11 th February: Transfiguration Sunday: II Kings 2.9–15

Christ’s Mantle

Various companies and organizations engage in succession planning today: working out who will succeed someone in an organization, particularly in the top jobs. The Church of England has recently established a talent pool from which future Deans and Bishops will come. As succession planning tends to be bureaucratic and managerial, how appropriate is it for the Church to engage in it? It certainly wasn’t the way that the prophet Elijah operated. Elijah tells Elisha he will have to wait to see whether God will bestow the prophetic role upon him (vv. 9–10). In other words, it’s down to God not the prophet as to who succeeds him, who receives his mantle. When Jesus takes Peter, James, and John with him up the holy mountain where he is transfigured before them, is this meant to indicate that they are the ones to receive Christ’s mantle? Because God has granted only these three the vision of Christ glorified, does this make them Christ’s successors? If so, this is much closer to Elijah than that of contemporary succession planning.

But after his death who was Christ’s successor, who received the mantle? We can see different answers to that question in the New Testament. Clearly, the gospels present Simon Peter as the Chief Apostle; and Acts flags up the newcomer Paul as the Apostle to the Gentiles and, hence, the future of the Church. Whatever the significance of both Peter and Paul, if we look closely in Acts, we discover that in Jerusalem someone else is ‘in charge’. The role that Jesus’ brother James plays as leader of the Church in Jerusalem makes him the Archbishop of Jerusalem. ¹ After all, it is James (not Peter) who presides at the first ever Synod and declares its verdict in Acts 15; and, moreover, it is James to whom Paul (however reluctantly) has to relate.

These different answers have some parallel to the tension within early Islam after the death of Mohammed. Who should succeed him? Clearly there had been no succession planning, so how were they going to handle this emotionally-charged question? The fundamental rift within Islam between Sunni and Shi’a (that continues in our own day) comes back to the different ways Moslems tried to answer that question. The Shi’a assumed that it needed to be someone from Mohammed’s family, his blood line (as James was in relation to Jesus) and the dominant group, the Sunni, who believed that it should be one of Mohammed’s immediate followers who should receive the mantle (similar to Peter as a disciple of Jesus).

Although in early Christianity there seems to have been something of a Jesus dynasty in the leadership of the Church in Jerusalem beginning with James, ² this never really took hold because of the flight of Christ-followers to Pella in 66, and the city’s destruction by the Romans in the year 70, plus the rapid expansion of the Church throughout the world. So the split that has so affected Islam didn’t have a similar effect in Christianity. At the same time, Elisha’s succession of Elijah provides more of a paradigm. Who had witnessed Elijah’s assumption into heaven and could therefore take up the mantle? Remember, this is similar to the criterion for the appointment of Judas Iscariot’s successor to the Twelve—it had to be a companion who was witness to Christ’s resurrection (Acts 1:22). Also, the paradigm of Elisha’s succession of Elijah, where witnesses are successors, applies to the Eleven who witness Jesus’ assumption to heaven. So, our Old Testament reading applies much more to the Ascension than it does to the Transfiguration, which it partners today. But both stories, like the Elisha story, point up the significance of God selecting people to witness divine happenings that are withheld from most of us. So The Twelve are successors. This is by divine selection, not human succession planning.

All this helps us to understand a phrase that has sometimes been controversial in the history of the Church: apostolic succession. At the most basic level, apostolic succession points to the fact that The Twelve were chosen, as a group, to be Christ successors; and, then, in continuity, those who were chosen to be elders/bishops/overseers in succession to the first Apostles, creating a lineage. A friend of mine is a Zen Buddhist of a particular English strain and he can show me his lineage: who taught him to meditate, and who taught them, etc., etc., back to the female founder of that particular movement. There is something very powerful about being able to trace your spiritual tree in this kind of way and it has had a fascination in parts of the Church as if it bestowed automatically some spiritual authority. But what quite clearly happens in Christianity alongside appointments of elders/bishops/overseers is that it is the Apostolic Church as a whole that is Christ’s Successor, continuing Christ’s work and witnessing to his life and significance. As Elisha took up Elijah’s mantle and carried on Elijah’s work, but in his own way, so, too, the Church carries on Christ’s work in different ways in different times but in conformity with Christ. This conformity is expressed in the Apostolic Writings, i.e., the New Testament, and later the Apostolic Creeds. These have become benchmarks by which we may discern authentic Christian teaching and practice.

In one sense, we can’t receive Christ’s mantle as Elisha received it from Elijah—we didn’t see the resurrected Christ or his ascension to heaven. Originally this didn’t constitute a problem because the Apostles or their companions were still alive and able to pass on Christ’s teaching and practice. But what happens when those successors, those who did receive Christ’s mantle are no longer here? This is when we have to believe in the Apostolic Church, that it is the Church as a body that has received Christ’s mantle. In the divine succession planning, it is the Church that is Christ’s successor. Christ’s mantle has been passed to us, corporately: we are the Body of Christ here and now. As individual Christians we are not to see ourselves as Elisha or Peter or Paul or James. Individually, we are not Christ’s successors. But we are part of the Apostolic Community that has received Christ’s mantle. Indeed, the Church is the extension or outworking or continuation of the Christ Event. ³

Christ’s mantle has passed to us—to the community of those who follow and who witness and celebrate the Risen, Ascended, and Glorified Lord, that Peter, James, and John were privileged to behold, ahead of time, on the mount of Transfiguration. Although we were not with them then, we are with them now. In the Church we know what it means to worship our Transfigured Lord as we witness to God’s transfiguring work as we look forward to the ultimate transfiguration of all things. To this we witness and pledge ourselves, as the Church of Jesus Christ, as Christ’s Body on earth, as the Apostolic Community who by divine grace has received Christ’s mantle.