An Oscar is a little golden god. Colin Firth’s acclaimed role as George VI in the film The Kings Speech won him that little god. In his acceptance speech his face was golden with happiness, shining as the statuette he was proudly yet nervously clutching. Win a Golden Globe – a planet – and you could believe yourself to be a golden god, adored by the whole world. Win yourself a Bafta, as Colin Firth did for his role in the same film, and you get a golden mask.
Golden gods, golden masks, shining faces. What produces a shining face? A golden Oscar perhaps; 15 smiling Welshmen victorious over a Scottish rugby team; Liam Jones from Durham, 2010 BBC boy chorister of the year; Kate Middleton as she approaches her wedding day or Steve Whiteley a heating engineer from North Tawton who hit the jackpot at a meeting at the Exeter racecourse. He won £1.45m on an accumulator, after placing an original bet of just £2. Perhaps we might see shining faces on the peoples of Tunisia and Egypt as they hopefully look forward to a world of security and just relationships. Much better to have a shining face than an Annie Walker glare or a Bet Lynch put down. As my choir musical director says – we sing with sparkling eyes, high cheekbones and smiling faces.
Some people with shining faces exude a presence when they walk into a room. I know the Queen would if she was invited to Roker URC; the Dean of Durham cathedral too has a presence when he comes into the bookshop, his face shines. Ron Dale, a retired preacher tells the tale of a day he attended a lecture given by Professor Joachim Jeremias, a leading world NT scholar renowned for his work on the parables. Ron Dale recounts that 30 years later he had forgotten everything from the Birmingham lecture except for one small detail. Coming from the lecture he held the swing doors for the person he had sensed behind him. To Ron’s astonishment it was Prof Jeremias. As he walked past something happened. Ron Dale looked into his face and as he did so, for the first time in his life, he looked at the sheer burning holiness in the life of another person. So great was the sense of holiness of God in the face and body of Prof. Jeremias he could actually feel heat and light radiating from him. Ron Dale writes that he was struck by his radiance. It was a face almost transparent with love, goodness and grace. It was the face of a man who had spent long hours communing with God, and it showed in his face. It was transfigured with an unearthly radiance. Even now, wrote Dale years later, he could in his mind’s eye still see that face and feel that radiant warmth of love.
In our gospel this morning Matthew tells us that from start to finish the keynote of this Transfiguration story is glory. Jesus’ face shone like the sun and his garments glistened and gleamed like light The Jews well knew the promise of God to the victorious righteous “Their face shall shine as the sun.” No Jew could ever have seen the luminous cloud without thinking of the shechinah, the glory of God resting upon his people. No fewer than three times in eight brief verses there occurs the little interjection: “Behold! Look you!” It is as if Matthew could not even tell the story without a catch of the breath at the sheer staggering wonder of it. But amongst the spectacle of the event the story holds an aspect we mustn't miss. The transfiguration of Jesus is framed in St Matthew by predictions of how he must suffer and die. The Christ whom Peter has recognised will not go up to glory before he suffers pain; or to put it another way, the glory of the transfiguration will turn out to be the glory of his self emptying for us in his death on the cross. A sombre Lenten thought we need to keep in mind as we journey towards in the events in Holy Week.
The story of the Transfiguration is pivotal in St Matthew's Gospel. It's a point of climax when Jesus is revealed for who he is, the one St Matthew wants his readers to know and follow. For a moment, the mists dissolve, and the secret is laid bare: he is disclosed as the anointed one who has come in fulfilment of all that the law and the prophets longed for. In his flesh and blood and in his shining face we see nothing less than Israel's God who had once disclosed himself in another transfiguration at a burning bush and spoken his sacred name. From now on, Matthew’s narrative darkens as it descends towards the passion - but we know what we didn't know before, which is that the man destined to die is none other than the Son of God.
Did you notice that throughout the Christmas and Epiphany season that little word glory appeared again and again? “Glory to God in the highest!” sang the angels, the Gentile kings worshipped and glorified Jesus, Jesus at his baptism was told by his father, “this is my son who I love” - the same message which was spelt out again on Mt Tabor. At the Wedding of Cana, the gospel writer bible tells us - “Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.” And now the band of three sees Jesus’ face, radiant, shining, shimmering with the light of the glory of God.
