WHAT'S IN A FACE?
War is usually talked and written about on the grand, or at least national scale.
But the true horror and madness of war can best be seen on the personal, individual level. When two human beings confront each other close up with gun or bayonet, they wonder what on earth they are doing and who or what has brought them to this tragic, absurd predicament.
We saw this in the fields of Flanders between 1914 and 1918. We saw hand to hand fighting in Thatcher’s Falklands war.
By now we thought we had come to redefine war as something fought on a remote scale, pressing buttons on computers to launch distant missiles with a sense of detachment. But now individual civilians in Ukraine, with heartbreaking, hopeless bravery, are arming themselves with pistols and rifles with which to try to kill individual Russian soldiers.
In the end life is lived face to face. And what more wondrous sight than Christ’s or any human face transfigured by the glory of God.
So here’s a truly uplifting story of transfiguration to be found in a 2005 film called “TSOTSI” - 6 days in the life of a young black South African thug eking out a living in Soweto by petty thieving and violence, including murder.
In the middle of his crime spree, (spoiler alert) he steals a car and is brought up short by discovering a baby strapped to the back seat.
The film then shows how he came, in his artless, fearful and impatient way to love this baby and also later the girl he forced (initially at gun point) to feed it. In the end his conscience drives him to return the baby to its parents and face the consequences of the murders he has committed.
One of the most remarkable things about this truly wonderful film is the face of the actor playing Tsotsi. No histrionics – just an oh-so-subtle change of expression from cold fear and hate to warm sorrow and compassion. His face was, in a word, transfigured.
This film is an almost sacred illustration of the truth that the human face, as a work of creation, must surely be God’s masterpiece. It is unique to each person born. In the eye of the beholder, it can be anything from unbearably ugly to exquisitely beautiful. It is capable of expressing , particularly in the eyes and the mouth, the most subtle messages of feeling.
In Genesis Chapter Two,, there’s a lovely, poetic (if slightly silly) story, which illustrates the serious truth that we were made in God’s image. As one hymn writer put it:
And when from dust he fashioned Adam’s face,
the likeness of his only Son was formed:
His Word incarnate, filled with truth and grace.
Faces are capable of conveying every emotion. Sometimes they are haunted with fear, harrowed by misery or contorted with greed or rage. And yet the very honesty with which our expressions give away what is in our hearts can melt the observer into compassion at the sheer frailness of humanity.
When you visualised a man or woman carefully, wrote Graham Greene, you could always begin to feel pity. When you saw the lines at the corner of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.
It is unnatural, and often dishonest, to disguise our feelings behind a so-called “poker face”. Attempts to do so tend to be unsuccessful, as skilled police interrogators well know. They only have to slip in a surprise question and the mask will slip. If our faces are transparent as they should be - a window on the soul - then they will be a good barometer of our spiritual state, anywhere from fair to stormy.
And of course those whose facial barometers give a spiritual reading of “set fair” – we might call them saints - have what I can only describe as a particular look about them: their faces have been TRANSFIGURED by their love of God.
I’m not talking about the brainwashed vacant glaze of the born-again. And I’m certainly not talking about the exquisitely painful piousness of the holier-than-thou. I’m talking about tranquillity, warmth, openness, vulnerablility and yet fearlessness which comes from complete trust in God.
THAT is the way in which the first Christian martyr S.Stephen’s face was transfigured as he was condemned and stoned to death.
This is what it says in the Acts of the Apostles: And all that sat in the Council, looking steadfastly on him, saw his face as it had been the face of an angel...........and he, being full of the Holy Spirit, looked up to heaven and saw the glory of God.
THAT surely is how the face of our Lord Jesus Christ himself was transfigured on the mountain. Never mind the Blue Daz whiter than white effect on His clothes. The real point is that His FACE SHONE WITH GLORY.
.The word was made flesh and dwelt among us and we saw His glory, says that magnificent prologue to John’s gospel. And this morning Luke says that three disciples caught a glimpse. They saw His glory.
And of course, as usual, Peter and the other two didn’t understand what it meant. They wanted to stay on the mountain. They wanted to bottle the experience and cling on to this magic, out-of-time moment.
You and I can sometimes get a flash of the transfiguring glory of God, not necessarily on a mountain, although the beauty of nature does have something transcendental about it.
No, it could be observing human antics from the top of a bus, at home reading an inspiring book, gazing at a picture of a face of a holy man or woman, listening to Mozart’s Ave verum corpus.
For me, it has often been witnessing the dying and death of someone who has surrendered themselves to the love and protection of God and whose face becomes serene, even radiant.
As the thug Tsotsi in the film eventually hands the stolen baby back to its father, his face betrays great emotional turmoil and we see for the first time tears starting to pour down his cheeks.
His face is transfigured and his life is transformed from ugliness to beauty by this moment of true glory.
But then the camera pans back to reveal the police cars and the guns that are trained on him. He is ordered to put his hands above his head. He does so ever so slowly and the tableau is, I believe, supposed to suggest the image of a crucifixion.
Tsotsi’s moment of redemptive glory is over and now he must face at the very least a whole life term of imprisonment for the crimes he has committed. But, now that he has saved his soul, perhaps even that is bearable compared to a few more short, unredeemed, months or years of hate, fear and killing in the township, almost inevitably with a meaningless ending via a bullet from a rival.
And what of Jesus’s own transfiguration?
There is no escaping the fact (although it did at the time escape the disciples) that the transfiguration foreshadows the crucifixion. For a brief moment, if you like, it tears a hole in the veil between heaven and earth. But the veil comes back across.. According to Matthew, the veil of the Temple will not be torn in two until Jesus dies on the cross.
But we’ll get to Good Friday in due course. Today, think about what happened next after they trooped back down the mountain.
The next little thing on Our Lord’s crowded agenda was yet another down-to-earth healing: an epileptic boy, an only child with a distraught father on whom Jesus took His characteristic compassion.
You see - a little prayer and a little transfiguration (a little heavenly magic) and then time to roll up His sleeves and get on with the practical job of bringing God’s love to a broken world.
So it was for Our Lord. And so it should be for us, His followers.