This week was the anniversary of the death of the most beloved Presbyterian minister of the last century ... do you all know who that is? Of course ... it was Fred Rogers, and on his show, he used to have a word of the day. He’d be addressing the camera, maybe putting on his sweater or his tennies, and he’d say “The word for today is ‘cow’” and he’d ask us “can you say cow?” and then a beat: “I knew you could.” And I liked the word of the day so much that I decided we needed one for today, so our word of the day is “intertextual.” Can you say intertextual? I knew you could . . . and though Mr. Rogers would have had a cool little low-tech puppet show about it, you’ll just have to be content with this boring old sermon . . .
But why “intertextual?” Well, it describes a way of reading scripture that all us seminary types are taught, but doesn’t get much play out in the pews . . . We usually read the Bible in chunks we call passages, isolated one from another. Problem is, that’s not usually the way it was meant to be understood. Though few—if any—writers of scripture knew what they wrote would end up as scripture, they were all written with a body of literature in mind. The books and letters we call the New Testament were written with the Old Testament Scriptures in mind; thus the themes and events depicted in the Chris tian scriptures echo, play off-of, and play around with themes and events in the Hebrew Scriptures. In a similar way, part of a New Testament book will often reference another part of itself or, indeed, another book in the New Testament altogether.
If we don’t pay attention to these things, we miss a large part of the meaning intended by the author. It’s like in a film, when you’ve seen an actor before, you can’t help but be affected by it, you can’t help but make the connection, even if only on a subconscious level, and it colors how you view the present film. Filmmakers take advantage of this all the time, most obvious when an actor is cast against type . . . nice-guy Tom Hanks was cast as a mob killer in The Road to Perdition, and it gave the role part an extra resonance, another layer of depth . . . and the director wanted this to happen, was counting on it . . . and so writers of Scriptures counted on their audiences to get the intertextuality, to make the connections, to add that little extra fillip of meaning to their own writing.
And today’s passage is the poster-child for intertextuality, it’s positively lousy with the stuff, so it behooves us--as the careful biblical scholars we are--to take it into account. First, the most obvious, the Old-Testament angle . . . who else do we know who had a theophany on a mountain top? Of course, we just heard it a few minutes ago . . . Moses goes up onto the mountain, and a cloud covers the mountain, and the glory of the Lord settles on Mt. Sinai . . . and the cloud covers it for six days, and on the seventh day—get it, seven? The earth was created in that many days, so the establishment of the law is the new creation?—on the seventh day, the day God rested, God calls out of the cloud . . . and it’s during those 40 days on Mt. Sinai that the Hebrew religion is established . . . a new creation indeed . . .
In our passage, Matthew is careful to situate Jesus’ mountaintop experience “six days later,” and six days later than what, you ask, and if we read just before our passage, we see that the transfiguration happens six days after Jesus predicts his own second coming: “For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done.” And now—six days later, on the seventh day—Jesus trudges up the mountain, and as with Moses, a cloud has descended upon the mountain, and God speaks out of the cloud, just like with Moses, and it’s clear that we’re supposed to read this as a new creation, just like with Moses. And is it conceivable that Matthew also wants us to view Jesus as a kind of a new Moses . . . perhaps bringing a new covenant?
In a few minutes, we will take the bread and break it and take the cup and pour it and it is indeed the new covenant in Chris t’s blood . . . and ours is the new covenant, and Jesus is the new Moses . . . and as if to emphasize that fact, there’s Moses up there with him, and Elijah to boot, and here’s Jesus hob-nobbing with the two greatest figures in Israelite history, or at least two pretty great ones, anyway, and again, the message is clear: Jesus is of a kind with Moses—who brought the Law—and Elijah, the greatest of the prophets. He’s right up there with the law and the prophets, one with them, in a sense . . . it’s like all those political endorsements with the candidate being photographed with the movie star . . . Jesus is of a kind with the Moses and Elijah, with law and prophets.
And Peter’s down with that, he’s cool with it, so much so that he wants to build three booths—our translation has dwellings, but it’s better as booths—he wants to build them booths, one for Jesus and one for Moses and one for Elijah, he wants them to stay together—perhaps to celebrate metaphorically the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles, to celebrate this oneness of Jesus and the Judaic past. But even as he’s speaking, God cuts him off, a bright cloud envelops them—again, like Moses—and a voice comes out of the cloud, and says “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him.”
And if that sounds familiar, it should: it’s more intertextuality, more echoes from the past, this time the recent past, and from the book of Matthew itself. These are the exact same words that come down from the cloud at Jesus’ baptism—"This is my son the beloved with him I am well pleased" and we are reminded of that dove and that time when the mission of Jesus came upon him, and we can see that our vision of Jesus and Elijah and Moses cut from the same cultic cloth is only partially correct, in Jesus we’re dealing with the beyond, the over and above, not just the along-side, and this freaks Peter and the others out, and they fall on their faces in fear, with the words of God ringing in their ear—this is my Son, and to the words from the river, the voice adds "listen to him," and when they do, what’s the first thing they hear? "Do not fear . . . get up, and do not be afraid" . . . and when they do that, when they look up, there’s no more Moses, no more Elijah, no more transfiguring light, just Jesus, and they get the picture: there is nothing but Jesus, the lone fulfillment of Law and prophets, there’s nothing but the Chris t.
And now, today, 2000 years later, this story has become our scripture, our text of texts . . . and we are charged with reading our own life, of examining our own narrative intertextually, in light of those texts written so long ago . . . it can be argued that this is the task of interpretation, of preaching, even, that we read our own stories and find echoes in them of our scriptures . . . that it’s in those echoes that we sometimes find application, overlap, places where what was written so long ago become available to us, here and now, today . . .
And of course, the obvious echo for these times is the transfiguration itself, and in Greek it has a stronger sense, of transformation, of metamorphosis . . . and we are seeking this transformation, seeking to open ourselves to God’s transforming grace, knowing full well that—as was the case with Jesus on the mountain, and Moses on his mountain before him, it is the spirit of God who will do the transfiguring, who will descend upon us like a dove and create in us a new morning.
The temptation is to be like Peter, to set up booths, to build houses to protect and enshrine the past, but the God of transformation, the Spirit of transfiguration, booms out of the clouds, out of the fog of the future, and says No! This is my son, the beloved that you are proclaiming. Listen to him . . . and like the disciples there on that mountain, we cover our eyes, we fall on our faces, we are sore afraid . . . but then Jesus touches us, and we remember God’s words—This is my son! Listen to him, and when we do, when we turn our eyes upon him and him alone, we hear the words that are as germane to us as they were to Peter and James and John: Get up, get moving, and above all do not fear. Amen
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