“When day comes,” the young poet had us ask ourselves on that Wednesday in January, “where can we find light in this never-ending shade?” She spoke with passion of the possibility of America and we listened to her confident voice, and with tears in our eyes we watched her face, her hands, her fingers—and our spirits soared. At the end of the poem she so powerfully performed on Inauguration Day, Amanda Gorman returned to that opening phrase and declared,
When day comes, we step out of the shade, aflame and unafraid.
The new dawn blooms as we free it.
For there is always light,
if only we’re brave enough to see it.
If only we’re brave enough to be it.[1]
Brave enough to see the light, and brave enough to be it—she lifted up ancient themes pondered by our ancestors and passed down in the Scriptures, reminders that seeing what illumines the world is no simple matter and that being part of that illuminating presence takes just as much courage as perceiving it.
Jesus asked the disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” And they told him that some thought he was John the Baptist, and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets. Jesus got people’s attention, and they saw connections, but they didn’t quite know who he was. So Jesus asked the disciples. They had been following him for a while, they had heard him teach and watched him heal more than anyone else. “Who do you say that I am?”
And Peter said, “You are the Messiah.”[2] Which was a great answer. Jesus, though, ordered them not to tell anyone about him. Which is odd, because you’d expect that the Messiah announcing the nearness of the kingdom of God would want the word to get out. It appears Peter gave the right answer, but he may have given it too soon. The amazing teachings and astonishing healings were not the whole story, and Jesus began to tell the disciples about the road ahead; he told them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected, and be killed, and after three days rise again. And Peter wouldn’t hear it; he took Jesus aside for a little constructive feedback, something along the lines of “You’re not serious, are you?” Because in Peter’s book, suffering and death were not included in the job description for God’s Messiah.
Peter gave the right answer, yet still he got it wrong. He thought he knew the playbook for God’s Messiah. He didn’t yet grasp yet that declaring Jesus to be the Messiah meant that no one but God and Jesus himself would determine what that declaration meant. Peter was first to learn that to follow Jesus doesn’t mean watching him live up to our expectations, but having him shape and transform our lives.
In the next scene, Jesus taught any who would follow him what it means to say to him, “You are the Messiah.”
If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. [3]
To follow Jesus is to trust that the way of the cross is indeed the way to fullness of life, and that kind of trust has little to do with knowing the right answer and everything with seeing Jesus for who he is.
At about the halfway point of Mark’s Gospel, suddenly there’s this mountain. Don’t go looking for it on the maps in the back of your Bible. This mountain, as Tom Long reminds us, “juts out not from the topography of Galilee, but from the topography of God. This is the mountain of revelation, the mountain of transformed vision, the mountain of true seeing.”[4] There, Mark tells us, Jesus was transfigured before Peter, James and John. It was like light bursting through the seams of Jesus’ clothes—his face and hands and feet shining with luminous beauty—and everything was bathed in this glorious light. It was as though time had collapsed—Moses and Elijah appeared, the great prophets of old, and they talked with Jesus. It was as though the veil separating everyday perception from what’s really real had been lifted.
A cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud came a voice, saying, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” It is not enough to say that Jesus was transfigured on the mountain. It is our perception of him that is changed. In this glorious moment of recognition, we see who he really is: God’s beloved Son. And we’re given this glimpse before his way takes him and us from Galilee to Jerusalem. We’re given this glimpse, because after his baptism we could never have guessed that he was beloved by anybody. Admired perhaps, after those moments when he drew huge crowds and astonished them, but otherwise misunderstood by his followers, rejected by folks in his hometown, drained of his power by scoffing neighbors, and plotted against by the authorities. Beloved? Hardly. And now he was on the way to Jerusalem where a violent storm was gathering.
