In the church, we call this Sunday The Transfiguration of the Lord. On this day, the gospel reading takes us up the mountain with Jesus, in the company of Peter, James and John. This mountain moment is the pivot point in the story when everything shifts from Jesus’ work in the villages of Galilee to his work in Jerusalem. Everything shifts — from Jesus’ proclamation of God’s reign in his teaching, his healing, and his radical hospitality — to his journey to Jerusalem, to the hill outside the city where the journey of hope ends in betrayal, injustice, and violent death.
And here, at the midpoint of the story, this luminous mountain moment shines like Easter. He was transfigured before them — his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white. Everything shifts on this mountain.
Six days earlier, Jesus had told his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And it was too much to take in for any of them. “God forbid it, Lord!” Peter said. “This must never happen to you.” Everything shifts on this mountain where the heavenly voice affirms Jesus’ identity and commands his disciples to listen to him – particularly when he tells them about the journey ahead.
I want to read a passage from an essay by Brian Doyle. It’s seemingly about something altogether different, but bear with me.
Very rarely are we able to reach back into the past and mark a moment when our innermost tides began to flow in another direction; but I think I see one, a moment when I realized with a first hint of cold honesty I was being a selfish buffoon—and possibly the moment when I began to grow up. It is beside the point that it took me another ten years at least to get there, or that I am not quite there yet, even in my fifties.
I was sitting at the dining-room table. My dad and my mom and my sister were sitting there also. I believe it was lunch. My brothers were elsewhere committing misdemeanor. I believe it was summertime. The room was lined with books from floor to ceiling. I believe the meal was finished, and my mother and sister were having tea and cigarettes. My father mentioned casually that our cousins were coming for dinner next Sunday or something like that. I believe these were the Connecticut cousins and not the New York cousins. I shoved my chair back and whined and snarled and complained. I believe this had something to do with some vague plans of my own that I had of course not shared with anyone else as yet, probably because they were half-hatched or mostly imaginary. My father said something calm and reasonable, as still is his wont. I said something rude. My mother remonstrated quietly but sharply, as still is her wont. I said something breathtakingly selfish. My sister said something gently and kind, as still is her wont. I said something cutting and sneering and angry.
My mother slowly put down her tea. Odd that I would remember that detail, her cigarette in her left hand and her teacup in her right and the cup descending slowly to the table. The table had a blue cloth, and just outside the window the yew hedge was the most brilliant vibrant green.
As I remember it was just as my mother was putting her teacup on the table, just as the smoke from the cigarettes was rising thin and blue and unbroken like twin towers, just as my father put his big hands on the table and prepared to stand up and say something calm and blunt to me and cut the moment before it spun out of control, that I realized I was being a fool. It wasn’t an epiphany or a trumpet blast or anything epic. It was an almost infinitesimal wriggle of something for which I don’t have good words even now. It wasn’t that I was embarrassed, though I was embarrassed, later. It was more like for a second I saw who I actually was rather than who I thought I was, or wanted to be, or wanted other people to think I was. I understood, dimly, for an instant—I believe for the first time in my life—that I was being a fool.[1]
Brian Doyle calls it A Fool’s Awakening, and awakening is the word, the experience that for me ties his piece to the luminous mountain moment of the gospel. It wasn’t Jesus, I want to suggest, who was transformed in front of his friends’ eyes, it was their manner of seeing him. Suddenly they saw who he really was rather than who they thought he was, or wanted him to be. They saw, not because they had read the right books or studied hard — they saw because they were awakened.
We heard a passage from 2 Peter this morning that makes reference to that mountain moment. The text addresses a situation where believers wrestled with disappointment and doubt. “For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father,”[2] Jesus had told his disciples, and for more than a generation, the church had lived with the hope of Jesus’ return in glory. But when? Why hadn’t he come yet? What was taking him so long? People were making fun of believers; they’re quoted in 2 Peter as saying, “Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since our ancestors died, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation!”[3] Apparently the argument was gaining ground that the apostolic teaching about Jesus’ return as judge was a “cleverly devised myth” and that the prophecies of scripture were unreliable. Cleverly devised myths. Stories made up for people who can’t handle the cold, hard truth that justice is but a dream. For ever since our ancestors died, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation. Sounds remarkably contemporary for a text from the end of the first century, doesn’t it? We expect commercials and campaign slogans to be cleverly devised myths, designed to tell people what they want to hear, but I can’t think of the apostles’ witness as the equivalent of Jesus commercials.
“We did not follow cleverly devised myths,” the author insists, “when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. We had been eyewitnesses of his majesty. He received honor and glory from God the Father when that voice was conveyed to him by the Majestic Glory, saying, ‘This is my Son, my Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.’ We ourselves heard this voice come from heaven, while we were with him on the holy mountain.”
The apostles who were with him on the mountain, the men and women who saw him on the third day, they were not a bunch of myth makers bent on deceiving impressionable people; they were eyewitnesses of his majesty. They were men and women struggling to find words for that moment of awakening, for an experience that opened not just their eyes but their entire being to the presence and promise of God in Jesus. To them the point was not when Jesus would come to judge the living and the dead, but that it was Jesus who would come. They were the first to trust that the unsentimental love of God they had encountered in Jesus was also the power that holds the future, and that in the end, we would not be accountable to no one or solely to ourselves, but to Jesus. I can’t think of those convictions as cleverly devised myths, but rather as a transfigured, awakened, way of seeing, thinking, and being.
John Calvin wrote,
Profane [people] think that religion rests only on opinion, and, therefore, … insist to have it proved by reason that Moses and the prophets were divinely inspired. But I answer, that the testimony of the Spirit is superior to reason. For as God alone can properly bear witness to his own words, so these words will not obtain full credit in the hearts of [people], until they are sealed by the inward testimony of the Spirit.[4]
We have no great certainty of the word itself, until it be confirmed by the testimony of the Spirit. For the Lord has so knit together the certainty of his word and his Spirit, that our minds are duly imbued with reverence for the word when the Spirit shining upon it enables us there to behold the face of God.[5]
We’re about to enter the season of Lent, a time of deep, and much needed, critique of the many cleverly devised myths we tell each other and ourselves. May it be for us a season of awakening to the Spirit’s lustrous presence, and may we all come to behold the face of God – in the words of the prophets, in Jesus on the cross, and in all whom he calls his brothers and sisters. You will do well to be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts — and all of creation is transfigured, shining with the glory of God.
[1] Brian Doyle, “A Fool’s Awakening,” The Christian Century, February 19, 2014, p. 12
[2] Matthew 16:27
[3] 2 Peter 3:4
[4] John Calvin, Institutes, 7.4.; see http://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/institutes.iii.viii.html
[5] Ibid., 9.3.