And we who with unveiled faces behold the Lord’s glory[…]are being transformed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another.
In the name of the Father…
“And we who with unveiled faces behold the Lord’s glory[…]are being transformed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another.” Is there a more splendid sentence in all of Scripture than this? Is there anything more luminous? And, at the same time, is there anything more scandalously subversive of the assumptions with which we typically approach the season of Lent?
In three days’ time we will enter into the season of Lent and all over the western world Christians will be competing with their secular counterparts to devise for themselves ever more punishing ascetic regimens by which to propel themselves, by sheer force of will, into a higher form of life. There will be cold showers, ultra-marathons before breakfast, social media blackouts, and goodness know what else. For, as unlikely as it may seem, we are in fact living in something of a golden age of self-mortification. Never before have abstinence, fasting and teetotalism enjoyed such unquestioned cultural supremacy as they do today. And you might think that all this would be a great boon for the Church. And yet here we have St Paul telling us that the chief means of our moral and spiritual transformation is nothing of this kind at all, but the simple act of beholding the beauty of God. According to St Paul, what Peter, James and John saw on the mountaintop at Tabor would have done more for their moral and spiritual wellbeing than all the cold showers, the dry Januarys and the 5 and 2 fasts they could possibly have put themselves through. And these are the texts the Church has seen fit to set before us as we prepare for the season of Lent.
So what are we to make of this? What exactly are supposed to glean from these texts about how we are to observe the coming season? Above all, they are a reminder of something fundamental about the nature of the sin from which we seek to be liberated, and that is that the power of sin is, from beginning to end, the power of deception. What these texts remind us is that for us to sin is always to have allowed ourselves to be beguiled into accepting a distorted version of reality as if it were the real thing, to have allowed ourselves to be taken in by phantoms and spectres as if they were as worthy of our attention as the true and the good. In other words, the fundamental corruption wrought upon the human person by sin is not upon our will, that is, upon our capacity to do what is right, but upon our vision, upon our ability to see straight, to see reality as it truly is. What the book of Genesis tells us is that sin came into the world not through the weakness of our will but by an act of deception. The weakness of the human will is a consequence, not the cause, of human sin. And this has profound implications for how we go about seeking to be liberated from that same sin. For if sin came about not by the weakness of our will but by deception, then no amount of willpower, no summoning up of human strength, however heroic, will be enough to free us from its grip. The only path to liberation is by learning to see straight, to see through the falsehood sin presents to us as reality. And that is where the Transfiguration comes in.
I have a friend who never tires of telling me that the way the police train their specialists to identify counterfeit money is not by having them look at lots of fake money, but by making them spend hours and hours studying the genuine article. Now whether or not this is actually true of police practice, it is manifestly true of the counterfeit reality that sin presents us with. When I fix my eyes upon the fantasies and obsessions that sin presents me with, when I allow my thoughts to linger upon them, then nothing could seem more real or substantial than them. It is only when I turn my eyes away from them to the reality of God that they are exposed as the shoddy deceptions, the cardboard cut-outs they truly are. In other words, the way in which we come to be liberated from sin is not by pitting ourselves against it, strength for strength, since that is just another way of crediting its claim to be something, to be worthy our attention, our opposition, the only way for us to be liberated from the grip of sin is to see through it, to see through the deception it offers us. And the only way we are able to do that is by fixing our eyes on the reality of God. That is why our liberation from sin will always be an act of grace and not of our own effort, because to see straight is not something we are capable of bringing about in ourselves, it comes only as the fruit of long beholding, of returning our gaze again and again to the supreme reality from which we come, until we come to see everything in its light.
When St Antony of Egypt, the great founding father of the monastic life, went out into the desert, he went first to live in the tombs outside of his hometown. He went, in other words, to live in a place that was an acknowledged stronghold of the devil, and he did so as a conscious act of provocation to the master of the house. He was in effect challenging the devil to a duel. And the devil, we are told, was not slow in responding to this provocation. Bringing with him a whole army of demons they beat Antony up so badly that the next day his friend found him lying unconscious on the ground. What has often puzzled readers of the Life of St Antony about this incident, however, is that when, later on, we are given the opportunity to listen in to St Antony’s mature teaching about the demons, the theme that recurs over and over again is their utter and complete powerlessness. The devil, says St Antony, is like a sparrow the Lord has tied up in order to be mocked by us. How then are we to square this with Antony’s own experience? How is it that devil can be simultaneously powerless and capable of beating Antony within an inch of his life? The only possible answer is that the power with which the demons beat Antony in his early days was in some sense a power he himself had invested them with. That by going out into the desert to engage the powers of evil in mortal combat what he was doing was inadvertently investing shadows and fantasies with a power they did not possess of themselves, a power they then turned upon him with a vengeance. The reason Antony was not subject to these same beatings later in life was not because he had grown stronger than the demons, but because he had learned to see through their deception. What happened between Antony being beaten up by the demons and his mature teaching about them was that he spent twenty years shut up in an abandoned barracks in solitude. We aren’t told what exactly he was doing during this time, but we can guess: that with an unveiled face he was beholding the glory of the Lord.
And what applies to St Antony, of course, applies to us, above all as we approach the season of Lent: If we take the power of sin at face value, if we try to match ourselves against it, strength for strength, there is only one possible outcome: we are going to get beaten up. But there is an alternative open to us: we can choose instead to fix our gaze on the supreme reality from which we come, to behold the Lord’s glory until we come to see everything else in its light.
Notice, finally, what happens in the story in the second part of today’s gospel. What does the distraught father of the possessed boy say to Jesus? Does he say “Lord, I beg you to cast out the demon that is terrorising my son”? No. Does he say “Lord, I beg you to heal my son”? No. He says “Teacher I beg you to look at my son.” It is the absolutely unencumbered clarity of the Lord’s vision in which the father of the boy puts his trust. And when the Lord turns that same undistorted gaze upon the demon it has no choice but to flee. Why is it that the disciples are not able to free the boy from the demon? Because they are still trying to cast it out by sheer force of arms. And what is the inevitable result? “They could not”. Jesus does not need to battle with the demons because he sees through them. He sees through the deceptive logic by which they would seek to draw him into a confrontation, a battle of strength and will. But his disciples do not yet see this. “I begged your disciples to cast it out, but they could not”. They could not. If those three little words are not to be the dispiriting epitaph to all our efforts this Lent then we need to know without a shadow of doubt where our hope lies and where it does not.
And we who with unveiled faces behold the Lord’s glory[…]are being transformed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another. Amen