Under a dark cloud?
Sunday 2 March 2025, The Sunday next before Lent
The Very Reverend Nicholas Papadopulos, Dean of Salisbury
2 Corinthians 3: 12—4: 2
Luke 9: 28–36
‘And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit’
At the eastern end of the Cathedral’s South Quire Aisle stands the ornate memorial to George Moberly, Bishop of Salisbury from 1869 to 1885. Above his recumbent effigy are four carved medallions which depict scenes from his distinguished ministry. One of these features him as Headmaster of Winchester College, a post which he held for thirty years; another features his delivery of the University Sermon in Oxford on Easter Monday 1847.
His text for that sermon, published under the title The Transfiguration of Christians, is the text with which I began, from Saint Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, our first reading this morning: ‘…all of us…are being transformed…from one degree of glory to another’. Moberly believes in this transformation: the condition of baptized Christians, he argues, is a condition of glory; ‘…glory wrought by the Spirit, shed from the face of God, mirrored on the separate Spirit-born souls of the baptized’. But this belief is a challenge rather than a comfort. For if the baptized receive God-given glory, then surely their lives should reveal God-given glory. And to Moberly, in the England of 1847 this does not appear to be the case.
‘I do not speak of the worst cases only’ he says ‘…not indeed of the poor at all, so much as of those who know more and should be better…how do they seem to live? How dark, how cold, how far from the reality of Christian life…is the aspect of our time, our people, and ourselves’.
But the sermon is a call to arms rather than a cry of woe. Moberly is a schoolmaster, and he is addressing a university congregation. He believes that he and his hearers have been equipped with what he calls the ‘machinery’ that will be necessary to effect a change and to equip the baptized to live lives worthy of the glory that is theirs. Unsurprisingly, the ‘machinery’ is lifelong Christian formation, from Baptism to Confirmation; from Confirmation to regular Communion; from regular Communion to mature repentance: in short, to a life worthy of its glorious condition.
What’s not to like? Well, Moberly’s world is not ours. He could assume that the people among which he lived were largely baptized Christians, however nominal their allegiance to the faith. Moberly could rely upon a Church which was accorded deference and plausibility, and which could act with authority. And Moberly could mine the rich seam of that profound Victorian sense that tomorrow would be better than today – that the inexorable trajectory of history was towards greater civilization, greater harmony, and greater prosperity.
Do you remember that sense? I do: it flourished briefly in the late 1990s, and its disappearance is what (to my mind) most clearly distinguishes Moberly’s world from ours: confidence about tomorrow feels as distant as the Poor Law and the workhouse. How many of us believe that the climate crisis will be averted in our generation? Or that warring nations are being drawn ever closer together? Or that our children’s lives will be better than ours? And if the decline of this sense of unstoppable advance has been gentle for some years then in the first weeks of 2025 it has become precipitous. The tectonic plates have moved and the assumptions with which we have lived for decades have been subverted: assumptions about the value of democracy, about the integrity of sovereignty, about the authority of scientific enquiry; assumptions about international institutions and about common values. We are approaching Lent and truly, a black cloud of pessimism covers us.
Two hundred years before Moberly preached his University Sermon on the Transfiguration of Christians John Hacket, Bishop of Lichfield in the mid-seventeenth century, preached a series of sermons on the Transfiguration of Jesus. The sixth of these is devoted to one verse: ‘While he was saying this, a cloud came and overshadowed them; and they were terrified as they entered the cloud’. Hacket is no mean theologian: the mere thought of preaching 8,000 words about a verse that is comprised of just twenty words horrifies me, as I am sure the thought of listening to it would horrify you.
But Hacket had had a classical education, and as he speaks of the cloud he reaches for his Herodotus and recalls the Battle of Thermopylae. This congregation will of course remember that in that battle 300 Spartan warriors under the leadership of King Leonidas are confronted by an overwhelming Persian force in a narrow mountain pass (the Spartans are clad only in swimming trunks, if a recent film version is to be believed). Hacket reminds his hearers that Leonidas is told that the airborne mass of Persian darts would be so great that it would cover up the light of the sun.
A cloud of hostile darts, blotting out the light of the sun: haven’t the headlines and images of 2025 felt like that? Threatening; dark; dangerous. It’s not that Moberly’s world was trouble-free; 1847 was the year when by royal proclamation a National Day of Fast and Humiliation was held across the UK in response to the Irish famine. But his quiet confidence in the unseen work of God and in the capacity of the Church to spearhead national renewal – these testify to a confidence and hope that (unless I am very much mistaken) you and I rarely encounter, whether in private conversation or in public pronouncement.
But Hacket then reminds his hearers of Leonidas’s response. When he is told that the weight of the Persian darts will blot out light of the sun he shrugs. ‘Then’ he says, ‘we will fight in the shade’. Hacket loves this. ‘A courageous word’ he says, ‘and made very fit for a Christian’s mouth’. For Hacket is ultimately a Bishop of the Church, not a classicist of the academy. He does not cite Thermopylae merely to impress with the breadth of his cultural hinterland. ‘Believe in the Lord,’ he says ‘and we are all under his custody and defence; beseech him to spread his wings upon us, and the Holy Ghost will overshadow us. Then we will fight in the shade: to that shadow we betake ourselves to shun the fire of anger, and the heat of concupiscence; under that shadow will we fight against our Ghostly enemies’.
The days are dark, but our turbulent local weather conditions – the clouds of fear, anger, and pain clustered above Kyiv and Gaza City – cannot disturb the eternal weather pattern made evident on Mount Tabor. No unchecked leader; no brutal war; no unjust peace; no ‘deal’ can dispel the cloud that settled on Peter, James, and John – the cloud that settled on us – the cloud of God’s presence. The three apostles entered the cloud and – Moberly was right – we have entered it too, by the water of baptism and the bread of the Eucharist. We can choose to sit despondently in the gloom. Or we can, through our prayer, our service, and our love make the darkness of these days the darkness of the Easter sepulchre: the darkness that presages the explosion of new life; the triumph of the glory of God which burns within each of us. Amen.