February 10, 2013
by James McCrea
Luke 9:28-36
When I was two years old, I had surgery to correct a lazy eye. In fact, my oldest memory is that of waking up in a hospital bed after the surgery with a bandage over one eye and having my parents hand me a stuffed bunny that was about as big as I was.
From that surgery on, I had to wear glasses all the time. The idea was to force my formerly lazy eye to look through the focal point of the lens, helping that eye to develop its muscles. I was even supposed to wear glasses in bed while I slept just in case I’d wake up in the middle of the night.
As a child, I was less than enthused about having to wear glasses. So I would occasionally get angry and throw them. But if they broke, that meant my Dad would simply wrap the broken section in athletic tape and I’d have to sport an instant nerd look.
That said, having to wear glasses all the time was good for at least one thing. I got to amaze people from time to time. Now and then someone would ask me if I was near-sighted or far-sighted and I would always reply neither. So they would ask if I has astigmatism — something I’d never even heard of the first time I was asked that. So I could readily deny having astigmatism also.
Then they would always ask me why I wore glasses and the truth is that for the longest time, I really didn’t know. But at that moment came the fun part. I could take off my glasses and show them that I could see both close-up and far away just as well without my glasses as with them. That stunt always made me a hero for at least 10 seconds. And that was 10 seconds more than I might otherwise get.
Those days are long gone now. I’ve been wearing glasses so long — and I am that much older now — that taking my glasses off just serves to show me just how fuzzy the world is without them. But when I put my glasses back on, everything comes back into sharp focus.
And that’s essentially how glasses work. Your eye doctor figures out how the distortions in your eye distort the world and then they select lens that distort things in the opposite direction with the idea that two wrongs will make a right and you will able to see clearly through the balanced imperfections of your eye and the lens.
That idea isn’t limited to just those of us with less-than-perfect vision. In 1990 the Hubble Space Telescope was launched into space, trailing a massive plume of hype in its wake. It was going to be placed beyond the distortion of earth’s atmosphere where it could be trained to peer far out into deepest reaches of the universe and show us sights we could never see with such clarity back home on earth.
Only that didn’t happen. When the Hubble was brought online, scientists discovered that its main mirror had been ground incorrectly. It had minute imperfections that were off just enough to ruin its vision. So, instead of sending back the sharpest space images in human history, it was as if we’d launched Mr. Magoo into space with a pair of binoculars.
So what could they do? They couldn’t exactly take it into the nearest space repair shop to have the mirror reground. So they created the equivalent of prescription eyeglasses to correct Hubble’s vision. And it worked. Now Hubble is doing exactly what it was created to do. I don’t know about you, but I secretly hope they added a piece of athletic tape somewhere on that corrective lens as a tribute to those of us who had to endure all those nerd comments growing up. And, for that matter, as a sly tribute to the folks who designed and fixed Hubble.
- John Calvin, as you probably know, was the theological father of the Presbyterian Church. He used a similar image to talk about the impact of sin in the world. He said in essence that the cumulative sin of humanity has so thoroughly distorted our perceptions of God’s creation that we’re no longer aware that those distortions exist; we’ve come to believe that that’s just the way things are. It’s as if we were all wearing a pair of those glasses with prism lens that transform everything into blobs and smears and make it impossible for us to see clearly. In effect, Calvin said that our only hope for truly understanding the world is to take off those glasses and put on a pair of Christ lens — that is, to see the world as he sees it.
It was in that context that Luke tells the story of the Transfiguration. In fact, he tells us that the Transfiguration took place eight days after the previous conversation, giving a subtle nod to the upcoming resurrection on the eighth day of the week.
On the top of Mount Tabor, with only three disciples to witness it, Jesus began to glow with an unearthly glory. It was as if his skin had melted away to reveal the radiant beauty of his soul within.
