A sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on February 11, 2024 by Revd Dr Sam Wells

Reading for address: Mark 9: 2-9

I want today to suggest that Transfiguration should be as high status a festival in the Christian imagination as Christmas and Easter. I’m not asking that it should play as big a role in the economy as Christmas presents or generate as much merch as Easter eggs. But I want to explore what an extraordinary amount Mark communicates to us in just eight verses in today’s gospel reading, and how it addresses some of the greatest unknowns at the heart of our faith.

Family outings were a rare and splendid thing when I was a child. My mother was invariably too ill, and my father too busy. But when I was 8, we went to see Lost Horizon. The film made a deep impression on me. I later discovered it was trashed by the critics, being ranked among the 50 worst films of all time. But our family outing was such a rare thing that we bought the movie soundtrack, which was quite something, since I think my parents owned around 12 LPs all told. That soundtrack kept the story in my imagination long after. The film is based on James Hilton’s 1933 novel, in which four British colonialists escape from a revolution in India only for their plane to crash in the Himalayas. They are found and taken to Shangri-La, an iridescent monastic paradise in the high mountains. They discover the mystery of the valley: once people enter it, their aging slows. It turns out the wise and saintly High Lama is nearing his life’s end. As he dies, he identifies one of the newcomers, Conway, a British consul, as his successor. But Conway’s companion, the deputy consul Mallinson, is determined to leave, and take with him the beautiful Lo-Tsen, with whom he’s fallen in love. Conway has an impossible choice of which world to belong to. He goes with Mallinson, but soon after leaving Shangri-La, Lo-Tsen ages rapidly to well beyond the age of death. We’re left with Conway’s impossible choice: whether to return to Shangri-La or face the mountain snows alone.

The novel clearly identifies Shangri-La as heaven on earth, and pinpoints two questions that pervade all Christian ponderings about heaven, or essence as I call it. My two vivid memories from the film display these two questions. My first memory is of the High Lama breaking into a smile as he tells Conway about the priest from Luxembourg who founded Shangri-La in the early eighteenth century – whereupon Conway suddenly realises the High Lama is this same European priest, and that he’s 250 years old. This is an open-mouth moment. It begs the question of whether essence is just too astonishing for us to comprehend, so big as to burst our imaginations. My second memory is the horror of seeing the beautiful Lo-Tsen age in a matter of seconds, once she crosses out of the valley. This is a devastating portrayal of the mortality that circumscribes existence. It begs the question of how we can know about essence if there’s no way humans have the capacity to go to and fro from essence to existence.

I want now to read the Transfiguration account in Mark’s gospel carefully to show how it answers these questions and a good deal more. Let’s start with the setting. The story takes place on a mountain. You’ll recall the Ten Commandments were given to Moses on a mountain, and before that Isaac was almost sacrificed on a mountain. This is telling us what’s about to happen is going to be vital, definitive, revelatory. Jesus is lit up by a blinding white light. Recall the first words of God in the Genesis account: Let there be light. This is as significant as creation. Then notice two features that echo the Lost Horizon story. The disciples are terrified: like Conway beholding the 250-year-old High Lama, it’s a jaw-dropping experience. They have no language, no foothold, no rigging to cling on to: ‘wow’ is not a word in Greek or a big enough word in English. There are no words. But when Peter finds words, they’re foolish ones: he wants to hold onto this moment, exercise hospitality, bring it all down to earth. Like Mallinson in the movie trying to keep his beloved Lo-Tsen in eternal youth, it can’t be done. Make an attempt and you end up stupid or broken-hearted; or both.

That’s the setting; now let’s look at the story. It’s a conversation. Right at the centre of this story – right at the epicentre of all things, since this story is the story of all things – is a conversation: a conversation in several layers. Layer one is a conversation between Jesus, Moses and Elijah. Moses and Elijah both had mysterious deaths – so mysterious they don’t seem like deaths at all. They somehow passed from existence into essence. They also represent the Bible as Jesus and the disciples knew it: Moses is the Law, Elijah is the Prophets. So this is a conversation between the Old and New Testaments, between three people for whom death is somehow permeable, between three people who know and understand and embody God’s purposes better than anyone who ever lived.

