Preached on the Last Sunday after the Epiphany, Year B, February 11, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.
2 Kings 2:1-12
Psalm 50:1-6
2 Corinthians 4:3-6
Mark 9:2-9
The Transfiguration, by Albert Bouts
I intensely dislike stains on my clothing. When I notice them for the first time, when I’m standing up at a restaurant or walking after lunch, my morale plunges. I groan. A stain on my clothes can ruin my day. In my compulsive hatred of stains, I suffered grim disillusionment when OxyClean came on the market and I discovered that it’s not great for oil stains. And those little Tide stain sticks? No. They don’t work, especially on oil. Oil is my nemesis. In my household, I take command of all laundry activities while Andrew governs the kitchen, and oil is despised in my realm as much as it is essential in his. This is a happy problem, but I intensely dislike stains.
And so I smile when Mark the evangelist tells us that Jesus is dressed in clothes so clean, clothes so spotless, that they dazzle in a way that “no one on earth could bleach them.” No stains! Jesus gleams. He is perfect. Undamaged. Unmarred. Clean and bright and beautiful.
But the response of his friends, when they see this vision that should stir the heart of every launderer, and inspire the imagination of every person ever to tri-fold a t-shirt — the response of his friends is terror. They are knocked to the ground in fear. They recoil in awe. We could just attribute this to the understandable human response to a bright, dazzling, and splendid explosion of divine glory. But I think it goes deeper than that. I think the friends of Jesus are frightened by his Transfiguration because it reveals the human person as God created us to be — it reveals the friends of Jesus as the human persons God created them to be — and the human person in full glory is terrifying. Your best self is unnerving. Your unstained soul, free of all blemishes, cleansed into perfection, is scary.
Reflect on this for a while. Imagine your best self: the ideal you. Speaking for myself alone, the ideal me is powerfully compassionate and empathetic, a force of reconciliation in this torn-asunder world of conflict. But, unfortunately, on any given day, in any given meeting, the ideal me does not necessarily appear. Maybe I’m nursing a tension headache, or worse, I’m nursing a self-centered resentment. Maybe, as we meet, there’s the dull irritation of construction noise down the hallway, something that has happened fairly often these past weeks. Maybe, like today, I’ve just gotten over a head cold, and I am wary of lingering congestion. But underneath or beyond all of that, the ideal me is alive. He is active. He is here.
And he is not neutral.
A human person at full, healthy, God-given strength is formidable. They bear a gleaming shield that wards off the enemies of ignorance and indifference. They brandish a flashing sword that defeats the demonic powers of nihilism and cruelty. They inspire people of good conscience, but they are daunting. They do not feel tame; they are not tame.
Part of my own therapy in recent years has been to get in touch with my better self, my stronger self, my dreadfully powerful warrior-for-justice self. I was formed as a later-born child to sit in the back of the family van; I was rewarded for keeping silent, for endorsing the status quo, for sitting tight. And so it is scary for me to stand, and walk, and act on God’s errand. It is scary to get into conflict for the right reasons, to get into what the Civil Rights hero John Lewis famously called “good trouble.” It is daunting to realize that when I am doing the right thing, I can be intimidating.
And so we draw alongside the friends of Jesus as they retreat in dismay from the Transfiguration, and we empathize with them. They see in Jesus what St. Irenaeus famously calls “the human person, fully alive.” Here’s the full quote: “The glory of God,” says St. Irenaeus, “the glory of God is the human person fully alive.”
Fully-alive people do all sorts of scary things. They ask for forgiveness, and that is scary because it invites the person they harmed into a terrible intimacy, into a perplexing, costly relationship of trust. Or they offer forgiveness, and that is frightening, too: “Do I deserve this forgiveness?” their offender may wonder. It is scary to contemplate the Gospel truth that yes, indeed, you do deserve this forgiveness. This truth compels you to be vulnerable to the person you harmed, and to go forward with the real intention to do no further harm. Do you have it in you to be this good? Yes, yes you do. Every living human person has the capacity to improve. But this is all quite unsettling, to say the least.
Fully-alive persons do many other scary things. They freely offer grace and goodness to their neighbor, regardless of that neighbor’s rap sheet, regardless of their own beliefs about whether that neighbor deserves their aid. They place their trust in people, knowing that to trust is to invite heartbreak. They don’t give up on people, ever, and while that does not mean we disregard healthy boundaries (our faith does not teach us to be doormats or powerless abuse victims!), we nevertheless always, always hold out hope for every single living human person: hope that they will respond to God’s saving love, hope that they will return to our community safely and peaceably, hope that we will never fail to see the reflection of Christ on their face, no matter how marred it might be by addiction or misbehavior or illness or abuse or despair. Fully-alive persons rise up in might as agents of mercy to those who appear least deserving of that mercy: and all of that is scary.
But the transfigured and risen Christ gives us a vision of humanity that is scarier still.
Back to those stains I hate: I despise stains, literal stains and metaphorical stains alike, because they get in the way of something or someone good. They make my favorite shirt look disheveled; or they hide my better self, my best self, behind a smaller me, a snottier me, a resentful or bitter me. I say No to all stains.
But I say Yes to the five wounds of the crucifixion. The Transfiguration story is possibly a post-Resurrection vision of Jesus, retrojected into the weeks before he arrived in Jerusalem and suffered, died, and was raised. Whatever the literary facts behind the text, the vision of the Transfiguration is definitely a lot like the Resurrection appearances: Jesus shines; he is familiar yet also strange; he is joyous yet also terrifying. And so it is good for us to remember that the risen Jesus is wounded: He shows his wounds to his friends, and he even invites someone to touch his wounds. Why? Aren’t the wounds of the crucifixion stains on the otherwise flawless Body of Christ?
No. The wounds don’t dim the brightness of his glory. They enhance it. They reveal his broken-open self, his vulnerable open heart that he offers to all people. The wounds reveal the risen Jesus, the best Jesus, the noblest human Jesus and the most majestic divine Jesus, both. And so we can dare to improve on St. Irenaeus, who again said “the glory of God is the human person fully alive.” That’s true! But we can add to it:
The glory of God is the human person fully open in ministry to their neighbor. The glory of God is the human person fully heartbroken in relationship with their offender, or their victim. The glory of God is the human person fully wounded by the wrenching injustice of this world, wounded because we rise up in might to face that injustice, for the sake of the least of these.
The wounds of the risen Christ are the opposite of stains. They reveal to us our own dazzling capacity for self-giving love, for life-giving service, for world-saving compassion. They move us to be wounded, too.
And so, at the dying of the old year, in early December, at the beginning of Advent — ten weeks ago, at the beginning of the incarnational season that reaches its end today — we sang a hymn about the dazzling, dreadful, risen Christ, a hymn that evokes the frightening splendor of the Transfiguration. In one stanza of that Advent hymn, we sang in particular about the wounds of the risen Christ. But as we sing about the wounds of the risen Christ, we do well to remember that they will become our wounds, too, whenever we follow him. We shine brightest — we are at our best — when we are wounded in Christian mission. With confidence, then, but also with some amount of fear, we sing these stirring words:
Those dear tokens of his passion
still his dazzling body bears,
cause of endless exultation to his ransomed worshipers;
with what rapture, with what rapture, with what rapture
gaze we on those glorious scars!