EVERYONE SHALL HAVE PRIZES
Reflections on the Transfiguration
Every school has traditions and
rituals. My old school certainly had them and one of them was Prize
Giving. For a select number, those
getting the prizes for academic or sporting brilliance, and who were applauded
on stage, this was a very special event.. For the vast
majority, however,
Prize Day was counter-productive. You knew you would never be
worthy to go upon stage, and have your name recorded. By definition, only a few could ever go
there.
Spirituality, the Way to God, can feel like that. There are spiritual paths and spiritual
systems that tell you the vision of God can only be attained after a long
journey, so far and seemingly so impossible to attain, that you might think
twice about even starting. And although
the Gospel is not about that, it can feel that way when we realise how far we
have to go on the journey into wholeness and healing. We read the stories of holy ones, of Old and
New Testaments, and we think, where do we start - how could we hope to come
into the presence of God ? Will we always be “also-rans” ?
That’s why we need that strange and
enticing story of the Transfiguration (Matthew
17:1-8) which we celebrate this month on August 6th. There Jesus takes Peter and James and John
aside, up the mountain and reveals his glory.
The point about the Transfiguration
is that God’s glory is revealed not to the perfect, to the enlightened, but to the
“also-rans”. And that should give us
hope about the God we have and how he comes to us.
Peter, James and John are often called Jesus’ “inner
circle”, but they are far from perfect.
A few days before they go up the mountain Peter has put his foot in it. He has
confessed Jesus as the Christ, the chosen one of God, and been commended for
it, but then Peter tries to dictate how he thinks Jesus should act, and Jesus
rebukes him. We know too, later on, that Peter, despite his confessions of
loyalty, denies Jesus three times and runs away, just like the rest of them.
This is the man that Jesus takes up the mountain, and to whom he reveals his glory !
James and John are the two who get
so upset when their ministry is rejected by a Samaritan village that they want
to call down fire and brimstone upon them. Jesus calls them “Sons of Thunder”, so James and John have
what is called these days an “anger-management problem”. And after the Transfiguration vision they
antagonise the other disciples by wanting the place of honour in the coming
Kingdom. These three disciples are hardly mature believers, and certainly not
perfect ministers of Christ. These
aren’t the ones called to the front on Prize Day and showered with privileges, these are the “also-rans” on the back row.
And yet to them God reveals his
glory.
The Transfiguration story should
give us hope: that the God revealed in
Jesus is one who comes to us not where we would like to be, but where we are.
He takes as we are, and reveals his glory to us and in us.
That’s why I’m a Christian, because
the Gospel tells me that I don’t have to be good enough and perfect (yet) to know God. When I am far off
he reaches out to me, takes me aside, and gives me himself. There’s a modern worship song that says: “You
did not wait for me to draw close to you, but you clothed yourself in my frail
humanity” That is the God we know
in Jesus, befriending
and loving us, where we are, and as we are.
The Christians who have most touched
my life, and in whom I have met God, have rarely been the perfect, “together”
ones but the real ones - angular, awkward, skewed, who know their need of God.
Their presence to me has been like a
To go back to the Prize Giving
picture I started with: being a
Christian is not about being one of the few who is counted worthy to go up on
stage and receive the rewards, it is about being one of the also-rans
who suddenly discovers there is a gift for him, which he doesn’t deserve, and
doesn’t expect, but is amazingly there.
In Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland the
Dodo says “Everyone has won and all must
have prizes”. That’s what the story
of those Disciples taken up on the mountain says to me - that is the Good News that Jesus
brings - and for that I’ll thank God !
Roger
Clarke
August
2005