What the Mountain Actually Showed Them

Today the Church celebrates the Feast of the Transfiguration of our Lord.

Peter, James, and John go up a mountain with Jesus, and for a moment the ordinary appearance he has always had is pulled back, and they see him as he actually is: his face shining like the sun, his clothes becoming as white as light. Moses and Elijah appear beside him. A cloud overshadows them, and a voice says: this is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.

I want to sit with something simple about this feast today, because I think it says something the world badly needs to hear right now, and it is not complicated theology. It is this: what the disciples saw on that mountain was not a new Jesus. It was the true Jesus, the one who had been there the whole time, briefly made visible in a way their ordinary sight could not usually catch.

The Transfiguration is not really a story about Jesus changing. It is a story about the disciples finally seeing clearly, for a moment, what love actually looks like when nothing is obscuring it.

I keep coming back to that idea this week, because I think a great deal of what passes for religion and public life right now is exactly the opposite movement. Instead of pulling back the veil to reveal love more clearly, so much of what we are watching, in politics, in churches, in the endless scroll of a social media feed, is working to obscure love, to bury it under contempt, under suspicion, under the manufactured urgency of who is in and who is out.

We have spent months now watching hatred dress itself up as conviction. We have watched division marketed as discernment, and cruelty marketed as courage. None of that is a revelation of anything true. It is the opposite of Transfiguration. It is disfiguration: taking something that was never meant to be ugly and making it ugly on purpose, for the sake of power or clicks or control.

I do not think what this moment calls for is complicated. I think it calls for a return, plainly and without qualification, to love and acceptance over hatred and division.

Not a vague, greeting-card version of love that asks nothing of anyone. The kind of love that was visible on that mountain: love with a face that shines, love substantial enough to be seen clearly once the ordinary clouds part. Love that welcomes the stranger. Love that stands with the immigrant, the queer person, the person of color, the poor, and refuses to let any of them be talked about as a problem to be managed rather than a person to be loved.

Acceptance is not a lesser virtue than conviction. On that mountain, the voice from the cloud did not say: listen to him if you agree with everything he is about to ask of you. It just said: listen to him. That is what acceptance actually requires. Not agreement with everything. Willingness to actually listen, to actually see, before deciding someone does not belong.

The world we are living in right now has gotten very good at disfiguring people: making them into caricatures, into threats, into headlines, into anything except what they actually are, which is beloved. The work in front of every one of us, this week and every week, is the opposite work. Pulling back whatever obscures a person's belovedness and letting it be seen clearly again.

This Sunday we return to Ordinary Time, our eight-week series behind us, and I find myself thinking about mountains and clouds and voices in a way that connects directly to what I want to preach.

I am not going to tell you here what the sermon says. But I will tell you that it has something to do with the difference between what is loud and what is true, and what it takes to actually hear the second one when the first one will not stop shouting.

Come Sunday. Bring whatever noise you have been living inside lately. We will sit with it together.

For now, on this feast day, I simply want to say: listen to him. Let love be visible again, in you, in this parish, in whatever small mountain you happen to be standing on this week.

 

Pax et Bonum,

Bishop Greer