Our lessons about the Transfiguration say
what I believe about Jesus better
than most any other
Scripture.
Some of you
may not buy this. You don’t have to.
I didn’t buy
it myself even when I was ordained.
But after a
few decades of Christian practice,
this seems true to me.
Jesus was a
mountain man.
He led his
disciples up three mountains
– the one where he taught them the
Beatitudes
and to turn the other
cheek
– the Mount of the Transfiguration
-
and
finally the Mount of Olives.
We can spend
our whole lives climbing mountains
-
the
career mountain, the money mountain,
the mental health mountain,
the happy family mountain,
even the religion mountain.
There are so
many mountains,
each with a prize on top.
Moses was a
mountain man.
He climbed
Mt. Sinai.
It had the
law on top.
It had the
moral order of the cosmos.
Moses
climbed the mountain of ethical living.
Elijah was a
mountain man.
He climbed
Mount Carmel.
It had
enlightenment on top,
the awesome silence of God’s voice,
the voice we hear in contemplation.
Elijah
climbed the mountain of spiritual experience.
Figuratively
speaking, St. Paul was a mountain man too.
He climbed
both mountains – ethics and spirituality.
As a
Pharisee he practiced the moral life to perfection.
As a
Mer-kobah mystic, he experienced the most advanced
states of spiritual contemplation.
But one day
Paul,
like the disciples on the Mount of
the Transfiguration,
had a vision of light shining from
Jesus
– and that vision changed everything.
20 years
after that vision, Paul looked back
on all his mountain climbing and said,
“Whatever gains I had, these I count
as loss
(compared to) the surpassing value of knowing
Christ Jesus my Lord.”
He no longer
billed himself as a just man or a mystic.
He didn’t
bill himself at all.
He said, “It
is not ourselves that we proclaim.
We proclaim Christ Jesus as Lord and
ourselves as your servants
for his sake.”
Paul tossed
aside every prize he had ever won
at the top of every mountain and said,
“I’d rather have Jesus.”
The
disciples in our Gospel lesson
had already left most things behind.
They’d given
up homes, families, careers.
But they
still had their religion.
They had the
Law of Moses and the spirituality of Elijah.
So when they
saw their rabbi on a mountaintop
talking with the father of ethical
religion
and the father of Jewish
spirituality,
it all came together.
And Peter
said to Jesus, “Let’s build three dwellings here
– one for you, one for Moses, and
one for Elijah.”
He meant it
as a compliment, to put Jesus on a par with those giants.
But Peter
had missed the point.
So God
showed up as a “bright cloud” and thundered,
“This is my beloved Son . . . .
Listen to him.”
And the
disciples were afraid.
They were
afraid because they had rashly answered
life’s ultimate question
– the question of what really
matters
– and they had gotten it wrong.
They pushed
the existential Jeopardy buzzer too soon.
On a
multiple choice question,
with the answers being morality, spirituality,
and Jesus;
they’d answered “all of
the above.”
But that
wasn’t’ God’s answer.
They hadn’t
grasped what blind Paul saw so clearly
– that the ultimate value of God’s
own self
was fully present in
this human person,
this peasant preacher who would end up a convict, this Jesus.
All of
morality and all of spirituality lead to this paradoxical point,
this glory in the dust.
That this
simple man should be God does two mind-blowing things:
It shatters our definition of God
with vulnerability; and
It shatters our definition of
humanity with glory.
The
discovery that the final answer is not
the moral order or a transcendent
experience
but a person – that’s a
lot to swallow.
But it is
the key to intimacy with God.
The story of
the Transfiguration shows us why.
The
disciples thought the terrifying cloud was the epiphany,
the manifestation of God.
They thought
the voice from heaven was the divine revelation.
So they fell
on the ground and hid their faces.
But the real
epiphany was what happened next.
Matthew
Chapter 17 tells us this same story
with a little more detail than Mark.
The real
epiphany was Jesus.
It happened
when he touched them and said,
“Get up and do not be afraid.”
God is most
perfectly seen and heard not as a thundercloud
sending us diving to the dust in
fear,
but as a brother saying “Get up and
do not be afraid.”
John Calvin,
a man who wrong about so many things, got this right.
He said,
“(A)ll thinking of God, apart from
Christ,
is a bottomless abyss
which utterly swallows
up our senses . . . .
In Christ, God . . . makes himself
little,
in order to lower
himself to our capacity;
and Christ
alone calms (us)
so that (we) . . . dare
intimately approach God.”
Jesus makes
it possible for us
to be intimate with God.
In Jesus, we
can embrace the perfect value
from which all good things derive
their value
as we might embrace a friend.
Jesus brings
divine love into the flesh of human life.
God can
touch us only with a human touch.
A surgeon named Richard Selzer tells a story
from his medical practice that is a
picture
of what happens for us in Jesus.
He writes:
“I stand by the bed where a young
woman lies
. . . her mouth twisted in palsy, clownish.
A
. . . facial never has been severed . . .
(T)o remove the tumor in her cheek,
I had to cut the
nerve.
“Will my mouth always be like this?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say, “It will because the nerve is cut.”
She nods and is silent,
but the young man
smiles,
“I
like it,” he says.
“It’s
kind of cute.”
He bends to kiss her crooked mouth,
and I, so close I
can see
how he twists his
own lips to accommodate hers,
to show her that
their kiss still works . . . .
(I)
hold
my breath . . . .”
Just so,
“Jesus touched them, saying,
‘Get up and do not be
afraid.’
And when they looked up,
they saw no one except Jesus himself
alone.”
