What luminous words from our Epistle lesson! "An entrance supplied abundantly into the everlasting Kingdom!"
Today we contemplate the highest summits of earthly life: passes through empyreal mountains, far above the Alps or Himalayas. It is the Feast of the Holy Transfiguration of our Lord, God, and Savior Jesus Christ: the crown of theosis, the pattern and purpose of our lives (as we shared during our preparations last week).
One of our Sisters follows Dr. Christopher Viniamin of St. Tikhon Seminary (OCA), who represents this feast as the greatest among the Twelve Feasts. Well, it is no use to sort through the great feasts in order of dignity or importance. For they are all incommensurables. We enter all as Divine Mysteries: encounters with God steadied and guided by angels and saints. Is Great Pascha greater than the Nativity of our Lord? St. Athanasius teaches that our lifeworld was renovated at the conception and birth of Jesus Christ, our Creator God touching the Creation according to the flesh. Is the ransom-offering of His human life on a Cross the pivotal moment of our salvation? Holy Orthodoxy teaches that His Passion began with His Self-emptying of Heavenly glory, entering the minuscule confines of our humanity, enduring our suffocating smallness that we might receive His unlimited greatness. You see, these Mysteries are not a mathematical moment. And they are not a this-for-that, but rather eternal, uncreated energy touching the earth in a cloud of unknowing. They have no end, no beginning, no middle, but only the Now of God's incommensurable energies and power. Each is the Now of His love and His will for our lives.
That is, what the great feasts commemorate as a seamless whole is nothing less than our Divine life received through God's life-giving blessings. We cherish them. We meditate on them. We participate in them. Indeed, today's feast is the high point of our participation, the culmination of human life.
Astonishingly, the Fathers have taught that Holy Scripture is secondary to this encounter with God. Yet, we ought not marvel at this, for St. Paul taught this precept as a matter of course:
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.... you are an epistle of Christ, ministered by us, written not with ink but by the Spirit
of the Living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of flesh, that is, of the heart. (2 Cor 3:3) |
As Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev has written,
| .... the reading of the Holy Scripture is only a secondary means on the ascetic's path to spiritual life. St. John Chrysostom says, "It were indeed meet for us not at all to require the aid of the written Word, but to exhibit a life so pure, that the grace of the Spirit should be instead as books to our souls, and that as these are inscribed with ink, even so should our hearts be with the Spirit. But since we have utterly put away from us this grace, come let us at any rate embrace the second best course." (Orthodox Christianity, II.30) |
Yes, our feast today is incommensurably holy. Our readings from the Holy Scriptures are to be observed with rapt attention. But the feast and the readings are not the thing. The thing is our own ascent up the Mount of Transfiguration, our encounter with God and our reception by the Deathless Ones: Moses and Elijah, who were assumed into Heaven, and the Son of God.
We follow St. Athanasius in affirming the Incarnation to be the cosmic shock that altered the destiny of our lifeworld from death to life. So we must be circumspect in affirming that the Lord Jesus really and truly died on the Cross according to the flesh. But can we honestly say that we are surprised at His victory? Was He not the Lord of Life before all worlds and at His birth and, after that, upon a Cross?
Moreover, what do we mean when we use the word death during the first century? We must take special cares not to retroject our modern minds, unprepared as they are for spiritual discourse, into this era. We must not import our modern categories into our holiest meditations. In particular, we must be very, very careful when we use the term death in connection with the Lord Jesus Christ or with the ancient world in general. For death as finality in a cold grave is a conceit not found among the ancients. The Babylonians and Assyrians, the Persians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans all contemplated afterlife.
Even during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, so antagonistic to spiritual life, experiences of the afterlife have become commonplace, counted now perhaps in the billions. Numerous books, articles, and databases detailing tens of millions of near-death experiences exploded onto our culture during the mid-twentieth century. Skeptics asked, "What is this near-death fad? And why should it become a craze now?" We answer in three letters: "CPR." With the advent of CPR in 1960 and the routine training of practitioners the world over through the 1970s, people who otherwise would have slipped away have been brought back.
And, of course, we have Scriptural warrant for experiences like this:
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And I know such a man — whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows —
how he was caught up into Paradise and heard inexpressible words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter. (2 Cor 12:3-4) |
We are left with an inescapable fact: death is a construct. There is, in fact, no death. For it turns out that God has made His human creatures to be permanent. We cannot speak to the future of other creatures, but we certainly affirm that humans are created first of all, to be holy and, second of all, to be eternal. So all of our questions concerning salvation cannot be whether we shall have eternal life but rather where or with Whom we shall have it.
Transfiguration, is a closely related subject, for our aspiration is to reach spiritual maturity before we depart this veil of tears and review our lives in the face of our God and Judge.
