Saint Margaret’s
Anglican Church
Budapest, Hungary
The Sunday Last Before Lent
2 March 2025
“This is my Son, my Chosen…”
The story of the Transfiguration of our Lord makes an appearance in our lectionary, or calendar of scriptural readings, each year on the last Sunday before Lent, as it does again today in our passage taken from the Gospel of Luke. In fact, today has become known in church circles as Transfiguration Sunday. The story of the Transfiguration is found in all three of the so-called Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke; and the event itself marks a turning point in Jesus’ messianic mission and a crossroads, if you will, a point of deeper revelation and understanding but also as well the foreshadowing of Jesus’ impending death and Resurrection.
Jesus, along with Peter, James, and John, ascends an unnamed mountain, specifically to pray as Luke alone tells us, and it is there in prayer that his appearance is somehow altered, and the disciples, enveloped in a mysterious cloud, hear a voice proclaiming, “This is my Son, my Chosen,” and so making sense in word and sound of that which the disciples have just seen and witnessed with their eyes. Jesus in other words is proclaimed from heaven as the Son of God; and the Transfiguration is the ultimate disclosure of the Christ, the conclusive acknowledgement of his nature and mission.
“This is my Son, my Chosen…”
Arguably, the only words spoken by the Father in the entire Christian Scriptures or New Testament. And significantly, we heard essentially these same words from above spoken earlier in the Gospels at the Baptism of our Lord at the Jordan where he was again described by Luke, tellingly, as praying. “A voice came from heaven,” Luke tells us, “You are my Son, my Beloved.” No wonder the Transfiguration is called in theological jargon a Christophany, a manifestation of Christ in our world. What was first proclaimed then at the Jordan is now confirmed and again attested at the Mountain and in prayer.
The Transfiguration is in other words the spilling over of eternity and of Christ’s divinity into our poor earthly realm. As is each Baptism. Each Baptism is itself a confirmation of the truths we learn at Christ’s Transfiguration. The voice of the priest, the voice of Father John this morning, saying “I baptise you,” is his and our reaffirmation in faith of Christ’s Sonship and divinity and of our sharing in the life of the Son, the Chosen and Beloved.
Massoumeh Lydia has heard again those words from heaven uttered at our Lord’s Baptism and Transfiguration. And in her Baptism, she too is transformed into the likeness of Christ, as has been each of us. She is baptised into the Cross of Christ. And like our Lord himself, she is baptised and transformed in prayer. “Do you come to Christ, the way, the truth and the life?” Father John will soon ask Masoumeh Lydia. And with the disciples of Christ across generations and in faith she will respond, “I come to Christ,”.
As does this day yet again each of us.
Amen.
The Revd Dr Canon Dr Frank Hegedűs
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