LAST SUNDAY, as part of my training as a Methodist minister, I shared this reflection. It was inspired by and adapted from the Liturgy for the Feast of the Transfiguration and Hiroshima Day, 6th August, by Norman Shanks (Wild Goose Publications 2015).
The Bible readings were Luke 9:28-36 and 2 Corinthians 5:16-6:2.
On 6th August 2025, two events are commemorated:
The first is the Feast of the Transfiguration. On this day churches across the world celebrate Jesus being glorified and affirmed as the chosen Son of God. He is revealed as the image of God in dazzling white light.
The second is Hiroshima Day. This year marks 80 years since the USA dropped the world’s first atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later, an even more powerful bomb exploded over the city of Nagasaki. The dazzling white light of these bombs brought disfiguration not transfiguration, killing thousands of people made in God’s image.
Today our altar table is covered with white paper cranes (see photo). A Japanese folk tale tells that anyone who folds 1000 paper cranes will have a wish come true.
This photo is of Sadako Sasaki, who was two years old when the atom bomb destroyed Hiroshima. She died aged 12 from leukaemia, the ‘atom bomb’ disease.
She hoped that, if she made more than 1000 paper cranes she might be granted her wish to run again.
The crane has become a symbol of peace throughout the world. Thousands are made and sent to the peace parks in Hiroshima and Nagasaki every year.
In the Peace Park in Nagasaki, they hang in multi-coloured cranes from the bells either side of a huge statue which declares peaceful existence for all.
And in Hiroshima there is a statue dedicated to Sadako, paid for by children from all over Japan. An inscription at the base says: ‘This is our cry; this is our prayer, peace in the world.’
US and UK leaders justified the use of atom bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasak as necessary to end the war with Japan. We know that it did not end all war. The World Population Review website estimates there are nearly 40 countries in the world today which are at war with others or fighting among themselves.
In 1938, as Europe feared that the Great War between 1914 and 1918 would not be ‘the war to end all wars’ as many had hoped, visionary and social reformer George MacLeod was driven by a belief that faith is grounded in action. He formed a community on the Scottish island of Iona, in which trainee ministers and unemployed workers from Glasgow lived, worked and worshipped together to rebuild the ruined Iona Abbey. More than 80 years later, the Iona Community continues as a dispersed community of people working for peace and justice.
In 1965, George MacLeod wrote a powerful article focussing on the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6th August 1945, the date widely celebrated by churches all over the world as the Feast of the Transfiguration.
McLeod spoke of the fusion of ‘matter’ and ‘spirit’, our material and spiritual world, and affirmed that each atom is permeated, indeed identified with, ‘the emergent body of Christ’. Thus, he said, in the Hiroshima bombing:
‘we took His body and we took His blood and we enacted a cosmic Golgotha. We took the key to love and we used it for bloody hell.’
Golgotha is the Aramaic name for a skull-shaped hill in ancient Jerusalem. The occupying Roman forces used it as a place of execution, where Jesus was crucified. The Hiroshima bomb, for McLeod, was ‘a cosmic Golgotha’, the place of execution of more than 100,000 people in one day.
This event was a kind of ‘reverse transfiguration’, turning upside down the biblical account of the experience of Peter, James and John who encounter God’s glory revealed in the transfigured Jesus on the mountaintop. It forces us to encounter the reality of nuclear weapons here and now. Eighty years after the first atom bomb exploded over Hiroshima, the World Population Review website estimates that nine countries now have more than 12,000 nuclear warheads between them, capable of destroying the entire world many times over.
The story of the Transfiguration may seem mysterious, abstract, even nebulous – shot through with a wonderful, shining power. By contrast, the Hiroshima bomb was perceived as being ‘brighter than a thousand suns’. Leaders of the USA and UK justified it as ‘the lesser of two evils’ compared to the potential for a much greater loss of life if the war with Japan continued indefinitely. As George MacLeod wrote in 1965,
‘the world potential for perpetrating bloody hell (as “the lesser of two evils”) is now a million times Hiroshima’.
Sixty years after McLeod wrote those words, that potential is even greater. A single modern nuclear warhead can be 15 to 30 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. The largest ever tested was 3,000 times more powerful.
In the original Iona Abbey, the cloister would have been a garden area with a tree, representing the tree of life from the biblical Creation story. In the cloister of the reconstructed Iona Abbey today stands this striking bronze statue – the Descent of the Spirit, by the Lithuanian Jewish sculptor Jacques Lipchitz. The sculpture shows the Virgin Mary supported in a starry cloud, descending to Earth represented by animals, birds and humans, and carried by the Holy Spirit, a Dove.
The sculptor made this inscription on the statue:
‘Jacob Lipchitz, Jew, faithful to the religion of his ancestors, has made this Virgin for the better understanding of human beings on this earth, so that the Spirit may prevail.’
From the back where the inscription is, the sculpture has a bomb-like appearance – it’s unclear whether that was the artist’s intention. It frequently provokes comment and discussion, and it has been the focus of many a reflection – not least on Hiroshima Day – on the urgent imperative of peace-making in our time.
The Feast of the Transfiguration celebrates the promise of new life, the hope that, within the miracle and mystery of God’s transforming grace, beyond our everyday existence, things can be different. God’s purpose of peace leaves no place for nuclear weapons. For many years churches have spoken out and campaigned against them as inherently evil and morally wrong. In the UK in 2016, despite widespread opposition, the House of Commons approved the decision to maintain the UK’s nuclear deterrent beyond the early 2030s. Even military leaders have questioned the case for maintaining nuclear weapons. The costs is massive, and not just financially, when there is an urgent need for more spending on services like health, education, and social care. Arguments about nuclear deterrence ‘keeping the peace’ and maintaining ‘security’ are shallow illusions which do not reflect the true nature of peace and security.
Previous commitments by world leaders to multilateral disarmament have made little significant progress. Claims from countries which have nuclear weapons, that other countries should not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons, lack moral justification. The UK’s replacement for its Trident missiles seems to have more to do with keeping a seat ‘at the top table’ on the UN Security Council, in an attempt to hold on to international dominance and hark back to an imperial past.
As St Paul’s letter to the Corinthians reminds us, we are called to be ‘ambassadors of Christ’ and to share in God’s ‘ministry of reconciliation’, guided by the vision and values of God’s kingdom.
As we commemorate the Feast of the Transfiguration and recall the atrocity of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 80 years ago this week, let’s thank God that ‘in Christ God is reconciling the world to himself, not counting our trespasses against us’.
Let’s pray that now may be an ‘acceptable time’ for disarmament and peace-making.
Let’s consider how we can express our Christian commitment to peace, in the political parties we support, in demonstrations, vigils and acts of witness. As St Paul reminds us, reconciliation starts with me, with you, with us.
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