He Who Is: a Sermon for the Transfiguration

 There can be good reason for such uncertainty, even scepticism. The disciplines many of us practice at this time of year – cutting down on what we eat and drink, reducing the time we devote to leisure activities or presence on social media - can seem pernickety and artificial at best and at worst confirmation of the rather prevalent notion that Christianity is inherently opposed to fun. Alternatively, our Lenten practices can foster a kind of assault course spirituality, in which we push ourselves harder year on year to endure more, refrain from more, give more, only to find that we end up either self-righteously proud if we succeed in keeping our resolutions, or somewhere close to despair when we fail. What’s more, we might have difficulty with the very language of self-denial which is so prominent a part of traditional talk about Lent. The word, of course, could mean either a literal denial of the self, a radical rejection of who I am, a form of self-hatred, or, more modestly, a denying something to the self - a voluntary limitation on the fulfilment of our desires for comfort and pleasure. It should be obvious that the first is not being asked of us during Lent or at any other time but, as I have suggested, if not handled carefully, even the more restricted sense of self-denial can form alliances with darker forces, either encouraging us to equate might with right or feeding our sense of worthlessness. We cannot, however, sidestep the language of self-denial. It is there, in the bible on the lips of Jesus Himself, immediately, as it happens, before the opening of tonight’s Gospel. Predicting His forthcoming death and resurrection, and at least implying that something similar awaits His disciples, Jesus declares “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow Me, for whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will save it. For what does it profit a man, if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself? At first sight, this sounds paradoxical, even nonsensical. It is precisely in refusing to deny ourselves, Jesus seems to be saying, that we risk losing ourselves. But what can it mean to lose ourselves, in order not to lose ourselves, selves who are so incalculably precious, Jesus tells us, that their loss is too great a price to pay, even for the whole world? One way to understand this, perhaps, is to think in terms of true and false selves, a false self I must reject, must lose, must deny, in order to have my true, pricelessly valuable self once more restored to me. But how are we to know who that true self is? Our two readings tonight, I suggest, may shed some light on this– almost literally shed light, with their talk of blazing bushes and dazzling whiteness: vital information, perhaps, if Lent is not to damage our spiritual health. Tonight’s episode from the book of Exodus is often read as stressing the question of God’s identity –at the heart of the story, after all, is that frustratingly mysterious response God gives from the burning bush when Moses asks His name: variously rendered (as in our version tonight) as I am who I am, or as I will be what I will be. Such apparent tautology, at first sight, doesn’t seem to get us very far. It is understandable, perhaps, that yet another translation occasionally proffered for the divine utterance here is “mind your own business”. But Moses asks another question too, prior to this one: who am I that I should go to Pharoah and bring the Israelites out of Egypt – a question of his own identity, a question, too, of his worthiness and his worth, his suitability for the intimidating mission with which he has been tasked. And here, instead of directly telling Moses who he is, God’s answer conveys something of who God is, in relation to Moses: “who am I?” Moses asks. “I will be with you” God responds. It seems, then, that the identity of God, and our own identities are intimately connected. To know something of who God is, is to know something of who we ourselves most truly are, and something of what we are made for. Perhaps some of the most profound insights into this relationship are found in the writings of the 14th century Italian Dominican laywoman and mystic, St Catherine of Siena. Catherine’s own spiritual director and first biographer, Blessed Raymond of Capua, tells us that one day at prayer, Catherine heard the Lord tell her: Do you know, daughter who you are and who I am? …You are she who is not, and I Am He Who Is. He who is: yet another rendering of the words uttered on Mt. Horeb – the one, as it happens, to be found in the Vulgate Latin Bible, the Bible Catherine would have encountered in the liturgy, and which would have informed all the preaching she heard. And at first sight, perhaps, Catherine’s experience as reported by Raymond seems like the stuff of truly pathological self-denial, in which the words of scripture are expanded and recruited to very dubious ends, as though Catherine sees herself annihilated by the flames of divine might. He is everything – she is nothing. But we shouldn’t be too ready to equate this distinction between the God who is and the Catherine who is not with some kind of project of self-erasure. For one thing, the evidence of her life tells against this interpretation: Catherine of Siena is perhaps best known as a redoubtable speaker of truth to power, who travelled throughout Italy and beyond, mediating disputes in and between warring and unstable city states, and, most famously, embarrassing the Pope into returning from rather comfortable exile in Avignon, to take up his duties in Rome. She worked tirelessly as a nurse during outbreaks of the Black Death, taught children their prayers, visited prisoners and accompanied them to their executions. It is hard to conceive how any of this could have been accomplished without a rather robust sense of self. She may have given unstintingly of herself in service to her God and her Church and her fellow men and women, but that was only possible because she had – and knew she had – a self of which to give. What the contrast between the Being of God and the not-being of Catherine is really getting at, I think, is the complete and utter dependence of that self on God. He who is – the God who is being itself, in the more formally scholastic terminology of Catherine’s fellow Dominican Thomas Aquinas - is the source of her being; the source of everything that she is. And this, of course is true of all of us. We are those who are not, not because we are of negligible worth, quite the reverse, but only in the sense that we would not