Thomas Kleinert
Three years ago, on a sunny day in January, a young woman addressed a group of people from the West Front of the U.S. Capitol. The live audience was limited, due to COVID restrictions, but millions of people were watching or listening. Only days after the January 6 attack on the Capitol, at the presidential inauguration, Amanda Gorman, the National Youth Poet Laureate, recited her poem, The Hill We Climb, which she had written for the occasion.
When day comes we ask ourselves,
where can we find light in this never-ending shade?
Gorman spoke of the possibility of America, and listening to her confident voice, and watching her face, her hands, her fingers, many of us had tears in our eyes. “When day comes,” she declared at the end of her moving performance,
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—the poet lifted up ancient themes of hope and bravery, long pondered by our ancestors and passed down in the Scriptures, reminders that seeing what truly illumines the world is no simple matter and that being part of that illuminating presence takes courage.
Somewhere in Galilee, Jesus asked the disciples, “Who do people say that I am?”, and they told him what they had heard and overheard. They mentioned John the Baptist, Elijah’s name came up, and that folks thought of him as one of the prophets. Then Jesus asked, “Who do you say that I am?”
And Peter answered, “You are the Messiah.”[2] There’s no indication that he had to think for a minute. He just said it. He’d been there from day one, and this was his conclusion having witnessed the teachings and healings of Jesus: You are the Messiah. And just then, Jesus began to tell them about the road ahead; that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected, and be killed, and after three days rise again.
Peter wouldn’t hear it. He took Jesus aside for a little feedback, perhaps something along the lines of “You’re not serious, are you?” And you all know how Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Get behind me, Satan!” Harsh words. We don’t get to tell Jesus how to be the Messiah. He didn’t come to live up to our expectations, but to mess with them. In the next scene, Jesus turns to the crowd and says,
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]
Seeing what truly illumines the world is no simple matter and being part of that illuminating presence takes courage, because the cross is not an unfortunate episode in Jesus’ ministry, but central to his mission and to what it means to call him Messiah.
And now Mark has us follow Jesus, with Peter, James and John, up a high mountain. We’re about halfway between Jesus’ baptism and his crucifixion, and there’s this mountain—jutting out not from the topography of Galilee, but from the topography of our desire to know who Jesus is, and who he is to God, and to us. This is the hill we climb: the mountain of revelation, the mountain of transformed vision, of seeing what’s really real.[4] There, Mark tells us, Jesus was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white. They saw Jesus, but they saw him like they had never seen him before. They saw heaven shining through him. The three of them saw him chatting with Moses and Elijah, the great prophets of old; it was as though time had collapsed into one glorious moment of heaven touching the earth.
And Peter got it almost right, again. He was breathing the air of fulfillment. He wanted to build tents, wanted that moment to last, wanted the earth and his own life never to be without this reality of heavenly presence again. What he didn’t see yet was that this moment, the whole reality of heavenly presence, was not tied to the place where they were, but to the one they were with: Jesus.
When at Jesus’ baptism the voice from heaven declared, “You are my Son, the Beloved; I delight in you,” we as readers had the privilege to hear it. None of the disciples were there. And now, just as Jesus began talking about his suffering and death, a voice from the cloud addresses them directly, saying, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” They are given, along with us, this wondrous affirmation of who Jesus is: God’s beloved Son. We are given this moment of profound insight, 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 his opponents. Beloved? Hardly. And now we’re on the way to Jerusalem with him, where a violent storm is gathering.
“This is my Son, the Beloved,” the heavenly voice said. “Listen to him!” When the three looked around, they saw only Jesus. And down the mountain they went, but the transfiguration wasn’t just a memory. It changed the way they saw him, and it began to change the way they looked at everything. They began to look at the world beyond Galilee in his light. They began to look at each other and themselves in his light.
And Mark, of course, invites us to join them as followers of Jesus, to walk with them on the way, and to find our own answer to his question, “Who do you say that I am?” Our journey with Jesus doesn’t take us out of the world and into lofty realms of pure spiritual splendor —the journey takes us down the mountain to the plain below and to the world longing to be transfigured. Down the mountain where life is broken and the shadows are long and deep; where people languish in crowded camps and flimsy shelters, where too many live as though they were the playthings of demons, where isolation 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 are brave enough to believe that the way of radical hospitality and courageous compassion, the way that led Jesus to the cross, is the way of life.
We go deeper into the world because, in the company of Jesus, we have begun to see what love can heal. We go deeper, because every glimpse of heaven he has given us, has changed us. We go deeper, because he embodies the reality we don’t want the world or our own lives to be without.
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 that hill, 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 even by the men crucified with him. On the mountain, a heavenly voice spoke truth and love, but on Golgotha a hostile crowd shouts ugly insults. On the mountain, Peter wanted to stay and build, but at the crucifixion he is nowhere to be found. On the mountain, we reflect on our desire to see and be with God, but at the foot of the cross, we begin to perceive the depth of God’s desire and commitment to be with us.
Peter didn’t know what he was saying when he told Jesus, “You are the Messiah.” 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—only then 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 nothing was left but despair and the love of Jesus, and love prevailed, that’s when Peter knew the Messiah and himself as God’s Beloved.
And so we pray 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 God’s Beloved in the face of every human being we encounter.
In her novel, Gilead Marilynne Robinson tells the story of John Ames, a minister in a little Iowa town. 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]
It strikes me how similar they sound, the old minister and the young poet who 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.
There is always light because the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of creation… constantly… extravagantly. We may not think of ourselves as the brave ones, but what if we were brave enough to follow Jesus on the way, and be the light we see?
[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] See 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.