Human experience rarely remains neatly contained in tidy boxes. Our emotions blur and bleed into each other, sometimes defying our ability to define them with any precision. I am often struck, for example, by the poignancy of beauty, as well as the luminous edges of pain. While tempted to separate and distinguish such things, I try to pay careful attention when beauty and pain seem inextricably bound together.
Emotional complexity punctuated nearly every moment on my recent trip to southern Africa, where I visited five countries over two weeks as I hoped to gain some fresh insights into the work of racial justice and ecological healing, especially how to integrate these modes of engagement more effectively. I could not have asked for a better encounter to begin that adventure than the one that capped the very first day.
After visiting the Nelson Mandela Foundation in Johannesburg, I was relaxing with a glass of wine at the hotel bar. The bartender was young, maybe in his late twenties, and his skin was a deep, beautiful black color, like midnight—actually, more like the deepest, darkest blue of Lake Michigan on a moonless night.
His name, he said, is Nkululeku, a Zulu word that means “freedom.” When he told me that—when he said “My name means freedom”—his face lit up, nearly shining, truly transfigured.
Perhaps you’ve seen this happen to a human face when someone speaks a clear and riveting truth, or because of the tender contours of the occasion, or perhaps the depth and richness of character in the encounter itself; a face can shine.
There I stood, a white man of European descent, whose ancestors had stolen so much of the freedom of that Black man’s ancestors, and not so terribly long ago.
My name means freedom, he said.
Just then, not only his face but the space between us and the air around us became radiant with what I can only call “divine glory.” I can’t possibly know whether any of this occurred to him, but I want to trust that for both of us that moment offered at least a glimpse, just a little taste of what it means to launch along a road toward healing and reconciliation after a long, traumatic history of injustice and violence.
“My name means freedom,” he said. And I nearly burst into tears.
Yesterday was the last Sunday after the Epiphany, which sits on the edge of Lent, and most churches always hear from one of the Gospel accounts of what’s called the “transfiguration” of Jesus. This is a pivot point in the gospel narratives, literally a “mountaintop experience” when Jesus radiates divine glory—the “appearance of his face changed,” Luke says (9:29), his face “shone like the sun,” Matthew says (17:2), and as many of us heard from Mark yesterday, his garments became radiant (9:3).
This story is a pivot point for each of these gospel writers as each of them frames this moment with what Jesus will soon face in Jerusalem—betrayal, suffering, and death. Beauty and pain are bound together in this story, just as they are in the iconic story from the Hebrew Bible the lectionary also gave us yesterday—grief and glory intermingle as the prophet Elijah is caught up in a heavenly chariot of fire leaving behind his dear friend and protégé Elisha.
It’s a pivot point on the liturgical calendar as well. The story of transfiguration ushers us into the week with Ash Wednesday in it, and we recall this mountaintop glory at the beginning of the very same week when ashes will appear on our foreheads, reminding us that we will one day die.
Both biblically and liturgically the last Sunday after the Epiphany presents a peculiar confluence of beauty and pain—which is itself an epiphany. The intermingling of glory and suffering resides at the very heart of Christian faith, and the Gospel writers won’t let us avoid it, at least not for long. I don’t mean that we just happen to hear about the beauty of transfiguration and the pain of crucifixion on the same day, as if this were an accidental coincidence. More pointedly and more severely, the Christian Gospel presents these as inseparably linked.
Like many others, I have struggled for many years with the prominence of sacrifice and suffering in Christian faith, perhaps especially when these are framed with glory. And yet, for at least one, brief shining moment of encounter with Nkululeku—a young South African Black man whose name means freedom—I suddenly and rather surprisingly realized how deeply I longed for racial healing and then still more, how much I would gladly sacrifice for the sake of justice.
If this can be true for us, if mortal, finite human beings can long for new life, and be willing to give much, maybe even all, for the sake of abundant life, then surely this is true for the infinite mystery of Love we call God—the God of Jesus who would give anything and everything for healing and wholeness and flourishing life, and this is indeed glorious to ponder!
Poised as we now are on the brink of Lent once again, I feel some urgency to consider carefully how to spend my time, my energy, and my resources in this season. The world is desperate for more than just my usual half-hearted attempts to give up chocolate. To be clear, spiritual disciplines of relinquishment do offer great value, but not for the sake of sacrifice alone, as if sacrifice itself were a good thing. Surely spiritual disciplines matter most when they guide us toward that abundant life God intends for the whole creation.
Nkululeku inspired me to imagine what a Lenten season might look like if it were devoted to freedom—our own and for others. This would retrieve a compelling practice from the earliest Christian traditions that used “freedom” and “salvation” interchangeably, and it seems high time to resurrect that powerful practice (pun intended).
How, for example, can we more intentionally promote freedom from the economic hierarchies that turn living beings into commodities, whether as human slaves or poached ivory from elephants?
Where we do we still need freedom from colonial classification schemes that make the color of our skin, or whom we choose to love, or the species into which we just happen to be born the basis of our value?
What can we do to facilitate a deeper freedom from the dynamics of cultural shame that keep so many trapped in unseen prisons of loneliness and a relentless, quiet despair?
Ash Wednesday will remind us that we are made from dust and that we shall return to dust, so perhaps we can help each other likewise remember the precious freedom Jesus offers from the fear of death.
That fear—and all the anxiety that attaches to our own mortality—that fear expresses itself in so many destructive ways, both individually and socially, from an epidemic of opioid addiction to the relentless burning of fossil fuels.
As God’s own beloved, we are held and embraced by God forever. This matters more than I usually imagine or can bear to conceive. I don’t know why just yet, but this conviction of God’s embrace deepened dramatically as I stood on a southern African savannah with elephants and buffalo and zebras and giraffes. As tears streamed down my face as I watched the sun set behind rolling hills and African teak trees, I knew—I just knew with unshakable certainty—that we never have to fear death again, not ever.
Freedom from death’s terror gives us the freedom to live fully, and then to offer even our very lives for the sake of a world of peace with justice.
Every year the story of transfiguration launches us toward Lent. In this story, the Jesus who is about to suffer and die is also the Jesus who shines with divine glory. A voice comes from Heaven in this story and calls this Jesus “the Beloved.”
I understood this story better when a young South African man said to me, “My name means freedom.”