be without Him Who Is and who has willed to create us. To forget this dependence is to risk viewing ourselves as the source of all that we are, deifying ourselves, turning ourselves into the sort of self-made men and women who worship their creator – and there are, perhaps few more damaging false images of the self than these. But what if far from seeing ourselves as God, we fear that we are beneath God’s contempt, so that self-denial in the radical sense of self-hatred seems all too plausibly what is asked of us? From this false image of the self too, and the damage it can do, Catherine’s contrast between He Who Is and she who is not can help to liberate us. I have suggested that for Catherine to say that God is, while she is not, is simply to say that God is her creator, and she repeatedly tells us, the reason for God’s creating her is that He is in love with her. And what is true of Catherine, is true of all of humanity. In one place, indeed, she says that God is madly in love with her and with us. We, of course, are sometimes madly in love too, and often enough the madness lies precisely in our not loving the real person to whom we are attracted, but the more or less false image we have of them in our heads. But God’s love is not infatuation, precisely because God’s beloved ones are real. We can dream up idealised images and fall in love with them – but they remain just that – images, figments of our imaginations. Only God, can, in dreaming us up, actually create us as He sees us, in all our solid, down to earth reality, and love us, fall in love with us, as we truly are. Deep down, we are all of us, truly, madly loveable, because that is how God made us to be. And that brings us to our gospel reading tonight – the Transfiguration of Jesus, as this scene is traditionally known – which is usually thought of, and rightly, as a theophany, God making himself manifest. In this, of course, it echoes our first reading: Jesus, on the mountain top to which He has brought His friends, Jesus who, at any rate for Christian theology is God, speaking from within the blazing white light of His garments, as God speaks from the flames of the bush on Mount Horeb. Peter, James and John see Jesus as they’ve never seen Him before, radiant with divine glory, and are assured, as Moses was assured at the burning bush, that God will be with them in the journey that lies ahead. Consequently, we too can be sure He will be with us on our journey through Lent to Easter. All of this is profoundly important – but, taken alone, it is also somewhat problematic. To speak of the transfiguration manifesting a God who is somehow concealed in Jesus comes perilously close to suggesting a God who has spent the last 33 years pretending to be what He is not, divinity dressing up, wearing the mask of humanity, like an actor in a Greek drama. Now, and on this account only now, He appears as He truly is, briefly exchanging the garment of human flesh for the dazzling robe of divinity; His face changed, as Luke puts it, because now, for the first time we truly see His face. We see Jesus unmasked: the Divine Person rather than the human persona. That seems a strangely deceptive way for God to behave, and nor is it very much help to us in our Lenten project of self-knowledge. This episode appears to suggest that even God has a false self, and if that is so, how can it possibly tell us anything about our true selves? Fortunately, this is not all there is to be said. Because, at any rate for Christian theology, Jesus is not only truly divine, but also truly human, not merely play-acting at humanity. And this is the deepest reason why knowing something of who God is means knowing something of who we most truly are. Jesus can show us our true selves because He is neither a man who seems like God, nor God who seems like a man, but truly God who is truly one of us. And this is why it is important that the transfiguration is just that: a transfiguration: a change of appearance. It is what Jesus shares with us that is changed: not His invisible divinity but His human face, His human body, His earthly garments. Looking at Jesus transfigured shows us something of the God who not only created us, but created us in His own image; the image He showed forth in Jesus, not only on the mountain top, but throughout His life. And that brings me, finally, to that suggestion for a Lenten discipline I promised at the beginning, and it brings me too, to another Medieval Dominican, Brother Giovanni da Fiesole, better known to history as Fra Angelico. Fra Angelico was a highly prolific religious artist, but his most celebrated works are probably the frescoes depicting scenes from the life of Christ – including the Transfiguration - which he painted on the walls of the cells of every friar in his own priory of San Marco, just outside Florence. Perhaps the most remarkable quality of these images – as of all of Fra Angelico’s work – is their tranquil radiance; a light which does indeed seem to refract something of the divine light. To live day by day with these images of the God revealed in Jesus, as Fra Angelico’s brothers did, would surely be to know healing from false images of God, of a God, for instance, who burns not with desire for His human creatures, but for their punishment and destruction. But, according to tradition, the models for Jesus employed by Fra Angelico were members of his own community. In looking on the face of Christ gifted to them by their brother, the friars of San Marco saw not only the image of God, but images of themselves made in God’s image; saw their true selves, the selves they were made to be. If this idea appeals to you as a Lenten practice – and only if it does, otherwise you are in pursuit of a false self, a self whom you feel ought to like this kind of thing while your true self doesn’t, really – but if it appeals, you might spend some time over the next six weeks with one or more of Fra Angelico’s images too. Of course, if you are interested in really hard-core penance, you might set off on the X5 or whatever it is called these days – and go to Oxford, where the Ashmolean Museum has recently acquired a particularly lovely example of his many depictions of the Crucifixion. There is also a smaller but profoundly moving representation of the dead Christ in the Fitzwilliam. And, of course, there are plenty of websites where Fra Angelico’s work is freely available. But I do invite you to look: you might just find something of your true self, yourself transfigured into the face of the God who is madly in love with you, and with each one of us. And have a happy Lent!