Transfiguration

By
the Revd Dr William Lamb

Who, Lord, can gaze on Your hiddenness
Which has come to revelation? Yes, your obscurity
Has come to manifestation and notification; your concealed being
Has come out into the open, without limitation.
Your awesome self has come to the hands
Of those who seized you.
All this has happened to You, Lord,
Because You became a human being.
Praises to Him who sent You.

                                    - St Ephrem the Syrian (306 - 373)
 
Today the church celebrates the Feast of the Transfiguration. This poem or hymn about the Transfiguration comes from St. Ephrem the Syrian. Ephrem was a Christian hymn-writer of the fourth century. For most of his life, Ephrem lived in Nisibis (on the border between southeast Turkey and northeast Syria). There he served as a deacon and catechist in the local church. Nisibis was an outpost of the eastern Roman Empire, but in the year 363, after the emperor Julian’s death in battle in Mesopotamia, the town was ceded to the Persians in the ensuing peace treaty. The Christian population of Nisibis was evacuated under the terms of the treaty, and Ephrem eventually ended up as a refugee in Edessa, some hundred miles further west. The one well-documented piece of information about Ephrem during the last ten or so years of his life, come from Edessa, where during a famine, he played a major role in organizing relief for the poor.

Ephrem is revered as a poet and a hymn-writer. In the Western tradition, we tend to think of theology as being above all connected with ‘dogmatic’ definitions and propositions. Theology is written in prose, sometimes rather tedious and long-winded prose. But Ephrem avoids – abhors – definitions. He regards definitions as boundaries which impose limits; his own approach to theology is to proceed by way of paradox and symbol. This does not mean that Ephrem is heterodox in his belief. Far from it. Ephrem was a theologian with a very profound sense of orthodox belief. But his poetic writings perhaps begin to do justice to the theology of the Transfiguration in a way that prose will never be able to accomplish.

Two of the words which recur again and again in Ephrem’s hymns are the words ‘hidden’ and ‘revealed’. Much of his poetry is devoted to exploring the tension between these two words, and the Transfiguration of Jesus is marked by this tension between what is ‘hidden’ and ‘revealed’. Of course, in the gospel story, when Peter is confronted with the Transfiguration, he seeks to hang onto what is revealed, to build a shrine around it, and to capture it. And yet, in the story, Jesus rebukes Peter. In this story, we learn about the peril of becoming consumers of ‘religious canned goods’. As the New Testament scholar, Ernst Käsemann, put it, the danger is that God ends up being ‘caught and rendered concrete in … inviolable theological formulas and thus becomes a calculable object in pious interchange’. As a result religious people ‘fear no surprises from heaven, and on earth …  defend the status quo’.

Like the poetry of Ephrem, the Transfiguration questions our basic human instinct to preserve the glory, and encourages us to go on learning about a God who continues to reveal. God’s hiddenness provokes us to cultivate a capacity for attentiveness and an ability to change – not hanging onto the past, but looking forward with anticipation, expecting God to do new things.