The story of the Transfiguration is a tough sell.
For pragmatic Protestants–who, even though we know better, still always want a take-away, a lesson, the moral of the story–the Transfiguration doesn’t offer much.
This coming Sunday, March 2, is Transfiguration Sunday (not to be confused with the Feast of the Transfiguration, August 6, and a rabbit hole we won’t go down here). Transfiguration Sunday is the final Sunday after Epiphany. A time of light and disclosure culminates with the big light show on Mount Tabor. Before we begin the Lenten trek toward the cross, we are fortified by a radiant revelation of Jesus.
The Transfiguration may be inspiring and thick with glory, but still, as I mentioned, we are never quite sure “what to do with it.” (And perhaps by “we,” I’m mainly referring to myself as a preacher.) Brightness and beauty, glory and mystery, affirmation and approval may be the heart of the story. But there’s not a lot cash-value here.
Often we hear that we should take an anti-lesson from the three disciples with Jesus, especially impetuous Peter. We want to build shrines. We want to stay on the mountain top. We want to memorialize our epiphanies of the past. And maybe, we want to talk too much when God is speaking. Instead, we need to go back down the mountain. Turn our face toward the cross. Walk the hard road of discipleship, rather than luxuriate at shrines of former glory. All of this is not wrong. And it certainly fits with our activist, practical faith.
Let me propose a different take. I won’t claim it owes a lot to the typical methods of interpreting biblical texts. But it seems timely and a bit provocative in the way that Scripture often should be.
I was inspired by this social media post last Easter, when the celebration of the Resurrection of our Lord coincided with Trans Day of Visibility, March 31. (Read Politico‘s brief report on last year’s Easter/Trans Day of Visibility skirmish in the broader culture war.)
If the Transfiguration tells us that within a dust-covered first-century itinerant preacher there was something more, an unimaginable blazing glory, then what if in a similar manner there is within some of the average people we travel with an unrecognized identity, an acute self-awareness that few could have foreseen, something different and bright and amazing, hiding right there.
Peter, James, and John were invited to see Jesus in a different light–to more fully experience who he was. Up to that time, a few people might have wondered or seen hints that indeed there was something more to Jesus, but no one could have imagined the magnitude of what it would actually look like.
Likewise in our transgender friends, there is something more, something surprising to many, but that has been there all along, and is an essential part of who they are. Like the disciples on Mount Tabor, we are privileged to see their deeper, true selves. And we can celebrate when it shines forth.
We probably don’t want to call what we see in our transgender friends a “transfiguration.” Mount Tabor is best understood as a one-off. Nonetheless Jesus’ Transfiguration could stretch our imaginations about what sort of surprises and glory we don’t see in all those around us. And how we might allow more of those surprises to be revealed and received in the courageous transitions of transgender people? It is almost as beautiful as the Transfiguration.
And taking it one step further, maybe God is speaking words of affirmation in these transitions, but like Peter we are too frenzied and debating to hear.
The story ends with the disciples “keeping it to themselves.” Being on that mountain top was a lot to process, no doubt. Some understanding must have come to them through the events of the weeks and months ahead, including Jesus’ even more startling resurrection. Still, I wonder what might have been if the disciples had inquired a bit of Jesus. What if they had dared to ask about what they had witnessed? What did it really mean? How did Jesus experience it? Did he know himself differently because of it?
I wonder too what it would mean if we would dare to lose our anxiety and bewilderment about transgender people. What if, instead of steering clear or relying on the malicious claims of others, we would seek to understand them? Not interrogating, not disputing, but gently coming to hear their stories and to walk with them.
In the last election, the United States decided that the prime threats to American greatness are not the climate crisis, not systemic racism, not income inequality. Rather, they are immigrants, park rangers, and transgender people. I won’t go into all the tragic stories and statistics about transgender people–family rejection, social scorn, assaults and murders, homelessness, suicide. If anyone seriously believes that a person would go through all this so they could skulk in women’s restrooms or have a successful swimming career, they are dismally misinformed and have been callously manipulated.
Transgender Day of Visibility is still a month away. But this Sunday, if you happen to hear the story of Jesus’ Transfiguration read in worship, you can remember and pray for and give thanks for transgender people. Be glad and grateful for these brave people who have dared to scandalize us by revealing something of their deeper, more honest, more glorious selves.
For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. Colossians 3:3
Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. 1 John 3:2
20 Responses
I think there’s important stuff here. The Transfiguration certainly breaks open all of our hard and comfortable rules and expectations.
“Thank you” doesn’t begin to touch it, Steve. In this article, you have given a gift and an invitation to learn and be transformed by new truths from Scripture and from the beautiful panoply of God’s children.
I would echo Marilyn’s thanksgiving. For me this is an example of a living and active Word. You offer us a gentle invitation to ponder and expand the reach of scripture.
As our current moment seeks to cancel so many people as useless, dangerous, and even worse, you have laid a gentle thought of how Jesus was still there, but in a form that was indescribable. Filled with glory and delight. Thank you for giving a different set of eyes to see.
