It is as a foretaste of his resurrection, a putting on of his new
glorified body for a moment while he was yet in the old body and the
awful shadow yet between. It may be to something like this as taking
place in other men that the apostle refers when he says: "We shall not
all sleep, but we shall all be changed." That coming death was to be but
as the overshadowing cloud, from which the glory should break anew and
for ever. The transfiguration then was the divine defiance of the coming
darkness.
Let us now speculate for a moment upon the relation of the spiritual and
physical manifested in it. He became, I repeat, outwardly glorious from
inward communion with his Father. In like circumstance, the face of
Moses shone marvellously. And what wonder? What should make a man's face
shine, if not the presence of the Holy? if not communion with the Father
of his spirit? In the transfiguration of Jesus we have, I think, just
the perfect outcome of those natural results of which we have the first
signs in Moses--the full daylight, of which his shining face was as
the dawn. Thus, like the other miracles, I regard it as simply a rare
manifestation of the perfect working of nature. Who knows not that in
moments of lofty emotion, in which self is for the time forgotten, the
eyes shine, and the face is so transfigured that we are doubtful whether
it be not in a degree absolutely luminous! I say once more, in the Lord
we find the perfecting of all the dull hunts of precious things which
common humanity affords us. If so, what a glory must await every
lowliest believer, since the communion of our elder brother with his
Father and our Father, a communion for whose perfecting in us he came,
caused not only his face to shine, but the dull garments he wore to
become white as snow through the potency of the permeating light issuing
from his whole person! The outer man shone with the delight of the inner
man--for his Father was with him--so that even his garments shared in
the glory. Such is what the presence of the Father will do for every
man. May I not add that the shining of the garments is a type of the
glorification of everything human when brought into its true relations
by and with the present God?
Keeping the same point of view, I turn now to the resurrection with
which the whole fact is so closely associated:--I think the virtue of
divine presence which thus broke in light from the body of Jesus, is the
same by which his risen body, half molten in power, was rendered plastic
to the will of the indwelling spirit. What if this light were the
healing agent of the bodies of men, as the deeper other light from which
it sprung is the healing agent of themselves? Are not the most powerful
of the rays of light invisible to our vision?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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