St Paul tells us that ‘We see the Glory of God in the face of Jesus” “God who made his light shine in our hearts has brought us the knowledge of glory in the face of Christ.” All three synoptic gospel writers have the story of the Transfiguration recounted in their gospels, with different emphasis. But when we study the Gospel of John we find no story, no record of the transfiguration. Why is that? Because for John Jesus is glorified on the Cross. It is on the Cross that the power and the radiance of God shine forth. And so when St Paul speaks of the glory of God ‘in the face of Jesus’, he is speaking of the glory of God as Jesus dies on the wood of the cross. It is on the Cross we see God’s love powerful and alive, even in the very darkest place, even in the horrifying events that are unfolding in Japan, in North Africa and have occurred in Christ Church, New Zealand.
The First World War chaplain Geoffrey Studdart-Kennedy recalled the occasion, when on the 7 June 1917, he stumbled over a young soldier with a wound in his stomach and a hole in his head. It seemed to him that the boy had disappeared and there in his place lay the Christ on the Cross who cried “inasmuch as you have done it to the least of these my little ones, you have done it to me.” “From that moment on,” he records, “I never saw a battlefield as anything but a crucifix. From that moment on, I have never seen the world as anything but a crucifix. To see the world as a crucifix means that we understand Christ not merely suffered once, but still suffers amongst people afflicted with natural disasters and wars. Christ is with us, suffering with us now, enduring with us our present sufferings and facing tragedy and death with the same trepidation, regret and fear as we do. His glory is the freedom to love, even when we are buried in the darkness of suffering, God is free to love us. That is why we see glory in the face of Jesus Christ.
Last Monday I conducted a funeral service in Durham for a 96 year old lady, Joyce Hart, she was a member and was married at the former Sorely Street Congregational Church. During the service I reminded the mourners of this very same verse - that it was “only in Jesus Christ that we saw the glory and goodness of God fully shining in a human face.” I gently reminded the mourners that it is also true that in the goodness of every human being we can see the face of Jesus Christ, Admittedly faces incomplete, flawed, but nevertheless a mirror of his love. How can we see Jesus in each other’s face – well as I understand it - it is because those who live with Jesus, who are his disciples, their lives begin to echo the life of Christ as Joachim Jeremais did. But also here is church – look around - we grow in wisdom, we reach out like him in healing to the wounded of the world, we love children, we have compassion on the weak and suffering, we make our hearts known to our friends, we take up our crosses, we forgive others and ask to be forgiven. We glimpse all these facets in the faces of those we rub shoulders with day by day, in our places of work, in our families, in our churches, in our communities. When in our lives, in our words and actions, we point to the freedom to love, then we show God’s glory.
When we gather as a congregation this morning, we should see in one another the glory of God. When you look at the person next to you, the glory of God is there! By looking in love at the world and working with one another, we somehow allow glory to come to light - so that for people outside or on the edge of faith they may find their own awareness of the world mysteriously changed by the way we as Christians look at it. God calls us to be at every level agents of transformation - in a ruined and exploited natural environment, in a world of deep divisions and much poverty, and in a Church whose communion can be undermined by fear or suspicion. It is for us to show the love of God to one another by showing that light in our faces. Alas and sadly, those who are still in darkness are those who have not seen love in the face of another person. The deepest darkness, the worst darkness, is to feel that you are not loved. So as we try to show one another the love of God, then we make a light in the darkness; we begin to make it possible for those who live in darkness or despair to see glory. Wherever we are; whatever the difficulty, whatever the challenge before us we are still able to make that light shine. It was Bishop Tom Wright who said “Let’s be like him so that we can speak of him.”
I can't pretend it is easy. Loving and trying to transform the world! Like Peter, I blunder about in the presence of glory: I miss the point by trying to capture it instead of paying attention to what God is doing. The voice from the cloud tells us what we must do. ‘This is my Son, the Beloved: listen to him!'. If we can discern his voice amid the clamour and chatter that bid for our attention; if we will listen and obey and follow, then we can know transfiguration, glimpse glory in our ordinary days. It's no good going in quest for it as if it were the Holy Grail or the Golden Fleece: it must find us. But it will, for his pledge to us is: ‘where I am, there you will be also'. And maybe, just maybe, this service could be that mountain top, that burning bush, that place where we see the glory of the crucified and risen Lord, and know and love him once again.
Revd Ray Anglesea is a self supporting minister working across church partnerships in the synod