“If anyone seriously believes that a person would go through all this so they could skulk in women’s restrooms or have a successful swimming career, they are dismally misinformed and have been callously manipulated.”
This is exactly what our misinformed, misguided Iowa legislature says they are “protecting women” from. They all need to read this post! Thank you.
You’re certainly correct that one of the take-aways from this story is that Jesus was quite “other” than the disciples realized, so much so they just couldn’t wrap their heads around it. (My view is that in fact it’s God speaking out of the cloud, “Listen to him!” that’s the key to the event, and that the listening they needed to do was in reference to Jesus’s warning them that he was going to suffer, not triumph politically–and that they needed to get ready to do the same–warnings that bracket this story, just before and after.)
And you are also quite correct that there are wonderful aspects to all kinds of people that we overlook or ignore as we marginalize them, and that goes for trans people too.
You over-stretch however in your attempt to make a mash-up of these two valid observations. As much as, given the preoccupations of our era, we might wish the story was really about us, and all the amazing and beautiful qualities that lie within us if only people could see us in all our magnificent yet over-looked specialness, it’s not.
In seminary, they warned us about committing “eisegesis,” the opposite of exegesis. (Let the reader understand.)
What some call eisegesis others call sanctified imagination. Children of Lady Wisdom are given a sense to recognize and get excited when they listen intently to what is being woven together in a peer’s sanctified imagination. This transfiguration story is linked to Exodus 30, verse 7 to the end, and also linked to Zechariah 4 and 5, and also linked to Isaiah 40. All have to do with human encounters with Glory. The Glory of the Lord that no ordinary human could see and survive, the Glory who enters tents tabernacles temples obscured by cloudiness, the Glory that allowed Moses a quick peep of her backside, the Glory who blows the lid off of Hell’s Measure-for-measure Basket, the Glory that will be revealed to all flesh like a bedecked candelabra when the stage floor is properly graded for the big reveal . . . the Glory who will be gowned as decadently as Dolly Levi was when she made her return and grand descent down the Harmonia Gardens staircase.
If we do not practice now, by seeing and honoring the Glory of our trans neighbors, we may miss a major cue in the future, the day when all Harmonia Gardens waiters everywhere will break into a glad “welcome back” song.
Whoops, I was speaking of Exodus 33, not 30!
The problem with “sanctified imagination” is that it’s so difficult to distinguish from sophisticated or sentimental argle bargle.
In Luke the Transfiguration is also about our Transformation, without denying that it is first about the Lord Jesus. In Luke, the Transfiguration is certainly an anticipation of the Resurrection, when Our Lord is revealed as the First Born of the New Humanity. The word “dazzling” is also used about the clothing of the two “men” at Our Lord’s resurrection. St. Luke certainly knew the word “angel,” but he calls them “men.” St. Paul in 2 Corinthians 3 also connects His glory with our transformation.
Yes, agreed, though I see no indications that that’s the core of what’s being conveyed in the event or the story. A lot happens in the story–Jesus converses with Moses and Elijah, eg, but I don’t think the point being conveyed is that there will be conversations in heaven (though I suspect there will).
I posted too soon before reading the upcoming homework for my Monday Bible study. Women’s Lectionary C Last Week of Epiphany OT selection by Dr. Gafney links in Judges 4 and 5 with Transfiguration event. . . b/c of the Mt. Tabor connection. So thrilling to listen to other Children of Queen Wisdom who are trying to make sense of it all, and so fruitful to ponder with other listeners why Peter might have been eager to start pitching a couple of (war?) tents on this mountain.
Gafney’s translation of Judges 4:9: “And Deborah said, ‘Indeed I will go with you [Barak] however, there will be no glory for you on the path you are taking, for into the hand of a woman will SHE WHO IS MIGHTY sell Sisera.’ ”
Hoping the Life-Breath wicks through everyone who will be preaching and straining to hear the good news woven up within the Transfiguration story in upcoming weeks.
John, another good warning from seminary is be concerned when scripture doesn’t stretch you, challenge you, or invite you to change, but simply confirms what you already knew before.
Indeed. Whenever our reading of scripture just so happens to land us in what we prefer to believe anyway, confirming the notions our chosen corner of the contemporary culture wars is already saying, we should investigate that reading double-hard.
Steve,
Thank you! Thought-provoking as always, your blog reminds me how shallow and frustrating I find the argument that trans people have, somehow, an ulterior motive besides finally transforming into the person they were created to be.
Just as Jon Haas suggests transfiguration is not about us but about God, in another sense such transitioning should not be about us and the few things we might have to rethink, but about them and how they can live full lives.
Thank you for this essay. It really is a good way to think differently from what I often have thought.
Thank you.
I thank you for my daughter, who has been declared not to exist.
Thank you, Steve. Thoughtful, insightful, and encouraging.
Happy to join the chorus of gratitude, Steve, for your contextual take on this wondrous sight and vision fair! Several of those friends with whom I’ve shared it have also found within your words the Word.
Another new interpretation of the Transfiguration story for me, and a good one in these troubled times in Iowa! I am stretched! Thanks, Steve! 🙂