The Awesome One

Paul Walton
4 March 2003

I like going to the Ship of Fools website. You get a very refreshing look at the faith here. You can find things like the Rowan Bear—a teddy bear that looks uncannily like the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. (‘He’s wild! He’s fluffy! He’s got 39 buttons on his cassock! … Members of Reform and other traditionalists are already waiting to question the Rowan Bear about his attitudes to same-bear relationships.’) And you can get yours for only £120. And then, if that doesn’t appeal, for something completely different there’s the Essene New Life Church, which has a holistic approach to ministry: it has a little colonic irrigation business on the side.

People can post e-mails on the Ship of Fools. One conversation thread caught my eye recently: it was called, ‘Bible Study: Playing the Game’. The person who started it spoke of the silly things said sometimes in bible study groups. Silly questions include: ‘Why do you think the Transfiguration on the Mount made such an impression on Peter?’ The writer wanted to say, ‘If it didn’t, what would make an impression? WHY DO YOU THINK?’

Perhaps it’s over-familiarity the stories of the Gospels. I think it’s more likely to be merely a lack of imagination. Otherwise, why would people think of such silly questions?

I’ve heard a lot of Transfiguration sermons. I’ve preached a few; it’s a preacher’s graveyard, and tonight I’m again digging my own grave. The average Transfiguration sermon betrays that lack of imagination we find in so much church life: Peter, James and John had an amazing experience on the mountaintop when they saw the transfigured Lord; but they had to come down to the plain. We can’t stay on the mountain-top for ever; we must also come down to the plain of everyday life once our ‘mountain-top experiences’ are over. After the sermon is finished, if the congregation is still awake, it can then get up and go.

I reckon that the experience that the disciples had was very hard for us to comprehend. It scared the wits out of them! It revealed Jesus in a way they had never imagined. It stopped them from ever again trying to fit Jesus into their categories.

You know, no matter how hard we Christians keep trying, it’s hard to domesticate Jesus. He continually escapes our categories and upsets our theological systems. We try so hard to domesticate Jesus when confronted with things like the Transfiguration. We ask questions like, ‘What was this experience? Did it “really happen”, or was it “just” a vision?’ We may rush to decide that it was a vision; we might relax then. Visions we can understand. If it was a vision, it didn’t ‘really’ happen. Yet—even if we decide it was a vision, we haven’t actually decided a thing. New questions arise!: ‘What was it a vision of? If it was a vision, what was the vision pointing us to?’

There are no ‘nice thoughts’ in the Transfiguration. It is not comforting to realise that Jesus can suddenly shine like the sun (a bit like the scene in Lord of the Rings where Galadriel’s true majesty—in all its terrifying possibilities—is revealed). Besides all that, it’s not one bit reassuring to suddenly have dead guys standing in front of you. The Transfiguration is an awe-inspiring story.

Yet—there’s the Gospel twist. The voice from heaven (God!) says, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!’ What has Jesus been saying? That he is to be rejected and killed, and then to rise again after three days. And that his followers are also to take up their cross. This is the kind of thing that the disciples could not possibly grasp until after the events of Good Friday and Easter Sunday. The awe we feel is not the awe that Frodo feels in the presence of Galadriel after all; it is altogether more involving and compelling.

However we reflect on this story, we are confronted with a Christ whose nature as truly God as well as truly human come to the fore in this incident.

Since my hobby is to be a liturgical theologian, I’ll finish with a word on awe in worship. In worship, we meet with God in Christ through the Spirit. But we have too much worshiptainment today in the Churches; I think it’s fair to say that people do not find awe in most church services.

I’m quoting a passage on worship which is beloved of liturgical theologians. It was written by Annie Dillard, an American author, a non-liturgist who once summed up her aversion to most sermons in these words: ‘I was looking for bigger game, not little moral lessons’. Oooh! The passage is in her book, Teaching a Stone to Talk:

Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?…

On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it?

The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, making up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ hats and straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.