On a Snow-Capped Mountain: Transfiguration then and now

There is a physical geography in today’s gospel and there is a geography of the soul. St Matthew tells us that Jesus and three disciples went up a ‘high’ mountain. Which one? There is only one serious candidate for me, and that is Mount Hermon in the far north of what is now Israel. We know from the previous chapter that Jesus has been in the district of Caesarea Philippi where Peter confesses him to be the Messiah, the Son of the living God. Here the infant River Jordan flows out of a mysterious cave in the cliff where there was once a shrine to the god Pan. I have a precious relic from this numinous place, a piece of limestone from the river bed that I brought back from a pilgrimage there. The headwaters of Jordan rise behind the cliff on the south-west flank of the great Hermon range. At nearly 3000 metres high, it is covered with snow for most of the year, a towering backdrop to the borderlands of Lebanon, Syria and Israel. This gleaming white mountain is my candidate for the transfiguration despite the claims made for Mount Tabor, which is much further south and just a modest hillock compared to Hermon. ‘His clothes became dazzling white’ says Matthew, and even if this is not persuasive, the three summits of the massif seem to echo the threefold company of Jesus, Moses and Elijah.

Israelis in Galilee call Hermon ‘the eyes of the nation’, a poetic epithet for a sinister purpose, which is to be home to Israel’s strategic early warning system located on one of its summits. For this is troubled territory. When I was there we were driven through the Golan Heights, the ancient hills where, as every chorister knows from the Psalms, Og was king of Bashan. This is occupied Syrian territory, and I wondered what risks we ran by driving through it in tourist buses.  It was not reassuring to pass through a ruined Syrian village, shot to rubble by Israeli artillery in the Six Day War. On both sides of the road alarming signs with skull and crossbones warned of minefields. With the tragedy of Syria in all our minds today, the memory of stopping beneath the foothills of Hermon and looking into Syria is strong.  Near here the ancient Via Maris headed towards Damascus only about 50 km away, with the memory of St Paul’s transfiguring encounter on that road. We could see beautiful vineyards and cherry orchards in blossom; but we could also see watch towers, radio transmission posts, barbed wire and army barracks, for these are turbulent, troubled landscapes.

In these foothills of Hermon is the wonderful castle of Subeibe which we visited. It has both an Arab and a Crusader history.  The ruin is set on a spectacular spur from which there are marvellous views across to the mountain. The fortress was built in the 13^th century by a nephew of the Islamic warrior Saladin to pre-empt an attack on Damascus by Crusaders. I have to confess that it was a relief from the holy sites which can become a shade oppressive when you are seeing so many in a short time. There were no biblical associations in these underground cisterns, winding staircases and forbidding towers. Yet the very existence of this fortress underlined how this sunny landscape held a dark side, for it has been fought over since the dawn of time, and the bloodshed is not over yet.

My point is that this is the landscape where transfiguration happens. Christ reveals his glory not in the imagined oasis of ‘sabbath rest by Galilee, the calm of hills above’ but where lands have been and still are bitterly contested, where blood goes on being shed, where human beings exact cruelty and pain on one another. You could say they are lands of crucifixion. St Matthew frames his transfiguration story with predictions of how Jesus will be made to suffer. At Banyas under Mount Hermon, Caesarea Philippi, where he has been recognised and proclaimed, Jesus begins to ‘show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised’. Afterwards when they are back in Galilee, he says that ‘the Son of Man is going to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and on the third day he will be raised’. Even on the mountain’s flank, he speaks about how ‘they did to Elijah whatever they pleased. So also the Son of Man is to suffer at their hands’.

In the first three gospels, Hermon is the turning point in Jesus’ career. When Jesus descends from these snowy heights of the north, it will be to return south again, back down into his homeland of Galilee, and beyond that, to Jerusalem itself. The holy city is where he will face his crisis, and he needs to prepare his followers for what ‘must’ come to pass – the texts underline that little word ‘must’ because it is not only his choice but his destiny. So already, on the mountain of glory, the passion is in view. Hermon is a long way from Judea, yet distance is collapsed in the geography of the spirit. It’s to say that we must not be misled as to the meaning of transfiguration. Yes, it is to be overwhelmed by the vision of divine splendour and the prospect that all of life, the whole of creation, and ourselves with it will one day be transformed from one degree of glory to another. The new heaven and the new earth are palpable on that summit, as they are whenever we find ourselves on some summit shared or alone, some peak experience as we say, when the air is suddenly thin and the colours glow and the ordinary falls away and we feel we know ‘the hills where our life rose and the sea where it goes’.

