Homily for Transfiguration Sunday
LET’S BUILD HUTS!
Sunday of the Transfiguration - February 14, 2010
Today is the Sunday of the Transfiguration, which every year both closes out the season of Epiphany and helps usher in the season Lent. And perhaps apropos of little, but sort of humorous, is this blurb from an essay on the Transfiguration by the writer Mary Gordon:
“I heard this story for many years, probably well into adulthood, before I thought to question the sense of the word ‘transfiguration.’ Some of my cousins lived in a parish in Brooklyn called Transfiguration. In the way of those times, the sacred word was made ordinary. ’Where do you go to school?’ ’Transfiguration.’ ’God, we have to play Transfiguration next week. They’re the division champs.’ “
Maybe slightly better than this, a friend of mine used to work at the Church of the Transfiguration down on E. 29th Street in Manhattan, and relished calling it, simply, “The Fig.”
What makes these offhanded references all the more ridiculous is that this is such a huge, climactic event in the Gospels. The Transfiguration refers to the story in all three Gospels – Matthew, Mark, and Luke – in which Jesus takes some of his disciples up a mountain in Galilee and is “transfigured” before their eyes. It’s not clear what actually happened here, but the description in Luke’s Gospel draws heavily on the language and imagery a mystical experience: the thick cloud, bright dazzling light, a liminal space somewhere between waking and dreaming, and this mixture of fear and wonder in the disciples’ reactions.
Fittingly, the two Old Testament figures that appear here with Jesus, Moses and Elijah, also had mystical encounters with God – Moses when he went up on Mount Horeb and into a thick, enveloping cloud, where he saw God, and, a lot like Jesus in this passage, descended the mountain a radiant face. And then Elijah, who out in the desert encountered God in a heavy wind and a raging fire, but most of all a still small voice – perhaps like the voice that Jesus heard from heaven here.
So the story ranks Jesus right up there with those important Jewish figures and serves as a kind of theological climax of the Gospels - hardly deserving of the shorthand “Fig!”
But shifting away from the experience itself, I want to turn now to the part of the passage that has always fascinated me the most: Peter’s response to whatever it was that took place. The story tells us that “Just as they were leaving him, Peter said to Jesus, “Master it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah” – not knowing what he said.”
This word “dwelling” is an interesting one, liable to be translated in all sorts of ways depending on which version of the Bible you’re reading. And how you interpret it affects how you think Peter was responding.
We just read from the Revised Standard Version, which translates it as “dwelling.” That’s a common translation of the word, the thought being that Peter was trying to set up a structure like the dwellings (or “booths”) that the Jews erected at their yearly Festival of Booths (the holiday that celebrates the end of their wilderness wanderings). So Peter was being a devout Jew, and understood this event in the context of his Jewish tradition.
Somewhat similar to that, the King James translates it “tabernacle,” which almost makes it sound as if Peter wants to perform an act of worship in response to these three figures.
The Evangelical New International Version, which is the version of the Bible that I grew up with, calls it a “shelter,” which just makes it sound like he wants to protect the moment. And that’s often where interpreters, especially preachers, go with this: that Peter wanted that wonderful but ephemeral experience to last when, of course, it couldn’t.
Last year I happened to come across another translation that made me think about what Peter is doing here in still a slightly different way. It was in Edith Wharton’s memoir “A Backward Glance” about growing up in Gilded Age New York. As she explains in her memoir, Wharton learned German as a child by reading the German Bible, and she especially remembered this passage because, in the German – and I assume she’s referring to the Luther Bible - “dwelling” is translated as “Hutte,” the German word for hut or cottage.
Let me just read the section because it’s so charming:
“She also taught me (out of the NT) how to read German; and in our Bible reading I came across a phrase which has always delighted me because of the quaint contrast between its impulsive German Gemutlichkeit and the majestic phraseology of our Authorized Version. When, on the Mount of the Transfiguration, the disciples cry out ‘Lord it is good for us to be here; if Thou wilt, let us make here three tabernacles, the German version causes them to say “So lasset uns Hutten bauen!” [i.e. “Let’s build huts!”] And then she continues “The cry suggested to me something fresh and leafy and adventurous, like “The Swiss Family Robinson.”
I like the direction she takes this in – that Peter’s was an adventurous, spontaneous and childlike response of joy when he offered to build these huts. But for me, “Hutten” conjures not just adventure but also comfort. I pictured a squat chalet deep in the black forest with smoke streaming from its chimney and candles in every window – just the kind of place you never want to leave.
The kind of place Peter often longed for in the Gospels.
One scene that comes to mind in connection with this one comes at the end of Luke’s’ Gospel, when Jesus is being tried before the Sandhedrin (or Jewish court), and Peter meanwhile is outside in the courtyard warming himself before the fire, as if still seeking to be comfortable even as the world around him is falling apart. Maybe in that moment he was even wondering why Jesus never let him build that hut and just stay there.
But, of course, following Christ means leaving our huts and going into the tangled, gnarled forest of the world where we can actually see and then meet the needs of the world – not to mention learn some important things about ourselves that we might not if we always stayed tucked away in our safe huts.
Next week, our image will shift from forest to desert, but both are places of risk and suffering - of our own and others – and exactly the sort of places Christ calls us to go.
