Eternal Light: A Final Epiphany Homily

Preached at All Saints, Collingwood, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, as part of our  Saturday Apres Ski series.  March 17, 2024.   

Text:  Mark 9:2-9

 "And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them." (Mk 9.3)

Tonight is the last night in our Apres Ski series that we will look at one of the themes of the Epiphany season,  even if that means looking back over our shoulder, since we are of course now in the season of Lent.

The climactic and final reading in Epiphany is usually the story of the Transfiguration, that moment in the synoptic gospels when Jesus goes up a mountain with three of his disciples and is momentarily seen in an unearthly brightness and glory.   Most commentators would agree that the Transfiguration story is intended to remind us that before Jesus became the incarnate Word made flesh, he was one with the Father in the glory of heaven.

The story is called The Transfiguration because that is the word that English bibles, since the King James version, have used to translate the Greek word used by Mark and Matthew – metamorphoo (Luke uses another Greek word that means “altered”).    We of course know the word “metamorphosis” from grade school biology, for example as when we learn how pupae turn into butterflies, but what if Mark is saying something different, that Jesus is not showing us a future state of being, like the butterfly, but rather showing us something from whence he came, his eternal and Trinitarian being with God the Father?

Since the Season of Epiphany is about the revealing of Jesus’ true, let’s think a little about what the Transfiguration story tells us about what Jesus turns into.   In fact, we aren’t told a lot, Mark merely says that Jesus’ clothes became an unearthly, “dazzling white” (Mk 1.3) whereas Matthew tells us that Jesus’ face “shone like the sun” (Mt 17.2’ Luke repeats the “dazzling white” but only says that Jesus’ face “changed” Lk 9.28) .   So all we really have is the impression of lightness and brightness, qualities which are consistently associated in scripture with God and the divine.

A short service like this does not allow time for a deep dive, so one example, from the prologue of John’s gospel, might suffice.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ²He was in the beginning with God. ³All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being ⁴in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. ⁵The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. (Jn 1.1-5)

St John tells us, in so far as we can comprehend it, that Jesus came from the Father, from an existence before creation and created being, from the source of all light and life.   We also know that God is the source of life thanks to the creation story in Genesis, where the first thing that God says is “let there be light” (Gen 1.3).  The fact that the first thing God creates is light, I think, says something profound about the character and good purposes of God.

However, there is something even more profound going on.  The light God creates in Genesis is created, it is second order, it is not God itself, in the same way that the earth, or you or I, are created by God but are not God.  The light that belongs to God, the light that I think we see in the Transfiguration, belongs to God, it is the uncreated, self-sufficient essence of God, it is the glory of God, and the glory that we see revealed glory in Christ is what Epiphany is all about.

If Jesus remained in his transfigured state, there would be no gospel, and no salvation.   If Jesus is fully God and fully human, then the human Jesus must be the lens through which we can see God the Father. 

Indeed, this is one of the great themes of John’s gospel, where Jesus several times explains to his disciples that since they know him, Jesus, then they also know and have seen the Father (Jn 14.7).  This knowledge is made possible by the incarnation, by God’s graciousness in sending the Son in human form, so that relationship, friendship, teaching and salvation through death on the cross are possible.   Otherwise there would only be the inaccessible glory of God that we see in the Old Testament in places like Moses’ encounter with God on the mountain (Ex 33:18-20).

This is all very abstract stuff, so let me address the “so what” question with some brief, concrete and (I hope) hopeful thoughts.

We know that our lives take us by and through some dark places, be they guilt, despair, loneliness, or even mortality, the darkness of the valley of the shadow of death.  Our hymns and prayers around evening time, including the ones we sing regularly at his service, address our need for light in the midst of our darkness. 

What better light can there be to guide our feet, and our lives, than Jesus, our friend and our brother, who with his Father shares and is the eternal light from whom all evil things are revealed and vanquished?    What better guide and guardian can we ask for than the gracious light of Jesus, who will accompany us until we reach the heavenly city glimpsed in Revelation, the city which “has no need of sun or moon to show on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb” (Rev 21.22).