But the gospel writers would not want us to slip into that way of speaking too easily. They would urge us not to dislocate the story from its context. They would say: remember where Hermon is, remember that these dangerous lands have long known conflict and suffering. And remember how before his transfiguration and in its glowing aftermath, Jesus felt the icy shadow of pain and death fall across his heart. Remember that the cross is his true glory, his self-giving love for the human family for which he was content to be betrayed, and given into the hands of wicked men, and to suffer death at Golgotha. This is why all the gospels speak of the cross as transfigured glory, the deep and dazzling darkness in which, as we gaze at it with awe and faith, we see the light of everlasting love.

We stand on the threshold of Lent, about to embark on the journey towards Easter. To be on Hermon is like the Hebrews on Mount Pisgah, looking out across to the promised land. For us today, that promised land is Easter. We have a journey to make to get there. It may be rough and steep, but it will be filled with its own beauty and reward: the desert is a place of wild beasts and angels, says St Mark where life is stripped thin and bare so that we can glimpse glory. I am saying that it is time to turn from the mountain to the plain and learn once again whatever God has to teach us in that desert’s tough but cleansing place. It is time to turn towards Jerusalem where faith will be tested in the time of trial, and where we shall walk the via dolorosa with Jesus and with suffering humanity and pray that he will take into himself the pain of the world. Time too to turn towards the resurrection we celebrate on this first day of the week, the risen glory that the transfiguration foreshadows. Time to pray the ancient prayer that God may show us his glory and beckon us to embrace it, time to reawaken our hope that one day all creation will find what it has longed for since time began, where there will be no more darkness or dazzling but one equal light.

Durham Cathedral, 2 March 2014
Matthew 17. 1-13

Candlemas

I am glad to be here on your patronal festival, especially as an envoy of the diocese of which your former bishop is now legally the incumbent. We are sorry to have stolen him from you. However, I hope you will still receive the warm greetings of Durham Cathedral, the only other Romanesque cathedral in the northern province.  

Down with the rosemary, and so /Down with the bays and mistletoe;

Down with the holly, ivy, all / Wherewith ye dressed the Christmas hall;

That so the superstitious find /Not one least branch there left behind;

For look, how many leaves there be /Neglected there, maids, trust to me,

So many goblins you shall see.

Robert Herrick was writing in the 17th century.  It sounds like a poem about Twelfth Night.  But it's called ‘Ceremony upon Candle­mas Eve’.  In those days they kept the Christ­mas decorations up for 40 days.  Then, on 2 February, they took them down and, in some rural parts of England at least, burnt them: bonfires to light up dark nights in honour of Christ the world’s true light. In the middle ages, Candlemas was an occasion for elaborate ceremonies of blessing tapers and carrying them in procession to light up churches and much partying.  In Durham Cathedral, a great row blew up in 1628, the puritans alleging that the high church party had lit 60 candles on the holy table, while they claimed it was only two.  Durham has always enjoyed a good argument about liturgy.  There are echoes of pre-Christian rituals here: Roman lighting candles to banish evil spirits, or Celts kindling fires at this time of year to mark the end of winter as the days grow perceptibly longer and snowdrops and crocuses signal that spring will soon be here. 

Candlemas is the last official day of Christmas.  Like the 40 days of resurrection from Easter to Ascension, these past 40 days of incarnation have kept before us the truth of the Word made flesh.  At Candlemas we recall how Jesus is brought by his parents as an infant of 40 days to be presented in the temple and blessed by God.  Simeon acclaims him as ‘a light to lighten the gentiles’: Light of the world, Light of all people, Light of life.  And we who stand by, looking on as Simeon cradles this little human light in his arms, we too are ready to sing our own Nunc Dimittis.  For we have seen all that is worth seeing: we have seen his glory, full of grace and truth.  We can depart in peace.

