On Thursday we celebrated the feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord. This is one of the greatest feasts of the year. Christ’s transfiguration on Mount Tabor has a monumental place in the theology of our Church. For example, the icon of the Transfiguration is the first icon that an iconographer paints. This is because it expresses so clearly that Christ is both God and a human being - and the divine life that human beings are called to share.

There so many things that can be said about the significance of the Transfiguration, but today I want to concentrate on just one of them - the life that he is calling us to share.

I would like to illustrate this by reading a quotation from The Screwtape Letters by CS Lewis. This is a letter from an imaginary demon who is teaching his young nephew, also an imaginary demon, how to tempt a human being. In the letters Jesus Christ is referred to as “The Enemy” and Jesus’ intentions for human beings is represented as if from a reverse perspective to ours.

One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself – creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons.

So, we are called to be creatures whose life, on a miniature scale, is qualitatively like Christ’s. This is pretty mind-boggling. The feast – and the icon - of the Transfiguration is so important because it shows us not only Christ as he really is, but ourselves as we are called to become.
But what is the path to this high calling? We have lots of clues in the Gospels, in the liturgical tradition of the Church and in the icon itself. In the Gospels, Moses and Elijah talk to Jesus about the “Exodus which he was about to accomplish in Jerusalem” , in other words, about his death and resurrection. Jesus talks to his disciples about the Cross as he is approaching the mountain where he was to be transfigured.

Many icons show this by including little inserts, showing Jesus teaching his disciples as they go up the mountain. The icon itself has a cross within the structure of the image, with Jesus and the mountain forming the vertical beam and the two prophets on either side of him forming the horizontal beam. The 6th August is 40 days apart from 14th September, when we celebrate the Exaltation of the Cross. As in Lent, we have 40 days of preparation as we head towards the Exaltation of the Cross.

And what might we be thinking about as we are making that journey from celebrating the Transfiguration to Celebrating the Cross, now, 4 days after Transfiguration, just 36 days?

Here I would like to return to CS Lewis. In his famous essay The Weight of Glory he says that the knowledge of what we are all called to become should radically change the way we relate to other people. I will close by reading a section of the essay. I think that this presents us with an ascesis very appropriate for the next 36 days!

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.

Given by Mother Sarah