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Meditation for August 5, 2024
The Eve of The Transfiguration
Reading: John 1:10-18
He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.
And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. (John testified to him and cried out, ‘This was he of whom I said, “He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.” ’) From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.
Meditation-Jeremy O’Neill
Tomorrow is the feast of The Transfiguration, and the daily office lectionary for today includes one of my favorite passages of scripture, the prologue to John’s Gospel. Much has been written and said about the opening lines (“In the beginning was the Word…”) but I have always been interested in the second half of the prologue selected for today. We hear of Jesus’s presence in the world and also his involvement in the creation of the world as we know it, but John quickly turns to how the world has did not accept Jesus.
Whenever I hear this passage, I think about how quick our society is to reject people, just as Jesus was rejected by “his own people.” In our world, the people who have been rejected are often blamed for their own rejection. Rather than question why we can’t accept them, we are quick to blame them for being different in some way society deems unacceptable. We choose not to accept people based on so many different aspects of who they are, from appearance to financial status, from gender identity to citizenship.
The incarnational reality of Christ is that he is aligned with those whom society has not accepted. He comes into the world and his own people do not accept him to the point of crucifying him because he is different and does not conform to their expectations of him. Jesus was also different because of his holiness. The passage continues “we have seen his glory, the glory of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”
In the Transfiguration, the man from Nazareth is shown to be different and holy as he is transfigured in bright white and a voice from heaven proclaims “this is my son, my beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” This places Christ, who has chosen to become incarnate amidst the people whose differences society has deemed unacceptable, in a position of glory and holiness which the world has never seen.
The collect the Book of Common Prayer has for tomorrow’s feast asks that we might be “delivered from the disquietude of this world.” I happen to love the word “disquietude,” and think it perfectly sums up the world Christ entered into. I hope to remember that it was this disquietude that assumed that Jesus needed to be killed because he was different and because he didn’t conform to society’s expectations of him, and be aware of who Christ is always calling us to be.
Collect for the Feast of The Transfiguration
O God, who on the holy mount revealed to chosen witnesses your well-beloved Son, wonderfully transfigured, in raiment white and glistening: Mercifully grant that we, being delivered from the disquietude of this world, may by faith behold the King in his beauty; who with you, O Father, and you, O Holy Spirit, lives and reigns, one God, for ever and
ever. Amen.
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