But there’s then a second level to the conversation: Peter joins in. This then becomes a conversation between revelation and reason, between what God has done in the past and what God is doing now, between those who anticipated the full revelation of God in Christ and those struggling to comprehend it being unveiled right in front of them. Yet just as we’re adapting to the second level of conversation, we see a third level: over comes the cloud and here’s the voice of God the Father – and we’re in the midst of an inner-trinitarian conversation. You know that moment when you’re with someone you greatly look up to or someone awesomely famous, and abruptly in walks their child, their partner or their mum – and you suddenly discover what they’re really like with someone who knows who they really are. Here’s the conversation Christ has been having for all eternity, and it’s intermingled with the conversation Jesus is having with the people of the Old Testament (represented by Moses and Elijah) and with the church today (represented by Peter). Three conversations all at once. Breathtaking.

That’s the setting and the story – how about the speech? If we’ve seen that at the centre of all things is a conversation, what do the people showing us what essence is actually say? We don’t discover what Moses and Elijah say to Jesus, or he to them. Maybe, as in Lost Horizon, there are things that would blow our earthly minds and which we can’t comprehend unless and until we cross the threshold into essence. In fact, the first person in this story whose words we actually learn is Peter. We generally deride him for suggesting he build some makeshift housing for Moses and Elijah. But don’t miss the first thing he says. ‘It is good for us to be here.’ Remember the creation story, and what God said after each successive day? ‘It is good.’ Peter may not be the sharpest knife in the toolbox, but he recognises this is a momentous revelation. We’ve seen here the very purpose of creation and the very nature of eternity. This conversation reveals the reason why God created the universe and the eventual quality of our life with the Trinity. We were made to talk and listen, to relate, to ponder together and explore with one another, to be with God, like this, in appreciative enquiry, in sympathetic engagement, beholding and sharing and dwelling and enjoying. It is good, Peter, it is indeed good to be here, to be given a glimpse of the glory for which all things were created and towards which everything is destined.

Then we get the words we remember from Jesus’ baptism: ‘This is my beloved Son.’ And this is an equally pulsating moment of revelation. We’ve learned that eternal life is a conversation: but it’s not an idle conversation. These words come from Isaiah’s Servant Songs – the moment in Israel’s history when it realised to its astonishment that God was suffering with it, that indeed God was something far more profound than a tribal God whose job was to bring earthly security and prosperity: that the God who created the universe was committed to being with us, being with us not just in our joy but in our sorrow, pain, isolation, suffering, fear, and despair. This is a real conversation, one about suffering and dismay and frustration and heartbreak and horror. God’s conversation can encompass every element of human experience and more.

And just in case you thought we’d had everything – creation, the giving of the law, the wilderness of Israel living in tents, the prophets, the exile of the servant songs, Jesus dwelling with us, the cross anticipated in Isaiah – there’s yet one more thing. Jesus speaks about his rising from the dead. The end of the story is the moment when creation, incarnation and eternity all converge – Jesus’ resurrection. Being with Jesus is what we were created for. We never think about being with Jesus without recalling the cross, by which we showed our incapacity to grasp who Jesus is and through which Jesus shares our sorrows and in which he demonstrates God’s commitment to be with us come what may. But we never think about the cross without giving thanks for the resurrection, which is the window through which we see eternity, the moment that enables us to trust that God turns now into forever, existence into essence, earth into heaven.

This whole story, just eight verses, shows us the answer to the two questions I’ve pondered ever since I saw Lost Horizon at 8 years old. How do we comprehend the magnitude of essence if we’re merely human? And, How can we know about it if no one can travel between essence and existence? And the answer to both those questions comes in what for me is the most poignant moment in the whole story. It’s an instant of silence in a story of conversation; a moment of stillness in a drama of action; a pause of simplicity in a narrative of grandeur. Suddenly the disciples see ‘no one with them anymore, but only Jesus.’ We’ve had the whole panoply of scriptural analogies and metaphors. We’ve had dialogue and discourse among God and human beings. We’ve had inspiration and folly, embrace and fear. And now we just have Jesus. Which is the moment we realise the answer to the two great questions, of how we can grasp the magnitude and how we can discover the reality, is before our eyes; is with us. The answer is Jesus. Jesus is the magnitude of essence made present in existence that we may begin to comprehend. Jesus is the one who comes from essence to existence to make known the wonder of essence.

The film Lost Horizon ends with Conway, poised between the doomed fantasy of Shangri-La and the bitter reality of real life. It’s a painful choice between a false heaven and an unbearable earth. The story of the Transfiguration ends with Jesus, poised between the wonder of essence and the truth of existence, utterly both, inviting us to join him in his resurrection life. That’s why Transfiguration should be up there with Christmas and Easter: because it has the embodiment and suffering of incarnation and the joy and transformation of resurrection. It is no lost horizon, but our true vision of glory and lasting ground for hope, until the day when we too are transfigured and become God’s conversation partners forever.