Village Shepherd

In his now famous book, Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt tells the story of his miserable and greatly deprived childhood in Catholic Ireland. It's a wonder that he survived his childhood at all, and indeed four of his brothers and his only sister all died.

The family was so poor that they never knew when the next meal would appear. They lived on the upper floor of their house because during the winter, the ground floor was flooded with rain water. The father, because he came from Northern Ireland and was therefore rejected by the southern Irish, was constantly out of work. Unable to cope with trying to feed his large family, he became an alcoholic and eventually disappeared altogether. And in the manner of the times, the children were treated extremely harshly at school.

After such an upbringing many people would become brutalised, and perhaps turn to crime. But Frank McCourt had a dream which he kept always before him and which he clung to throughout the worst of times. He'd actually been born in America, and the family had returned to Ireland when they found themselves destitute in America. But young Frank was grimly determined to return to that land of opportunity which he only dimly remembered. He achieved his dream as a young man.

He made good in America and eventually was able to use his appalling childhood to good effect, for amidst all the horror, "Angela's Ashes" is both moving and poignant, and gently amusing.

Somehow, Frank McCourt has redeemed and transformed his terrible childhood. Or perhaps God has transformed and redeemed it for him, and Frank McCourt has seized the opportunity for redemption which God offered him.

Peter, James and John, the three disciples Jesus took with him up the mountainside in today's story, were just ordinary people. They weren't particularly spiritual, they didn't understand very much and they weren't even particularly reliable. For although they were the three singled out after the Last Supper to watch with Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, they all failed to stay awake. And along with the other disciples, they all deserted Jesus when the crunch came.

So although they had this amazing mountaintop experience of transfiguration, and heard God speaking to them from a cloud, nothing much changed for them initially. It was only years later, after Jesus had died and had risen again, that those early experiences came into their own and Peter, James and John became the acknowledged leaders of the early church.

Perhaps it's significant that God spoke from a cloud. A cloud was a recognised medium for encountering God. Back in the early days of wandering in the wilderness led by Moses some 1,500 years before the time of Jesus, God had guided the Ancient Israelites by going before them in a cloud. The Jews always looked back to that time in the wilderness as the golden years, the halcyon age when God was very much present with his people. So Peter, James and John would immediately be aware of God's presence in a cloud.

But maybe a cloud also describes how they felt about things at the time. Jesus had already begun to talk to them about his coming death and about the suffering involved in his death, which must have made unsettling and disturbing listening. The glorious revelation of Jesus as God at this event of the transfiguration, perhaps goes some way towards counter-balancing the fear and anxiety generated by Jesus' talk of approaching death.

It's interesting that the two figures seen on either side of Jesus were two people considered by the Jews never to have died. According to the end of the book of Deuteronomy, God himself took Moses, and according to the second book of Kings, Elijah was carried up to heaven in a whirlwind.

Moses was the bringer of the law, and considered to be the great leader of the Jewish people. Elijah represented the prophets, that other great strand in Old Testament history. The prophets were those people who were closest to God and who interpreted and conveyed God's wishes.

According to prophecy, Elijah was expected to appear first, before the coming Messiah. Jesus later identified Elijah in the person of John the Baptist, the forerunner.

At the transfiguration, Jesus is seen as the central figure flanked by Moses and Elijah, and therefore more important than either of them. So the implication is that although God spared Moses and Elijah from the normal processes of death, his own beloved son must suffer and die. But the very fact of the transfiguration hints that Jesus' glory will overcome even his death.

Some people today enjoy mountaintop experiences, where they have an overwhelming spiritual revelation of some sort. But just as only a quarter of the disciples experienced the glory of the transfiguration, so not everybody has mountaintop experiences.

Many of us muddle along in a bit of a cloud, not quite knowing exactly where we're going, and not able to see the way ahead very clearly. And most of us experience clouds from time to time. But they're not necessarily white, fluffy clouds. The clouds which gather over human lives are often dark and ominous and threatening.

So it's worth remembering that no matter how glorious the transfiguration experience, God didn't speak at all during it, but spoke afterwards from the cloud which followed it and which overshadowed them.

And God didn't give a particularly earth-shattering message, but simply repeated the words used at Jesus' baptism, "This is my beloved son, listen to him."

Perhaps when we're overshadowed by cloud, we sometimes expect God to give very specific directions, telling us exactly what to do and how to do it. But if we're expecting that, maybe we fail to hear the quiet voice and the gentle message which simply says, "Listen!"

Listening to God can transfigure lives. Although he may not have been aware of it, Frank McCourt was able to listen sufficiently during the dark and overshadowing cloud of his appalling early childhood, to enable a later transfiguration of his life.

And although it wasn't immediately apparent, those ordinary disciples listened sufficiently to God's voice in the cloud to enable their lives to be transfigured at a later date.

Perhaps if you want your life to be transfigured, you simply need to listen to God when the clouds overshadow you.