I close this series with thoughts on the Transfiguration, believing the story a window through which we glimpse, for a moment, the region whence all miracles come—a glimpse vague and dark for all its light, for God himself is “by abundant clarity invisible.” Here a marvellous change passes upon the very form from which the miracles flowed, as if the pent-up grace wrought mightily on the earthen vessel that held it.
Our Lord often sought a hill at evening, often having no other chamber for undisturbed communion with his Father. This, I think, was such an occasion. He took with him the favoured three, whom he also took apart in Gethsemane, to withdraw even from them a little that he might be alone with the Father yet know his brothers were near—the ocean of human need drawn upward in an apex of perfect prayer toward the Father’s throne.
I think this, his one material show except the entry into Jerusalem on the ass, took place at night. Then the carpenter’s son was crowned, not on the head only with a crown from without, but in his whole person with a crown of light born in him. St Luke says he went up to pray while Peter and his companions were “heavy with sleep,” and places “on the next day, when they were come down from the mountain” the miracle that St Matthew and St Mark put immediately on the descent; so the night was likely spent on the mountain.
St Luke says his countenance was altered and his raiment white and glistering; St Matthew, that his face shone like the sun and his raiment was white as the light; St Mark, that his raiment shone, whiter than any fuller on earth could make it. St Luke alone says the change came while he prayed: he became outwardly glorious from inward communion with his Father. The more immediate subject of his prayer, I think, is indicated by St Luke’s note that his heavenly visitors spoke “of his decease which he should accomplish at Jerusalem.” Add that his talk with the disciples coming down pointed the same way, and that report of the vision was to be withheld until he had risen from the dead, and it appears likely that the master, oppressed by what now drew near, sought his Father’s comfort and sympathy, praying in prospect of his decease. In throwing off the weight of this awful shadow by prayer he did not merely grow calm and resigned; his faith broke forth so triumphant over fear that it shone from him in physical light. Every cloud of sorrow or dread touched by such illumination is itself changed to glory. It was a foretaste of his resurrection, a putting on of his glorified body for a moment while he was yet in the old body and the awful shadow between. The apostle may refer to something like this in other men when he says, “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.” That coming death was to be only the overshadowing cloud from which the glory should break anew and for ever. The transfiguration was the divine defiance of the coming darkness.
Let us speculate on the relation of the spiritual and physical manifested here. Moses’ face likewise shone marvellously, and what wonder? What should make a man’s face shine if not the presence of the Holy, communion with the Father of his spirit? In the transfiguration I see the perfect outcome of those natural results of which Moses showed the first signs: the full daylight of which his shining face was the dawn. So, like the other miracles, I regard it as a rare manifestation of the perfect working of nature. Who does not know that in moments of lofty emotion, when self is forgotten, the eyes shine and the face is so transfigured that we doubt whether it is not in a degree luminous? If so, what glory must await every lowliest believer, since the communion of our elder brother with his Father and ours, for whose perfecting in us he came, made not only his face shine but even his dull garments white as snow, through the light issuing from his whole person! May I not add that the shining garments are a type of the glorification of everything human when brought into its true relations by and with the present God?
I turn to the resurrection, so closely associated with all this. I think the virtue of divine presence that broke in light from Jesus’ body is the same by which his risen body, half molten in power, was made plastic to the indwelling spirit. What if this light were the healing agent of men’s bodies, as the deeper light from which it sprang is the healing agent of themselves? Are not the most powerful rays of light invisible to our vision?
Some will object that this is too material a view. I answer that the question is whether I use the material to interpret the spiritual, as I think I do, or to account for it, as I do not. In my theory the spiritual both explains and accounts for the material.
If our notions of material light make it the only fitting image of the invisible Truth, the being of God, there must be some closest tie between them—not connection only but unity. Otherwise we would need a god of the Natural and another of the Supernatural, brothers supplementing each other. The essential truth of God must create its own visual image in the sun that lights the world; and when man, God’s image, is filled with the presence of the eternal, he too, his divine nature for the moment ripened to glory, radiates light from his person. Where, when or how inner spiritual light passes into or generates outward physical light, who can tell? This borderland, this touching of mind and matter, is the region of miracles—of material creation, I might have said, which is the great, the only miracle. But if matter is the outcome of spirit, and body and soul are one man, then if the soul is radiant with truth, what can the body do but shine?
I conjecture, then, that truth, which is light in the soul, might not only cast out disease, which is darkness in the body, but change that body, without death, into the likeness of Jesus’ body. Except by violence I do not think his body could have died. No physiologist can tell why man should die. I think a perfect soul could keep its body alive; an imperfect one cannot fill it with light in every part. The transfiguration was the visible outbreak of a life so strong as to be life-giving and life-restoring, able to melt the flesh away and ever renew it. Such a body might well walk on the stormiest waters.
But I find myself in regions where I dare tread no further for the darkness of ignorance. I see many glimmers, but too formless and uncertain.
We are not told when or how the light died away. My own fancy is that it went on shining, paling, all night on the lonely mount, and vanished in the dawn. When he came down, the virtue in him went forth no more as light to the eyes but as healing to the epileptic boy’s poor torn frame. So he vanished at last from his friends’ eyes, only to draw nearer, with a more intense and healing presence, to their hearts and minds.
Even so come, Lord Jesus.