Hartman, Craig W.. Cathedral of Christ the Light, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=54202 [retrieved February 12, 2024]. Original source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sicarr/3251258111/.

RCL Year B, Transfiguration Sunday (The Last Sunday after Pentecost)
II Kings 2:1-12, Psalm 50:1-6, II Corinthians 4:3-6, Saint Mark 9:2-9

Over the years, I have had a reservation about the Collect of the Day today. It isn’t a reservation about the Transfiguration, the revelation of Jesus’ “glory upon the holy mount,”[1] for I believe that his flesh concealed his glory, his divinity, and his identity as the Son of God. Nor is it a reservation about asking God for the strength to bear our cross. For surely we need God’s strength if we intend to take up our cross and bear it as Jesus bore his cross. Most of us are not able to bear a cross the way Jesus did. I mean by that we are not able to bear it for the glory of God until it brings our death, which is but a step closer to the glory of God which God wishes to share with us as he shared it with his only Son.

My reservation concerns our request that we “be changed into his likeness from glory to glory.” Certainly, our Lenten disciplines, whatever they may be, can bring us closer to a likeness of Christ. But they cannot transform us from a human being into a divine being. The glory we see in him, as he teaches, as he heals, as he shines on the holy mount, and as he reigns from Calvary’s tree, that glory is a glory belonging to God. It is the glory of God himself. It can enlighten and shine upon us while we bear our cross and rely upon the redemption that Christ came to give. But all the while we remain human, and we stand in the need of a Redeemer.

It is the shining from the face of Jesus, mentioned in the Epiphany Preface, that shines in our hearts, giving us the knowledge of God’s “glory in the face of” God’s “Son Jesus Christ our Lord.”[2] That glory lights our path as we move into Lent and move into maturity in Christ.

That light lights our way, but it is more than something external to us. It is more than what we receive from God. That light becomes what we should do. The light is the very love of God, what believers in Jesus are to distribute in healing, in encouragement, and in blessing. We are to reflect that light in what we do and in what we are. And, especially in Lent, we are to commit ourselves again to be Christ’s agents in a broken world without hope unless it be the hope we have in Christ.

For that is the Christian life. We are to pass on, to confer to others, the blessings we have happily received. The light shining from Christ’s face enlightens our path, and it shows us the way. That light can set us aflame to tell the glory of the living God.

[1] The BCP, page 217.

[2] The BCP, page 378.