Light so that Darkness will not swallow them up.
That choice is not merely for the first century Jews listening to Jesus in this passage. Jesus said earlier in this Gospel to Nicodemus that it is not God’s will for anyone to perish, that it is not God’s will that the Light be offered to the Children of Israel only. No, God loves the world, the cosmos which had become subject to Death from the Ancestral Sin, and because of Death is still mired in Sin. The choice is not merely just for Nicodemus, for his fellow Jews, but also for the centurion whose servant Jesus healed, for the Samaritan woman at the well, for the Syro-Phoenician woman whose daughter was possessed, for the Greeks the Apostle Philip introduced to Jesus, for you, for me. We have before us Life and Death, to choose the Life that is the Light of men, or to let the Darkness overtake us. If we choose Life, then we are with the Light, and the Darkness can then never overtake us.
✠ Through the prayers of the Most Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, Holy Dominic, and all the saints, Saviour save us. Amen.
[1] Jn. 12.35a, 36a [2] Jn. 1.4-5 [3] Jn. 12.30-31 [4] Rom. 5.12. Modern translations perpetuate the old Latin mistranslation of the Greek original ἐφ’ᾧ πάντες ἥμαρτον, which flawed translatiοns render as “because of [Adam’s] Sin all have sinned,” a translation the Orthodox repudiate to this day, along with its result, the doctrine of Original Sin. [5] 1 Cor. 15.55 [6] Rev. 21.5