Those loving parents, and old Simeon and Anna, and the little tiny child – all of humanity is there. Rembrandt depicted this scene many times in his paintings and etchings.  He returned to it again and again, fascinated by the inter­play of themes: intimacy and vastness, child­hood and old age, life's dawning and its eventide, prom­ise and ful­filment, darkness and light. It is the scale of these pictures that is so memor­able: the immense spaces of the temple, and at its centre, the tiny figures of the holy fam­ily, like a fragile colony of life precariously nurtured in a shadowy cave.  You wonder about those lowering shades that seem to press in upon that tiny point of light.  Will the light grow in that darkness and finally overcome it - or is the darkness about to close in upon the light, extinguish it, snuff out what has been carried at such cost in Mary's womb?

They are sublimely accurate, these paintings.  They portray things as they are, the dark-and-light realities God takes on as he comes among us and shares our human condition.  By now, we know that Christmas has not suddenly made the world all right again, though we longed and prayed for it, for peace on earth and goodwill to all people, ‘hoping it might be so’.  The shadows and the darkness are real enough.  The massacre of the inno­cents shows how fragile incarnation is.  According to St Matthew, the infant Jesus had to cling precariously on to life in a world as mis­chievous and as viol­ent and as mur­der­ous as we know it to be today.  The Candlemas story foreshadows the child's destiny.  ‘A sword will pierce your own soul too’ says Simeon to Mary.  It is another annun­ciation that sets her pon­dering in her heart all over again as she feels Golgotha looming over the holy family, foresees another, crueller, presenta­tion of Christ, when he will be handed over into the hands of wicked men to suffer death upon a cross. W. H. Auden has a poem ‘At the Manger Mary Sings’.  He has Mary say to her child, with terrible foreboding yet infinite love: How soon will you start on the sorrowful way?  Dream while you may.

So Candlemas has a poignancy as well as joy about it.  We have said goodbye to the festive cheerfulness that warmed up the bleak midwinter.  The crib will be put away for another year, its pieces disassembled into a forlorn plastic bag.  Tomorrow it will be ordinary time again, and soon Lent and ashes: ‘dust you are and to dust you shall return’.  Christians in the east call Candlemas ‘the meeting’, the strange meeting between old and new covenant, between Christmas and Lent, light and dark, nativ­ity and cross.  In the Candlemas ceremony in this liturgy we shall mark the end of Christmas by carrying candles in procession, and then – get ready for it - blowing them out.  It is a deliber­ate, almost sacri­legious thing to do: to snuff out the very light of the infant Jesus.  In Advent it was darkness to light; now in a way it is light to darkness: the human pattern so familiar in our world today as we watch nations and peoples being drawn inexorably into destructiveness and conflict; familiar to people with no home or livelihood or friends; familiar to anyone who has lost someone they loved; familiar to all of us in a thousand different ways.  It is as if a shadow falls across what light we have.  The cross is always present. 

This time of year is paradoxical.  It makes you wonder about the mystery of things, how ‘joy and woe are woven fine, a clothing for the soul divine’ as Blake says; how our light, glorious as it is, is as yet only partial; how spring tries to prize this world out of winter’s clasp, yet frost clings on to its soul.  God forbid that at this precarious time in our history, the threats we face should hold us fast for ever.  There is the ecstasy of the crib and the agony of the cross and these two belong together.  But it is still true that the days are growing longer, and the sap is rising.  The worst of winter may not yet be over, but February doesn’t last forever, thank God.  Spring will come, and Lent’s lengthening light.  Soon we shall climb towards Easter.  Today we light candles of longing in dark places and even when they are put out, we keep the memory of a precious flame alive for when the day breaks, and shadows flee away, and Christ is the glory of the nations, and hope is emptied in delight.

2 February 2014, on the Feast of the Presentation, Southwell Minster

Luke 2: 22-40

In the Wilderness

Our Old Testament reading took us into the wilderness in words which Samuel Sebastian Wesley set to music in tonight’s anthem.  The desert is a rich theme in the scriptures.  One aspect of this is that it is a place of truth. If you have been in the desert for even an hour, you realise what a profoundly discomfiting place it is. But to biblical writers it can become not an enemy but a friend.  The desert fathers heard the voice of prophets like Hosea and Jeremiah, who said that all Israel’s problems stemmed from their having abandoned the faith of the desert.  So they turned their back on the cities and went into the desert to seek God.  Our beloved St Cuthbert whom we celebrate this week followed this same way of life when he went as a hermit to the Inner Farne. He went to face the hunger, the thirst, the silence, the loneliness, the exposure, the cravings the wilderness throws at you, live with the wild beasts, face the demons in the depths of the soul, and find God. 

