THIS Sunday offers a choice: read the whole of Luke 9.28-43a, or only the first part, up to verse 36. This tells of the transfiguration of Jesus (metamorphosis in Greek), an event described by all three Synoptic Gospels; so there are interesting things to be discovered by comparing Luke’s account with Matthew’s and Mark’s.
The transfiguration is something that I have more than once reflected on as a stand-alone event, both for the Sunday before Lent, and for its own feast day on 6 August. This time, I am exploring the longer Gospel option, which adds in the healing of a boy with epilepsy. When a single event is found in more than one Gospel, we consider not only the versions of that event, but also how those versions are embedded within their individual texts. In this case, Luke’s account of the transfiguration is followed by the healing of an epileptic boy. Matthew and Mark also link these two events, confirming that the linkage has significance in itself.
I am hardly alone in thinking that the two episodes are not juxtaposed through narrative happenstance. Nor am I unique in believing that their belonging together is theological, as much as historical. There is a famous icon of that linkage: a painting by Raphael, not quite completed when he died in 1520. It transfigures the Gospel narrative into its visual equivalent, depicting the metamorphosed Jesus above the metamorphosed boy.
In Raphael’s interpretation of the Gospel, Jesus shines with an inner light that is blue-white in its purity. He is even lifted up from the earth, a detail that the artist has imagined for himself, but which calls to mind John 12.32. He seems to generate his own brilliance. It radiates from him, as light from the Light (John again, 9.5), illuminating Moses, Elijah, and the disciples he had chosen to accompany him.
All three disciples are shielding their eyes from this light. They are not yet able to endure it. In contrast, two small figures to the left are gazing directly. This is probably because they represent two young martyrs. If that is so, they have no historical place within the Gospel. But they do still matter to Raphael’s visual exegesis of the transfiguration Gospel as a whole.
The disciples are there, as so often, to represent us: earthly, embodied humanity, as yet unable to endure the sight of the Lord as he really is. That is our condition, as we need to be reminded of it, on this Sunday, on the brink of Lent. The martyred boys (if that is who they are) matter because they have achieved the beatific vision, just like Moses and Elijah, who also look directly on Christ.
It cannot be an accident that they are boys. They are the heavenly counterpart to that misunderstood, perhaps feared, boy in the lower half of the painting. There, one figure on the apostles’ side is pointing at him, whether out of concern or revulsion we cannot tell. In contrast, two figures in red — one on the apostles’ side, the other on the side of the boy’s family — point upwards.
They are drawing our attention to an event that is historically beyond their sight, but visually, theologically, and spiritually ever-present: the transfiguring potential of Christ. But there is a third figure gesturing upwards to Christ: the epileptic boy himself. His reaching hand could be taken as nothing more than the meaningless movement of one who is not in his right mind. In the time of the Renaissance painter, as much as that of the Evangelists, his condition was feared, because it was potentially dangerous (as in Mark 9.22) and certainly untreatable.
What the onlookers fear as unreason seems to give the boy spiritual insight. He is apparently identifying what his relations, as yet, only long for: someone who will rebuke the unclean spirit, heal the boy, and give him back to his father. His condition unlocks a perception that some of the onlookers cannot reach.
It is unwise to sentimentalise illness, or trivialise it, by claiming that it brings with it compensations. It is also risky to read into the text things that the Evangelist has not said. But the coupling of the two metamorphoses is not only in Raphael’s imagination. It is as real as the Church’s wisdom in connecting those metamorphoses with the one that Lent ought to effect in us.