As if that weren’t enough, Moses and Elijah, symbolic of the law and the prophets, suddenly appeared to talk with Jesus. That’s the detail that always sticks with me since we’re talking about a time before photographs and in a culture that considered even painted portraits to be a violation of the Second Commandment. Yet somehow all three of the disciples immediately recognized both Moses and Elijah without ever having seen them. That, to me, implies something about the way we will recognize one another in the afterlife.
In any case, the point isn’t so much about who they are as what they’re saying. Luke tells us that they are talking with Jesus about what our translation says is Jesus’ “departure,” although the original Greek actually says they’re discussing Jesus’ “Exodus.” That’s a loaded theological word referring back to God’s freeing the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. It was a freedom that was gained only due to God’s love and grace.
And what was Christ’s death on the cross but a sign of God’s love and grace — as Jesus paid the penalty to free us from our sins? The Transfiguration served both as a way of confirming Jesus in his determination to accept the cross and as a way of underlining for the disciples that everything he had told them about his upcoming death and resurrection was true. Then the whole thing was topped off by the audible sound of God’s own voice.
As Don Hoffman puts it, “For a brief moment in time — was it the high altitude, was it the clear air, was it the angle of the sun? — for a brief moment in time Jesus became translucent, and the light of God, the glory of God shone through. His disciples remained just as opaque as ever. As you read on you discover they can’t do the simple healings Jesus thought he had taught them. They squabble about their pecking order. They misunderstand everything Jesus tells them. Opaque? Those guys were so thick you couldn’t shine X-rays through them.
“I wonder sometimes if Jesus was always that [dazzlingly] bright, and the disciples just didn’t let themselves notice. I wonder if something happened on top of that mountain, not to Jesus, but to Peter, James, and John. I wonder if their dark glasses got knocked off, somehow, and there they were, squinting against the bright light, scrabbling around on the ground with their fingers, to find their shades. ‘Wow, Master, it’s great to be here, but do you think we could build a tent with thick canvas walls, and keep the light inside, where it’s safe?’”
“[…] Much later, some kind of transformation did happen to those disciples. The billion candlepower glory of the resurrection began to shine through them. They, too, were transfigured. They, too, were transformed. Their veils were stripped away, their sunglasses were discarded, their thickness was penetrated. And all of them, with unveiled faces, began to be transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.”
To be honest, the story of the Transfiguration has an odd, other-worldly feeling about it that makes it seem almost completely unrelated to modern life. But that feeling was no different for Peter or James and John 2,000 years ago. They had never seen anything like that before and they had no idea what to make of it.
Yet I believe that we can all experience that same sort of transformation — that is, allowing the brilliance of God’s love to shine through us by what we say and what we do. And I believe that through prayer and open hearts, we can begin to see God’s love present and acting in our world.
- For example, a couple of years ago a severe earthquake hit Japan. Afterwards, rescuers began the difficult and emotionally-draining work of digging through the rubble to look for survivors. When they reached the ruins of a young woman’s house, they saw her dead body through the cracks in the debris.
But something about her pose caught their eyes. She was kneeling like a person in worship with her body was leaning forward. In that posture, the house had fallen down around her and crushed her head and back.
The leader of the rescue team put his hand through a narrow gap on the wall to touch the woman’s body. He was hoping that this woman could be still alive. However, the cold and stiff body told him that she had definitely died.
So he and the rest of the team left this house and were going to search the next collapsed building. But for some reason, the team leader was compelled to go back to the ruined house of the dead woman. Again, he knelt down and pushed his hand through the narrow cracks to search the little space under the dead body. Suddenly, he screamed with excitement, “A child! There is a child!”
Underneath the woman, he had found a 3-month-old boy wrapped in a flowery blanket. Obviously, the woman had made an ultimate sacrifice to save her son. When her house was falling, she used her body to provide cover, hoping to protect her son. The little boy was still sleeping peacefully when the team leader picked him up.
The rescue team found a mobile phone inside the blanket. There was a text message on the screen. It said, “If you can survive, you must remember that I love you.”
(Comments to Jim at :jmfpc@sbcglobal.net.)