We need a place of truth to teach us who we are and who God is. Jesus too goes into the wild places where, like Israel in the desert, he undergoes ordeals, not so much temptation as testing, the time of trial that portends the last things.  The test for Jesus is the same as it is in the story of Israel’s wilderness wanderings. To whom do I owe allegiance?  Will I choose to have no other gods but the Lord?  The desert teaches us the difference between illusion and truth. It purifies our vision, helps us regain clarity about what our lives are really for.  So we keep Lent to strip the spirit bare like trees in winter so that we pay proper attention to what matters ultimately.  It invites us to a table spread with prayer and fasting and silence and simplicity and acts of charity: our teachers and soul mates for forty days to help us make space for God.

When we do this, we find something remarkable happens. The wilderness becomes a place of blossoming and joy.  When we give ourselves to him, God comes to us, relieves our fears, makes us strong, gives us back our lives. Waters break out, streams in the desert in the imagery of Isaiah. There is a highway, a holy way which turns out to be nothing less than the way home, the way out of exile, the way back to God. And as we journey through Lent, this wilderness way offers the promise of redemption, reconciliation, healing. We glimpse how life can begin again: for our broken world, for our damaged communities, for everyone who has lost hope, for ourselves. We sense that things could blossom and flower for us, even when life is at its most deserted, desperate and dry

The Sunday sheet charmingly announces that at this service I am offering ‘medication’ on Isaiah chapter 35. Well, the Prayer Book Collect for St Luke speaks about the wholesome medicine of the gospel and this is what we celebrate in Passiontide.  That medicine is the cross of Jesus: by his wounds we are healed.  The eyes of the blind are opened, the ears of the deaf unstopped; the lame leap like deer and the tongues of the speechless sing for joy.  These healing images in Isaiah are metaphors of what will become true for all humanity when the wilderness becomes a paradise.  The cross is no longer a symbol of shame but of victory.  The final hymn invites us to ‘sing my tongue the glorious battle’. In this hostile, destructive wilderness there blossoms a tree that, in the hymn’s imagery frees the world from death. Its fruits are for the healing of the nations.  Christ is the victim who has won the day.  We make our boast in the cross.  Sorrow and sighing flee away.

Durham Cathedral, Passion Sunday 2013 (Isaiah 35)

Going Slow

‘Lord, it is good to be here’ says Peter. ‘Let us make three dwellings: one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah’ – not knowing what he said or why he said it. The disciple blunders in, nearly exploding the divine moment with a rush of activity and words. He is arrested by the Voice that comes from the mysterious, threatening cloud: ‘this is my Son, the beloved.  Listen to him’. 

To listen in any serious way means paying attention. The transfigured Christ and his companions on the mountain top knew what this meant. Moses learned it at the burning bush, Elijah in his cave, and Jesus in the desert. Peter had not yet learned it. He could not walk slowly enough. This is one of the most important of life’s lessons. And I speak about it this morning because on Wednesday it will be Lent, and Lent can be our teacher, and I guess that we shall not learn about slowing down unless we have some kind of discipline to guide us. Lent prepares us to celebrate the cross and resurrection of Christ at Easter. This means knowing cross and resurrection ourselves, paying attention to God’s work within us. This is more than a yearly Lenten practice. St Benedict says that all of life should be Lent, reaching for and growing towards the God who invites us to know him as truth and love. So I am speaking about all our days, not just the forty days of fast that lie ahead. But those forty days focus what all of life should mean. And one of its aspects should be our ability to slow down and listen to what the voice of God has to say to us.  

In 1878 Mark Twain was in Switzerland.  He had climbed high up a valley near Zermatt from where, below, was a glacier.  He thought he might travel down with it:

I took up as good a position as I could upon the middle of the glacier – because Baedeker said the middle part travels the fastest.  As a measure of economy, however, I put some of the heavier baggage on the shoreward parts, to go as slow freight.  I waited and waited, but the glacier did not move.  Night was coming on, the darkness began to gather – still we did not budge.  It occurred to me then that there might be a timetable in Baedeker; it would be well to find out the hours of starting.  I soon found a sentence which threw a dazzling light upon the matter.  It said, ‘The Gorner Glacier travels at an average rate of a little less than an inch a day.’  I have seldom felt so outraged. I have seldom felt my confidence so wantonly betrayed.  I made a small calculation: one inch a day, say thirty feet a year; estimated distance to Zermatt, three and one-eighteenth miles.  Time required to go by glacier, a little over five hundred years!  The passenger part of this glacier – the central part – the lightning express part, so to speak, was not due in Zermatt until the summer of 2378, and the baggage, coming along the slow edge, would not arrive until some generations later….  As a means of passenger transportation, I consider the glacier a failure.

