This is a transitional passage, at least
the way the Church treats it: we put it on the last Sunday of the first period
of Ordinary Time, a time that’s ordinary only in the sense that it’s not a
festival season like Christmas or Easter or Lent. