In the Transfiguration we encounter Jesus as God, his divinity overshadowing His humanity. That Jesus is God was a great controversy in the 4th Century, and the denial of Christ's divinity (Arianism) was mainstream for four hundred years. Modernism, the theology of accommodating the Church to the modern world, rests on a subtle Arianism - an unspoken denial of the divinity of Christ. If Jesus really is the all knowing, all seeing, all powerful, God then attempts to minimise or relativise his teachings as being from a particular culture or point of history are nonsensical. If He is God then what He taught is true yesterday, today, and always.
This is my Son, the Beloved; he enjoys my favour. Listen to him.
In 313 AD the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great issued a ruling, which would come to be known as the edict of Milan; the ruling granted freedom of religion to Christians. After near-three hundred years being persecuted by the Roman state, three hundred years of imprisonments, banishments, and martyrdoms, the Church was finally free. What did the Christians do with their newfound freedom? They immediately began falling out with each other!
Constantine was perplexed, this strange sect to which he (loosely) belonged, were unlike any other religious group he’d ever encountered. They rejected almost all of his society’s morality, they were obsessed with a destroyed city in the backwater province of Palestine, and all they wanted to do was argue about doctrine! Decades of persecution ended and suddenly they were all at each other’s throats. What was the point of contention? What caused the argument? A very simple question;
Who exactly was this Jesus of Nazareth?
There were always strange sects and cults on the fringes of the Church that taught odd things, but by the early fourth century one of them had gained real prominence and had split the Church in two. A priest from Libya named Arius, taught that God the Father was the sole God, and that Jesus was like Him but was created by Him. Jesus was the highest of all creatures, but He was not God. This idea spread, until its followers, dubbed Arians, had become a serious faction inside the Church – not just a cult or a sect on its fringes.
This teaching enraged other Christians. There is an apocryphal story that Saint Nicholas (yes, the Saint behind the myth of jolly old Santa Claus) physically hit Arius in the face over this teaching. While that incident almost certainly never happened, tensions ran high, and physical violence was not unheard of.
Eventually Constantine had enough of them. Much like a parent clapping his children's head's together and telling them they needed to get along, he summoned the Bishops to Nicaea in what is now Turkey, and made them have it out; was Jesus Christ God, or was he just a God-like creation? The profession of faith, the creed, formulated at Nicaea, the same Creed (more-or-less) we still say at Mass today, proclaimed the truth which had always been believed by all true Christians everywhere, and which was to be believed by them forever more;
We believe in One Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, born of the Father before all ages, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father.
While I am no expert on the Council of Nicaea, I am certain that the readings of today’s feast will have been a powerful consideration; Jesus takes his trusted Apostles Peter, John, and James, up a mountain and is transfigured before them. His divinity overshadowed his humanity for a moment and they got a glimpse of who he really is; not just an ordinary man, but God come down to earth and mystically united to our human nature. He appears between Elijah and Moses, as the fulfilment of the Law and the Prophets, and the cloud covers them, and the voice of the Father is heard saying;
This is my Son, the Beloved; he enjoys my favour. Listen to him.
This should have been the end of it, the Bishops at Nicaea proclaimed the divinity of Jesus Christ, rooted in the scriptures and the teachings of the Apostles, and the ubiquitous belief of the Church. And yet, it was not. Arianism persisted for another four hundred years. Other heresies and errors which denied either that Jesus Christ was truly God, or that He was truly human, cropped up again and again. In one particularly dark chapter, a Roman emperor converted to Arianism and dragged the western Church into that error – the Bishops who stood up to him like Athanasius and Eusebius were punished severely, banished from their homes for years. These errors kept coming around.
Don’t think either that we have escaped this in the 21st Century; the Church is no more safe from Arianism now than it was in the 4th Century. The heresy of modernism, denounced by Pope Saint Pius X, which seeks to reconcile the Church’s teachings with the spirit of the modern world (teachings diametrically opposed to what Christ taught) is rooted in this same denial of the divinity of Jesus Christ. The theologians (among them, sadly even some in the clergy) who say the Church’s teaching has to change to better fit our modern understanding of the world, who say we now have a better understanding of psychology, and sociology, and human sexuality than they had back in first century Palestine, or who say Jesus was just a man tragically constrained by the culture around him, are doing nothing more than denying the divinity of Christ.
I shall make it plain, using the simple language of the Church Fathers; either Jesus Christ is God or He is not. If He is not God he does not have the power to save us or forgive our sins. If He is not God then this entire exercise in following Him, coming to Church, reading accounts of his life, and trying to be like Him is utterly pointless. As the author C.S. Lewis put it; you could not go around in first century Palestine saying the things Jesus says and be regarded as just a good man. Look at today's readings; Daniel prophesises about the divine Son of man, and in the Gospel Jesus claims that title for himself. We do not have the choice to accept Jesus as just a moral teacher, the Gospels do not leave that option open to us; he is either a liar (in which case he is the most evil man to have ever lived, selling billions on his lie) a madman (and when you read the Gospels, he hardly comes across as a raving madman) or the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. We must either reject Him as the devil or bow down to Him as incarnate God. There is no middle ground.
Whichever option we choose has consequences. If Jesus Christ really is God then we cannot join the modernists in trying to relativise or diminish the words he spoke as being just part of a certain culture or a certain time or a limited knowledge about Humanity. If He truly is God, all knowing, all seeing, and all powerful, then what He said is absolutely true now and for all ages. If He truly is God, then He knew exactly how his words and actions would be interpreted by His early followers. If he knew they were going to misinterpret something, he would have corrected them explicitly (and he does frequently correct their misinterpretations and mistakes). What is more, Jesus broke every social convention and norm he saw fit to break, he gave greater protection to women than the law allowed them by protecting them from being arbitrarily divorced by their husbands, He broke down the walls between Gentile and Jew, and every social class. He proclaimed the end of the rituals and sacrifices and priesthood of the Jewish people and instituted his own High Priesthood. Jesus is not a man bound by a particular time and culture; he is God, come to earth to shatter that time and culture and take only what was good from it, to build something definitively new. And to back Him up, to make it clear where His authority lay, God the Father spoke from heaven;
This is my Son, the Beloved; he enjoys my favour. Listen to him.
The prophecy of Daniel has been fulfilled in Jesus Christ, the ancient of days has handed over the eternal Kingdom to the Son of Man. The Son of man handed the Keys to the Kingdom to those Apostles who witnessed his divine glory and instructed them to keep safe the truth He had revealed to them.
Today’s feast of the transfiguration calls us again to proclaim loudly and proudly our Faith that Jesus Christ is Lord, and then to live with the consequences of that Faith.
Homily for the Feast of the Transfiguration
St Thomas Church, St Helier 06 August 2023
First Reading: Daniel 7:9-10,13-14
Second Reading: 2 Peter 1:16-19
Gospel: Matthew 17:1-9
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