Metamorpheo
by the Rev. Canon Sue Sommer, Canon Pastor and Subdean
This just in: We humans are creatures of habit and routine. Like other species, we tend to be neophobic — suspicious of change – even though (or maybe precisely because) change is the one constant of life on our planet. And change is a primary feature of today’s gospel passage. We hear an account of the Transfiguration of Jesus each year on the last Sunday of Epiphany. We heard Mark’s version a moment ago, but to get the full impact, we need to get caught up on what has happened in the Gospel of Mark since last week when Jesus healed a leper at the end of Chapter 1. In the intervening 8 chapters, Jesus continued his ministry of healing which increasingly irritated the religious authorities. He travelled to Gentile country, and healed the gentiles as well. He fed 5000 hungry people in the wilderness without thought given to the ritual purity of the hands that made the food or of the people who ate the food. He restored sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf. In short, he has waded into all manner of chaotic brokenness wherever he found it, and restored it to wholeness.
And at the end of Chapter 8, he asked, “Who do people say that I am?”
It’s a great set-up for Peter’s confession of Jesus as the Messiah. And six days after that we get the passage appointed for today where Jesus traipses up the mountain with his inner circle of disciples and there he is transfigured.
Transfigured is how it is translated into English. The Greek word is metamorpheo. From which we get our word, metamorphosis.
Now I have disclosed many times before that I am a geeky wordsmith, so it should come as no surprise to you that I am intrigued by that choice of word. Because we understand metamorphosis to be a particular kind of change. Professor McGonegal in the Harry Potter series notwithstanding, transfiguration – metamorpheo – is not about changing the essence of something. Rather, it is about uncovering the essence of something that was intended from the beginning. So a caterpillar metamorphoses into a butterfly. A caterpillar and a butterfly don’t look anything alike, but it is undeniably the same organism. Its appearance has radically changed, but its essential DNA remains the same. It is simply, as one writer put it, that the full purpose of the caterpillar is revealed in the butterfly.
Jesus has brought sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf, and now on the mountaintop the disciples see and hear as they have never seen nor heard before. The metamorpheo that Jesus underwent is nothing less than the glory of God, dwelling within Jesus all along, being revealed to the inner circle of disciples. This is the same Jesus who walked up the mountain with them. Nothing has changed. And yet everything changed for the disciples in this blinding metamorphosis because God’s full purpose for the Messiah had been revealed in Jesus for their benefit. An assignment awaited them.
What Peter, James, and John were to do was to listen to God’s Beloved Son. And listening, in scriptural context, is always understood as an active, rather than passive task. The Latin word, oboedire, which means to hear, is the root of our English word, obedience. To listen – to hear Christ meant that they, too, were to be about the business of healing and restoring all who were on the margins of society, all whom poverty or disease or misfortune or sin had rendered ritually unclean and thereby removed from official avenues of access to God. They were to join Jesus both now, and later after his death and resurrection, in the work of restoring to wholeness whatever is broken in humankind and in human affairs because that is God’s purpose for creation. It was for this that God gave the Law, (hence, the appearance of Moses) it was for this that God sent the prophets (hence, the appearance of Elijah). It was for this that God sent his only begotten Son.
This is way more than a biblical account we hear at roughly this time each year. It is a reminder that each one of us is God’s beloved child whom God loves with a love beyond human comprehension. And as such, our baptism – in which we become members of Christ’s Body — is also a kind of metamorpheo. Baptism doesn’t change our essential nature. It doesn’t magically transform our behavior from sinful to sanctified. Baptism doesn’t make God love us more. Baptism, as we understand it, reveals us and empowers us as the beloved children God intended and intends us to be because we, too, have an assignment. Like his first disciples, we too are to be about the business of healing and restoring all who are on the margins of society. It’s right there in our baptismal covenant: the call to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves, striving for justice and peace among all people and respecting the dignity of every human being.
Baptism calls us, as the Body of Christ, to be a transfigured people. Like the inner circle of disciples, we have been given a glimpse of the fullness of what that means for creation. And this is what it means. We are to be agents of health, wholeness, restoration, justice and Shalom for all.
