Thursday 27 February 2014

LECTIONARY SUNDAY NEXT BEFORE LENT: We Were All Transfigured (Matthew 17:1-9)

WE ALL WERE TRANSFIGURED
We’ve heard it said,
That the voice from above was heard before,
The words that echoed down out of that great cloud,
Had passed through ears before,
Been known before,
We’ve heard it said,
And now we have heard it,
First-hand,
The “man” we knew stood before us,
Resplendent in bright light white,
Face like sun,
Brilliant and hewn from ethereal gold,
Dressed in angelic shimmer,
Colours so rich and intense,
Yet simply white,
Diamonds hovering in the air,
The son lost in the sun’s light,
And the sun renewed in the son’s visage,
We saw and we heard,
We hoped to build tents of remembrance,
For the moment when amidst Moses and Elijah he stood,
We wanted to capture that occurrence,
As a reference point to illustrate who he is,
Who he was,
Who he was before his breathing shallowed,
And the sag in his chest spoke of strangulation and asphyxiation,
When choking and drowning-in-air overtook him,
We wanted a tabernacle to point to,
To point others to,
But only when the stoned was on its side,
Only when hell’s gates had been kicked down,
And kicked through,
And kicked out,
Only then were we to speak of what we’d seen,
Of what we’d heard,
And more importantly, what we felt,
Golden face and clothes tingling with creation’s light,
In that moment we truly saw,
Yet afterwards his voice,
It belonged to him,
There was no room for doubt,
It was him,
We too were changed,
We too truly knew,
We too were taken out of life’s mundane every day,
And brought back into life’s momentous every day,
And his words echoed in our hearts,
And the echo rumbles on still,
“Get up”,
“Do not be afraid”.


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