Grace Presbyterian Church
February 15, 2015, Transfiguration
2 Corinthians 4:3-6; Mark 9:2-9
With Glory
It’s one of those
days, liturgically speaking.
One of those days
that isn’t quite a major event in the liturgical calendar. It’s certainly not on the level of
Christmas or Good Friday or Easter, not even quite on the level of, say,
Pentecost or Epiphany. It’s there,
and it must mean something, but explaining or understanding just what it means
isn’t easy at all.
The
Transfiguration of the Lord – there’s an unwieldy name for you – marks in the
liturgical calendar the final Sunday before Lent starts. Its subject is that peculiar incident
we’ve heard from Mark’s Gospel, in which Jesus takes a few of his disciples up
a mountain and something happens that is rather difficult to describe.
“Transfiguration”
itself is an unusual word at best.
Dictionary.com defines being “transfigured” as “to change in outward
form or appearance; transform,” with a secondary definition of “to change as to
glorify or exalt,” a definition which is largely based on its usage to describe
this event.
In fact we really
don’t use this word very often outside of this story. We’re more likely to use a word like “transformation,” “transmogrification,”
or maybe “metamorphosis,” which is actually close to the word used in the Greek
text. Of course popular culture
can affect how we understand any of these words. The toys and movies about those robots that change into
other kinds of machines can easily pop into our minds when we hear or see the word
“transformer,” and the comic strip Calvin
and Hobbes used the word “transmogrifier” for Calvin’s fanciful machine for
changing himself into someone else (that word became so uniquely associated
with that comic strip that to this day, readers still think “transmogrify” was
a made-up word, though it is quite real).
All of these words
carry some implication that a person or thing changes appearance, but not
necessarily changing in substance or person. The robot can still be called Optimus Prime even when it
looks like a truck. Calvin is
still Calvin even if he’s “transmogrified” into a tiger or frog or whatever his
imagination comes up with.
What happens in
today’s gospel is not exactly like that.
Mark’s early
readers would have realized that something was up the moment that Mark
mentioned that Jesus and the three disciples were going up a mountain. Anyone who know their Hebrew Scriptures
would have remembered that interesting things happen on mountains.
One of the first
such examples would have been Moses and his trips up Mount Sinai to receive the
law from the Lord. In Exodus 34,
when Moses came down from the mountain after receiving the re-dictated Ten
Commandments, his face was glowing, after God his Moses in a cleft in the rock
and allowed divine glory to pass by Moses.
Another, similar
mountain encounter with the glory of God is recorded in 2 Kings, when the
fugitive prophet Elijah encounters the glory of God not in fire or earthquake
or whirlwind, but in the “sheer silence” that followed. Mountains are often – not always, but
often – places where holy and mysterious things happen, and not just in the
Hebrew/Jewish tradition. Mark’s
readers would have likely taken the hint, and expected something unusual to
happen. And in Mark’s usual
no-nonsense, no-frills, no-time-wasted fashion, that expectation is rewarded.
Our author quickly
tells readers that Jesus began to … change. To be transfigured, as translators have usually chosen to
translate μεταμορφὠθη (metamorphothe), the Greek word found here. As Mark then describes the event, Jesus
changes, but the change that Mark describes seems to be mostly about light; “his clothes became dazzling white, such as
no one on earth could bleach them” (v. 3). This would also remind Mark’s listeners about those previous
mountaintop experiences, with Moses’s face ending up glowing and Elijah
glimpsing the dazzling glory of God.
And
then, as if any more clues were needed, we get those very figures themselves
appearing in this scene. Elijah
and Moses appeared next to Jesus, talking with him – now there’s a conversation
you wish somebody had been able to record!
By
this time Mark’s readers must have felt as if they were being hit over the head
with the obvious; this man Jesus is of God. Mark told us way back at the beginning of the gospel that
this was the “son of God” (1:1), and
the scene before the three disciples seems to us (who after all have the
benefit of Mark’s narration and storytelling to clue us in) to be a magnificent
and irrefutable demonstration of the glory of God manifested in Jesus. This would seem to be as much proof as
anybody could need, right? This
man is from God, right? The son of
God?