As we say at the Hermitage, the timezone of the Kingdom is Now, always Now. Our God is always before us, full of blessing, understanding, and love. And, of yes, He scourges all the sons that He loves (Heb 12:6). Standing always opposite God is the elemental world pervaded by demons who weave a trance out of false promises, illusory timelines, and meaningless goals. All of these fade to a distance beside God's brilliant, blindingly bright Now.
Ours is a calling God. He does not mean later. He does not negotiate. To presume upon His famous patience and mercy would be insolence. His call must always be followed by Samuel's "I am here, Lord" or Isaiah's "Send me." His Now is the only timeline. His call is our only vocation. His will is our only goal and purpose. Everything else is delusion.
Always the primary call is theosis. "Follow me," He says. "I go to prepare a place for you," He promises. "Pick up your Cross," He commands, signifying that we say "No" to the world and its false promises. "I send fire on the earth", He tells us that we might burn down our former lives. His Now is our only life and focus. And preparation for our departure from this transitory life is our daily work.
In the Epistle lesson this morning, St. Peter goes straight to this subject. After contemplating our abundant entrance into the Kingdom, he writes,
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Yes, I think it is right, as long as I am in this tent, to stir you up by reminding you,
knowing that shortly I must put off my tent, just as our Lord Jesus Christ showed me. (2 Pet 1:13-14) |
The obvious meaning of tent is, of course, his carnal body. But the Greek word He uses, σκηνώματός / skunomatos, refers to a tabernacle, the Tabernacle in the Sinai Wilderness, which together with the Zion Temple has vanished leaving behind living stones built unto a spiritual house (1 Pet 2:5). Peter enjoins us on two levels, both earthly and Heavenly. On earth we are to be temples of the Holy Spirit, pure and spotless — not a recreation area for Bacchic revels, not a playground which morphs into the slaughterhouse of our souls. After that, we shall put off this tabernacle becoming united to God's spiritual household, being holy as He is holy. The time must always be Now, for we do not know the day or hour of our departure (Mt 24:36).
The Lord Jesus does not use the word death as He approaches Moses and Elijah, as I say, the "deathless ones." The Greek word He selects is exodon, for which we do not need an education in Greek language to understand. He announces His Exodus (anticipating Peter's later reference to the Sinai Tabernacle). In this, the Lord communicates what is primary, which is the three-fold path of purification, illumination, and union. We must be washed in the Red Sea pointing to our Baptism in the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. We must be illuminated as before a Pillar of Fire or upon the heights of Mount Sinai. Finally, we must undergo desert life purging us of every last vanity that we might reach the Land of Promise, which is the Kingdom of Heaven. My brothers and sisters, these are the basics of our faith. We must never, in this evil age, be separated from them. They are our lifeline.
Today, we celebrate our earthly journey and its fulfillment: theosis-unto-union with the Lord God. As our life's purpose is to follow, imitate, and mysteriously become our Elder Brother Jesus (according to adoption), so the manifest Transfiguration of Jesus of Nazareth unto Theophany depicts the goal and purpose of all human life.
Our week began with this passage:
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Jesus said to them, "The Son of Man is about to be betrayed into the hands of men,
and they will kill Him, and the third day He will be raised up." And they were exceedingly sorrowful. (Mt 17:22-23) |
In this, we are inducted into a cosmic struggle. The Holy God is born into the world immediately to be torn to pieces by the implacable evil of men. Is not this the meaning of the Slaughter of the Innocents, a drama played out upon His birth? Yet, from the beginning, another, Divine, reality is revealed: "another way" (Mt 2:12). Star-led wizards (Milton) granted Divine knowledge have fastened their eyes upon the Heavens. They journey to a crib in Bethlehem, which is the goal of human history, the desire of the everlasting hills (Gen 29:46). They pour out their gold, frankincense, and myrrh before the Holy One. And they worship Him. In this, they have revealed to all mankind unto the ages of ages a higher Kingdom than might be found in Herod's court or Caesar's palace.
The model they set out is unambiguous. We must prepare ourselves as they have. We must train ourselves. We must perceive our surroundings, understanding that a different Kingdom stands all around us. We must follow a higher star. We must discern the voices of angels. We must recognize demonic purposes and schemes and navigate around them. We are to be innocent as doves yet wily as serpents (Mt 10:16). And all of this has been modeled by these three mysterious and holy men.
We do not lack for saints today to teach us.
They teach us to
follow the Master according to His Word
and
to imitate Him in every thought and action.
We are to give the world a wide berth, for we are not immune to its pollutions.
And we must live in expectation and joy for the moment
that we put off our tents
to join His imperishable Kingdom,
seamlessly,
quietly,
perhaps
barely noticing any difference.
For the life we are taught
and
the life that we follow has been true all along.
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.