Progressive reflections on the lectionary #55

Monday 24th February 2025

Luke 9:28-36, (37-43a) Luke's Transfiguration Story

Some people take a straightforward approach to the interpretation of Biblical passages. “If there was a video camera there,” they say, “would it have recorded events as they are narrated in the passage?”

In this week’s story that would make quite the short film. Jesus is literally ‘transfigured’ - his appearance changes to something that is beyond the natural; two long dead patriarchs suddenly appear and stand with him; there’s a mysterious cloud from within which the voice of God comes.

And that’s just the first part of this week’s reading - to use the contemporary phrase: ‘it’s a lot.’

It’s hard to know where to start with this, to be candid, but perhaps we can start with the video camera motif. We can start there because in a sense it’s a redundant question. It relies on a concept of ‘seeing’ which is fundamentally modern, which says that to see, and to experience, and to participate, are categorically different. ‘Sight’ in the ancient world wasn’t conceived of in this way - there wasn’t the same sort of separation that we assume between different senses. A ‘vision’, therefore, wasn’t something that one ‘saw’ - but something one experienced, or took part in.

The pre-modern writers understood this, and for that reason they largely interpret this story as a kind of ecstatic experience - an apocalyptic dream sequence. They point to clear narrative indications: drowsiness and confusion, to say that the whole thing is a vivid experiential discourse.

The Bible is full of this sort of thing - prophetic visions, apocalyptic visions - whole books are written this way. I’ve said before that the fact that we don’t write this sort of literature (apocalyptica) any more makes it hard for us to understand what it is. Hence people try to take Revelation literally. To be fair, I suppose it doesn’t help that one gets pieces of apocalyptic literature interwoven into texts that contain other genres too.

An apocalypse is a ‘revelation’ - a revealing of a deeper or greater truth. In this brief ‘revelatory’ experience Luke says that the disciples come to see Jesus differently. They understand him in a different light - literally.

This altered consciousness narrative is challenging for those who, following Barth and others, seek to steer away for the idea that personal subjective experience can be ‘reliable’ in spiritual or religious terms. This results in the classic split - both within Protestantism (experientialist/non experientialist) and more broadly between Protestantism and Catholicism. My observation, for what its worth, is that the intra-Protestant division is increasingly problematised - at the same time greater interest is growing in the effects of psychedelic experiences, whether induced by breathwork or psychoactive substances. My guess is that this latter will form a greater part of mainstream Christianity going forward - but I’m going off on a tangent.

So - to recap - the first part of this story narrates a profound ‘visionary’ experience which was apocalyptic in nature, which speaks of the divine ‘chosen-ness’ of Jesus, which is to say his status as ‘Christ’ - in Jewish terms the chosen ‘liberator’ and ‘redeemer’ of Israel. Christianity changed the idea of what a ‘Christ’ was, of course, divorcing it from it’s crucially important political ‘here-and-now’ aspect.

The second half of the story narrates Jesus’ return from the mountain top experience - here Luke is deliberately aping the stories of Moses and Elijah, who he has already primed us to think of by situating them within the vision.

He then uses a rebuke taken from Deuteronomy 32 - calling out the ‘faithless and perverse generation’ (the Deuteronomist says “a perverse generation, children in whom there is no faithfulness”) which appears in the ‘song of Moses’ - the poem attributed to the patriarch as he heads to his death having anointed Joshua as his successor. The subtlety here is somewhat unsubtle.

With this descent from the mountain Luke readies the reader/listener to move to a different part of his narrative, one which will see Jesus continue to mirror the story of Elijah until ultimately he, like Elijah, ascends to heaven leaving others to continue his work of divinely ordained liberation.

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