You
know how there always seems to be one person, no matter the situation, who
always seems to say the wrong thing at the wrong time? No matter how beautiful, how glorious,
how transcendent the moment, they manage to chime in with something that’s just
wrongheaded or ugly or maybe just … off?
Peter is a good bet to be that guy in the gospels. In all of the gospels he manages to be
that rare combination of (1) always willing to speak, and (2) not necessarily
the sharpest knife in the drawer.
In this case, these two traits combined to cause Peter to blurt out a
suggestion that, for all his good intentions, ruined the moment. It was as if a resplendently beautiful
bride took a pratfall halfway down the aisle.
To
be fair, Peter’s suggestion about building three “dwellings” (also translatable as “tents” or “booths”) wasn’t
totally wacky. One of the possible
interpretations of Jewish tradition at that time was that the “Feast of
Booths,” a regularly-observed event, would be the time when God would intervene
in Israel’s fortunes and usher in a new age. Peter seems to have jumped to the conclusion that the
appearance of Elijah and Moses with their teacher was just this sign that God’s
new age was arriving. Peter,
though, was forgetting about the very things this teacher Jesus had been
telling them, unpleasant things about suffering and death. Perhaps he wanted to forget them, or
hoped that this intervention would make them unnecessary. Whatever it was, Peter’s blurted-out
suggestion, probably babbled in a moment of bafflement and uncertainty, was
just … off.
To
make that clear, a cloud descended over the mountain, and when it lifted Elijah
and Moses were gone and Jesus stood alone before the disciples, with a stern
warning from above to “Listen to him!”
It
was a moment of revelation, in a way.
The Transformers and Transmogrifiers that came up earlier were about
concealment. Even the very
packaging on that Transformers toy described them as “Robots In Disguise.” This, on the other hand, wasn’t a
disguise. Just the opposite; for
those few transcendent, dazzling moments, the disciples caught just a glimpse
of Jesus as he really is, in all the divine glory that is his.
It
had to be hard for the disciples not to wonder as they headed down the
mountain, particularly when Jesus started going on about their not telling
anybody about what they saw, why they couldn’t see this all the time, or at
least more often.
Why
is it that we can’t see this glory?
Why do we have to live in the dark and grey of the world, down in the
valley instead of up on the mountain?
The
Apostle Paul may be helpful here.
In writing to the Corinthians he puts forward an idea that God does not choose to be “veiled” from our
perception. Instead, Paul
suggests, the “god of this world”
has “blinded the minds” of those who
do not believe. Paul is not
literally suggesting that there is another god at work, but he is a firm
believer that evil is active in the world, and that this evil seeks to separate
people from God. It's not like we need another god or evil to blind ourselves to things we don't want to see anyway, and that glory can be a little blinding sometimes. Furthermore, this
separation is exactly why we are called out to bear witness to the light of God
that we have seen, the revelation we have known in Jesus, the indwelling of God
that we know through the Holy Spirit.
If others do not see the light, it is our job to bear witness to
it.
This
is why we don’t get to stay on the mountain. There are too many in the valley or on the plain, in the
city or out in the countryside, from whom the light is veiled, and our calling
is to bear witness, to let that light that is within us shine through us.
It’s
not our light, of course. It is
the light of God’s glory, the light that illumined Jesus on the mountain,
dazzling and intense and brilliant.
It is that glory, that transcendence that points us towards hope,
knowing that the Jesus transfigured on the mountain goes before us, intercedes
for us, suffers and rejoices with us in our sufferings and rejoicings.
For
this we rejoice. The Transfiguration,
strange as it may be, is a moment of hope, maybe one last reminder before the
penitence and reflection of Lent that we are not abandoned, we are not
forsaken, we are not alone. To
borrow from John’s gospel, the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness
cannot overcome it.
For
light, for transfiguration, for glory revealed, Thanks be to God. Amen.
Hymns (PH
’90): “Immortal, Invisible” (263), “Jesus on the Mountain Peak” (74), “Arise,
Your Light Is Come” (411)
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