 

By now, Twain would have travelled about a kilometer.  It’s not the slowest form of travel - continental drift takes longer. But the glacier’s message is the same as that of looking back in time as we gaze at the stars, or the timescales of geological strata and the origin of species,or waiting for your first grandchild to be born. They will not be hurried, for God has plenty of time. A friend of mine said that it was like walking a toddler in the park and forever waiting for him to catch you up. Perhaps you hadn’t considered the two year old as an image of God.  The Japanese theologian Kosuke Koyama called him ‘Three Mile an Hour God’.  He points to the 40 years it took God even to begin to teach the Israelites the single lesson that we do not live by bread alone.  Maybe we shall not come close to learning this even after 40 Lents. On the mountain of transfiguration, he calls to the disciples out of the cloud and tells them that to pay attention and listen hard. ‘This is my Son, the beloved.’  It’s as if the Glory is inviting them into a differently calibrated kind of life, a way of being that is not governed by the breathless sprint of our ordinary days but that paces itself according to divine time, a spiritual ecology that cherishes and cultivates the inward response to a greater reality that surrounds it, discovers its own rhythms through living reflectively.  

I am trying to learn, late in life, that the race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong.  Ours is an age where speed is everything.  Wherever you turn, in business, in industry, in education, even in the church, success is measured by this: that you fill your diary, work every hour God sends, work both smart and fast.  When I was in Sheffield and trying to raise funds for the Cathedral, I asked a wealthy businessman to help.  As he wrote out the cheque, he said to me: ‘Michael, it’s really important that the church models something different from the hectic pace at which we in the public and private sectors expect to see results.  The cathedral has been here for centuries. It has a perspective sub specie aeternitatis: it looks at things from the vantage point of eternity. It can help us take the long view, learn the meaning of patience.’  Perhaps this is what St Benedict meant by stability in his rule for monks: not running feverishly from place to place either physically or metaphorically, but being committed to the present where God has placed us, living according to that long view. 

A gift of Lent could be finding equanimity, equilibrium, balance among the world’s destabilising, capricious changes and chances. And help is at hand. If you go to www.notbusy.co.uk you will find resources put together by Canon Cherry and Sacristy Press based on his book Beyond Business. The idea is to give up business during Lent and regain control of our lives by living more at God’s pace than our own. You can ever a wristband telling the world that you’re not busy. For me, the first sign of success will be not to agree with anyone who says to me ‘You must be so busy’. Indeed, authentic Christian ministry means the very opposite: having time for other people and for God. I see this as the work of love: ours for God and for others, but most of all, God’s love for us. If Lent means anything, it should be that we become more aware of Love’s work in us and all around us, and learn to live it for ourselves. As everyone who has loved knows, love has its own speed.  ‘It is ‘slow’, yet it is lord over all other speeds.  It goes on in the depth of our being, whether we notice it or not, whether we have mountains to scale or torrents to span or are crossing the quieter welcome prairies of our existence. If you ask me about the speed God walks, I would say: Adagio, lento, sometimes andante, but not often presto or vivace; the still small voice, not the earthquake, wind and fire.  

It’s true that occasionally, ‘he is such a fast god’ as R.S. Thomas says: baffling, elusive, strange.  But most of the time he is so slow his movement is undetectable except to those who stay still for long enough. To see it, we need to become more contemplative: sit on the glacier and travel at God’s speed; lie prostrate on the mountain top and listen to the voice of glory.  Try it this Lent: paying attention and seeing into the life of things. It will bring to its relentless flow and flux the gift of stability and peace.  Love works slowly but God has plenty of time.  We can afford to wait for him.  Spring is nearly here, Lent’s slow awakening, forty days for the wilderness to blossom, for us to listen and pay attention and find a new happiness in our souls. For then we shall know the hills where our life rose and the sea where it goes.

Durham Cathedral, 10 February 2013 (Sunday before Lent)