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On LIVING the mysteries of our Faith: The Transfiguration

When I read our parish bulletin on the Icon of the Transfiguration, it covered the main theological points, but made no real attempt to indicate what it all means to you and me, today, right here and now as we confront our daily tasks. So here’s my attempt to remedy this, starting with a quote from the bulletin:

“What is it that the three disciples were able to contemplate, when they saw the face of Christ ‘shine as the sun’ etc., cf. Mt 17. According to St. Gregory of Nazianzus this light was the Divinity manifested to the disciples on the mountain.”

But what’s in it for us???

On my web site <www.mamaleh-larisa.com> is the ikon by Theophanes the Greek which depicts especially well the reality of this mystery, which is: God became man so that man would become God. And so in the ikon we see the two triangular shafts of blinding white light converging, one descending from above, the other – since the disciples had to be themselves transfigured in order to behold Christ in glory – ascending, its shafts visibly touching the disciples.

From this we are given to understand that God the Word was not incarnate merely in Jesus Christ, rather, it is in each one of us that He incarnates Himself, and this is still true today. This absolutely foundational truth is all through the Apostle Paul, whom Gregory Palamas, famous for his writing on the “ineffable splendor of the one nature in three hypostases,” as the bulletin says, referred to as “Christ’s mouthpiece.” For Paul did not know Jesus as He walked on earth, but only after He was crucified, risen, and ascended – so that Paul’s concern is to share with us his own experience of how Christ incarnates Himself in US – those “many brothers of whom He is the Firstborn.” Rm 8:29

Now, what this means is that we, like Jesus the GodMan, have two natures, divine and human. The bulletin mentions this, in a reference to “The Councils of the 14th century, …formulating the Orthodox definition of grace, founded on the dogmatic distinction between the inaccessible essence and the communicable energy of God.” So Jesus is God, as a Person divine, God the Word – yet having two natures, divine and human. He remains, nevertheless, a divine Person. We are human persons – having our human nature, and also the divine nature, not as proper to us as persons, but by participation, we “become partakers of the divine nature.” Cf. 2Pet 1:4,

Thus there is a kind of schiz built right into our personalities from the very beginning, and it is the background, and indeed the very “stuff” of our daily struggle against the temptations that beset us on all sides, precisely because of this schiz. And so the point to be made is that this is also the very stuff of God’s pre-eternal plan for our salvation and ultimate union with Himself, so we need to capitalize on our weakness and cooperate with it, rather than be saddened when we stumble and fall. In Proverbs it says, “The just man falls 7 times daily.” Why? Because it is the just man who gets up each time! The unjust man just lies there in indifference or despair.

And so Paul relates his own daily experience in order to show us how it all works out in practice. The passage, Rm 7:14-25, is very well known, but like most of the Bible it is today mostly fodder for controversy – just like the canons of the Church which are tossed about with such abandon these days – so let’s make the effort to understand what is at issue.

We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin.

This is Paul’s epistle to the Romans, which begins with the examination of the “law” as an instructive tutorial. The same notion of discipline was basic to Dr. Spock when my own children were growing up – hopefully the young parents have at least heard of him. Children who are disciplined, he said, are more secure because they know their limits, and thus have a better sense of who they are as a person. It’s the confused and insecure kid who keeps testing the limits in order to define himself. I had an experience of this very thing recently. A rather bratty kid was – well, he had a tablet and pencil, and instead of using the top page, he was trying to just go through and mark randomly with the only purpose to spoil the tablet. So I was holding the pages down to keep him from doing it. At first he was angrily defiant, but he just looked so ridiculous, expending such useless effort to get his pencil in when I would beat him to the spot he was aiming at every time, that I started laughing, and the more it went on the funnier he was, and the more I laughed – and he became totally discombobulated! He was used to being slapped down all the time, and here it was all turning into this funny game! So we kept at it for a little, both of us laughing our heads off together – until, since I was still ahead in the competition, he turned to something else.

My experience is that children – and grownups also, even when they have taken a wrong turn - WANT to be good, so if you just try to see what they are getting at and respond to that, not that much discipline in the form of punishment is necessary. AND this applies also to ourselves! We need to keep reminding ourselves that we are fundamentally good – the bad, well, it’s there to teach us the difference between good and bad. And this accords with what Paul says in the beginning of Romans about the Gentiles “who have not the law doing by nature what the law requires” being “a law to themselves.” He says that thus “they show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience bears witness” that they do right or wrong. (Rm 2:14ff)

And this is precisely what Paul says next:

I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good.

So here’s where that built-in schiz comes into play. Even naturally, as Paul says of the Gentiles, but all the more powerfully inasmuch as that participation in the very triune divine life of God Himself, the Triune Godhead, is at work within us:

As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.

And then the clincher:

Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.

So what I think we need to practice, and teach our children – or whoever else we may have responsibility for – is how to live in the presence of God, so that the divine impulses will strengthen against the lower impulses. This is addressed in The Way of the Pilgrim, which is all about the Jesus Prayer. I told the story when I did a workshop for women at an ecumenical program, and all the women – mostly stalwart Presbyterian and Lutheran types – were just overwhelmed, so much so that they went and got all their friends to come to the afternoon session, and they all even stayed on for Vespers.

Someone asks the Pilgrim how it is possible to pray unceasingly the Jesus Prayer when you have obligations that keep your mind engaged. So he invites them to imagine that a marvelous king has asked that you make something very special for him – but he also asks that you do it in the throne room, right in his august presence! You would work with utmost concentration, care, and attentiveness precisely because of your awareness of being in the presence of the great king!

All the ladies, their friends in tow, were besieging me: The throne room! The throne room! Tell about the throne room!

St. Paul describes our experience when we have the conscientiousness born of this constant awareness of God’s presence:

So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members.

What continues to leave me dumbfounded every time I read this passage is – precisely the schiz between what we are in ourselves:

What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?

Yet with his very next breath Paul switches to what we are in God – because the bottom line is that when we are living this truth, we are not living in ourselves alone, we are living in ourselves as TRANSFIGURED by – well, the uncreated light of Mt Tabor:

Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I of myself [in God] serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.

I think it is of interest in this regard that when I wanted to become Orthodox and was given a prayer book by the Russians in Jerusalem, it said of confession: We recall our sins in confession in order to have the proper contrition for the sacrament. Our sins are forgiven, yes, the Russians even write them down, and then the priest tears the paper into shreds. But they are forgiven because confession is first of all an act of metanoia.

And this, in the everyday world we live in, is what the Transfiguration is all about!

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