“This is my Son, the Beloved,” the heavenly voice said. “Listen to him!” The three looked around and they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus. But now everything looked different because of him. Now they looked at the world in his light, now they looked at each other and themselves in his light. Now what they had seen on the mountaintop permeated what and how they perceived in the dimmer plains of everyday. Our journey with Jesus doesn’t take us out of the world and into lofty realms of pure spiritual splendor where we dream of dwelling for good—the journey takes us down the mountain to the plains below and the dark valleys where the whole world is longing to be transfigured. Down the mountain where life is broken and the shadows are long and deep; down the mountain where people languish in crowded camps and flimsy shelters, where too many experience life as though they were the playthings of demons, where corruption is rampant and courage, rare. Our journey with Jesus doesn’t take us out of the world, but deeper into it—as servants of the kingdom of God, as people who dare to believe that the way of Jesus, the way of radical hospitality and courageous compassion that led him to the cross, is the way of life. Not because we know the right answers, but because in the company of Jesus we have caught glimpses of what love can heal, and every glimpse has changed what and how we see. Every glimpse has transformed us.
We know that Lent is only days away. We know that the other hill we climb in the company of Jesus is the one they call Golgotha. And on Golgotha, there is no bright cloud overshadowing the scene, only thick darkness. On the mountain, Jesus’ clothes became dazzling white, but under the cross soldiers tear them into souvenir rags. On the mountain, Moses and Elijah spoke with Jesus, but on the cross he is taunted by bandits. On the mountain, a heavenly voice spoke truth, but on Golgotha a hostile crowd shouts ugly insults. On the mountain, our friend Peter wanted to stay and build dwellings, but at the crucifixion he is nowhere to be found. The contrast is startling and stark. On the mountain, we reflect on our desire to see and be with God, but at the foot of the cross, we kneel in awe as we begin to perceive the depth of God’s desire to be with us.
Peter said to Jesus, “You are the Messiah,” but he didn’t know what he was saying. On the mountain, Peter saw Jesus transfigured and heard the voice of God declaring, “This is my Son, the Beloved.” But only after he had failed repeatedly to stay awake and pray with Jesus in Gethsemane, after he had denied Jesus three times, and after he had fled from the cross was Peter ready to follow the Messiah who suffered, died and was raised. It was not on the mountaintop, but at the lowest point of his life that Peter truly saw who Jesus is. When there was nothing left but hopelessness and the love of Christ, and love prevailed, that’s when Peter knew the Messiah and when he knew himself as his Beloved.
And so we pray, wherever we are on the journey, for the light of God to shine in our hearts that we might be filled with the knowledge of God’s glory shining in the face of Jesus, as Paul so beautifully put it.[5] We pray for the transfiguration of the world and for our own complete transformation in the image and likeness of Christ. And we pray that we may see in the face of every human being what is really there: one of God’s Beloved.
In her novel, Gilead Marilynne Robinson tells the story of John Ames, a minister in a little town in Iowa called Gilead. The novel takes the form of a letter this old man wrote to his young son, and just before the letter ends and the novel closes, we read these words:
It has seemed to me sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of creation and it turns to radiance for a moment or a year or the span of a life and then it sinks back into itself again and to look at it no one would know it had anything to do with fire or light. … But the Lord is more constant and far more extravagant than it seems to imply. Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see.[6]
The young poet declared with confidence that
there is always light,
if only we’re brave enough to see it.
If only we’re brave enough to be it.
Whether you think of it as being brave enough or bringing a little willingness to see—the deep truth the old man and the young poet both point to is that there is always light because the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of creation… constantly… extravagantly. And when our leaders aren’t brave enough to be the light or can’t bring even a little willingness to see it—our eyes have been opened to the fierce and unsentimental love of God, and we are not afraid to step out on faith.
[1] https://www.elle.com/uk/life-and-culture/culture/a35276230/amanda-gormans-poem-the-hill-we-climb/
[2] See Mark 8:27-30
[3] See Mark 8:34-35
[4] Thomas G. Long, “Reality show,” The Christian Century 123, no. 5 (March 7, 2006), 16.
[5] 2 Corinthians 4:6
[6] Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 245.