Keeping Quiet
AM Psalm 89:1-18 • PM Psalm 89:19-52
1 Macc. 3:1-24 • Rev. 20:7-15 • Matt. 17:1-13
Today’s gospel on the transfiguration is one of the richest we have. There is so much in it, so many ways we can read it. It has always struck me how close the feast of the transfiguration in August comes to the anniversary of the first use of the atomic bomb. The reading in church always unsettles me, with its reference to blinding light and Jesus’s shining face. Can there be a more jarring juxtaposition than “This is my son…Listen to him” and Hiroshima?
Then there is the somewhat puzzling note at the end when Jesus instructs his disciples to tell no one about the extraordinary, literally transforming moment they have just witnessed. Why does he do that? There are various explanations, all of them sensible, but as in all such rich readings, Jesus’s command invites other possibilities. We can be sure that the experience has changed Peter, James, and John profoundly. How could it not? Just as surely they must have felt an irresistible impulse, once off the mountain, to stop and tell every stranger what they have seen, the message behind it, and especially how it has changed them, how they have been transfigured.
When Jesus instructs them not to tell that story, perhaps, among other things, he is pointing out what many of us have learned—that describing such experiences to persons outside the faith who have not had them is ultimately impossible. I recall an interview of someone who said trying to describe her own conversion experience was like “doing card tricks on the radio.”
Maybe Jesus is telling the three disciples (and us) instead to keep quiet and treasure such moments, to keep them close, to allow them to do their work, to remain open to their expanding lessons, and to live them out as best we can. That is the only effective way of telling the story. On her desk Suzanne keeps a quote attributed to St. Francis: “Preach the gospel always. If necessary, use words.” Good advice.
Written by Elliott West
Elliott teaches in the department of history at the University and has been a member of St. Paul’s for more than thirty years.