David Timbs (Melbourne)                     David's previous articles

Second Sunday of Lent: The Transfiguration. (Luke 9: 28b-36)

It is customary in the Scriptural cycles of the Lenten period to highlight two rather powerful emotionally evocative themes: the approaching memorial of Jesus’ suffering, rejection and violent death and his Resurrection in glory. Both these dramatic elements feature dramatically in this weekend’s Gospel reading.

The characters of characters accompanying Jesus in the story are highly significant ones in the whole Gospel narrative. Peter, James and John belong to Jesus’ trusted inner circle of disciples. They feature as representative figures of incomprehension, fear and confusion in the Agony in the Garden. The setting in today’s Gospel is a high mountain, traditionally the place of divine revelation in the Hebrew tradition. The occasion is Jesus’ invitation to his friends to enter a time of prayer. The timing is very crucial as immediately before this passage, Jesus has had to confront the frustrating blindness and incomprehension of his closest followers when predicting his fast approaching death.

It is at this point that Luke eases the tension of the language of suffering and death and lets the Gospel listener, through Peter, James and John, into the secret of the full story. The secret is that God’s beloved Son would not be defeated and destroyed by death but rather, he would have the final victory over it.

For Luke’s audience, the figures of Moses and Elijah at the Transfiguration would have had the effect of situating it firmly within Israel’s history of Salvation. Both were, in turn, the great symbolic figures within that narrative: Moses was the key human agent of the Passover deliverance of the Israelites from slavery, while Elijah spent his life summoning Israel to maintain Covenant fidelity their One God.

At the Transfiguration, these two great prophetic figures of the Old Covenant are depicting as having a conversation with Jesus, the first and greatest prophet of the New Covenant. They talk of about his ‘departure’, literally exodos (exodus) in Luke’s Greek text. The scene ends with the disappearance of Moses and Elijah leaving Jesus alone.

Gestures of deference of the Old Covenant to the New occur elsewhere in Luke’s Gospel: the Visitation, the presentation in the Temple, the encounter between John the Baptist and Jesus at the Jordan. Luke uses these literary devices to illustrate that the old history of Salvation is complete and the new era of grace has begun.

What is most significant in this drama is that, in the moment of prayerful communion with God, the appearance of Jesus’ face changed. Jesus was not just transfigured, he was transformed. Some commentators suggest that at some point in his ministry, possibly very early on, Jesus realised that his ministry would be a failure and that resolution to the conflict had to be achieved between him and his most entrenched opponents, the Temple Scribes. Inevitably then, he would have to face them down personally in a dramatic showdown. This is exactly the decision Jesus arrived at and it is reflected in Luke’s narrative.

Immediately after the Transfiguration or transformation of Jesus, Luke narrates, "When the days drew near for him to be received up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem" (Lk 9: 51).

Our Lenten journey involves our fateful pilgrimage with Jesus to what awaited him there, both Cross and Resurrection.

David Timbs

21/02/2016

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