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Seven Ways of Looking at the Transfiguration

Struggling with Transfiguration Sunday? Sarah Hinlicky Wilson offers seven fresh angles on this mysterious event, weaving theology, exegesis, and preaching insight.

Seven Ways of Looking at the Transfiguration
Sarah Hinlicky Wilson
Thornbush Press, 138 pages
August 6, 2024

Seated around my seminary president’s dinner table, a group of clergy and students debated our least favorite Sunday to preach. Hands down: Transfiguration Sunday. The Transfiguration defies explanation … it’s rich and mysterious … and yet it’s also the exact. same. story. every year, leaving preachers scrambling for a fresh take.

After just three years of preaching, pastor and theologian Sarah Hinlicky Wilson was convinced she had run out of things to say. She dug deeper, translating for herself the accounts in the Synoptic Gospels and 2 Peter, and realized the story was deeper than she realized. “All I had to do was tug on one slender thread within the Transfiguration story to find that it was connected to an intricate, gorgeous web stretching across the whole of Scripture,” she writes.

Hinlicky begins with the earliest Gospel, Mark, and then analyzes each addition or change in Matthew and Luke. For example, when Matthew says Jesus’ face “shone like the sun,” she mines each word for meaning, starting with the Greek and drawing connections with Matthew’s exhortation to “let your light shine” (from the Sermon on the Mount), as well as to the details of Jesus’ crucifixion, which Matthew describes as occurring when “the whole earth was dark.” With rich discussions like this, there’s more than enough to inspire a host of sermons.

And it’s this framework that makes Seven Ways of Looking at the Transfiguration eminently useful. It combines theology and biblical exegesis, always with preaching in mind; Hinlicky strikes a friendly tone, like that of a trusted colleague rather than a know-it-all. The “seven ways” are neatly offered lenses such as “eschaton (Elijah)” or “tabernacles (Israel)” through which to peer at the story, but she’s equally clear that there are so many more.

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