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

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)