Transfiguration
What happens when human beings are transfigured?
Now about eight days after these sayings Jesus took with him Peter and John and James and went up on the mountain to pray. And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed… Luke 9: 28-29
I was sitting in church on this past Transfiguration Sunday and I heard the texts on Jesus’ transfiguration in a new way.
The traditional theological interpretation of the Transfiguration as depicted in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew 17: 1-8; Mark 9: 2-8 and Luke 9: 28-36) is that the divine nature of Jesus is revealed to three of his disciples, Peter, James and John when his body changes.
I thought about the divine nature of human bodies, created in the image of God, Genesis 1:26-27, and thought about how transgender people embrace their physicality in a new way. There are some transgender folks I have been privileged to know as they embraced their sexual identity.
Their bodies change. They become more the bodies that match their sexual identity. As their bodies change, their faces can seem illuminated as their identity is revealed.
Now, of course, the Transfiguration texts in the Gospels are metaphors. As theologian Sallie McFague points out so well in her book Metaphorical Teology: Models Of God In Religious Language, religious language is profoundly metaphorical.
“Most simply, a metaphor is seeing one thing as something else, pretending "this" is "that" because we do not know how to think or talk about "this," so we use "that" as a way of saying something about it. Thinking metaphorically means spotting a thread of similarity between two dissimilar objects, events, or whatever, one of which is better known than the other, and using the better-known one as a way of speaking about the lesser known.”
Jesus was clearly changing in the eyes of the disciples, and they were struggling to understand that. They coped by telling stories of mountains and stones and voices from the sky in order to convey what was so difficult to understand.
In the same way, people who are transgender are changing into the person they really are.
But then along come the haters, the people who can’t really grasp profound change even when it is right in front of them. They promote prejudice instead.
Prejudice against transgender people is, frankly, cheap politics, a way to demonize a small group and gin up fear to get votes. It is reprehensible.
And these reprehensible views are often based on reprehensible theology, a denial of God’s image in human beings. These haters are theological and political parasites and, like actual parasites, they want to cling on to or burrow inside a host organism, in this case Christianity, and steal nutrients and cause harm without providing any benefit.
The nutrients, the nourishing food of Christian faith, is that core belief that people are created in the image of God and are God’s child even as Jesus was God’s child.
I have never understood the hatred aimed at trans people. Even when I didn't (still don't?) understand what a trans person means when they say their body doesn't match their assigned gender. As far as I'm concerned, I'm not qualified to say they're not who they say they are. I am qualified to say that I won't hate someone for trying to be fully human, as long as they're not heaping hatred on others. And even then, I won't hate the haters.
I really appreciate your characterization of haters as parasites on Christianity. How do we get rid of parasites? First recognize them and what they're doing -- "stealing nutrients and causing harm without providing benefits." Then remove them from our organism, and shower them with anti-parasite medication. Hmmm, what would that be? It's hard to love a hater. But maybe we can start by asking God to keep loving them, even if we can't.
Printing this one out for a future Transfiguration Sunday sermon!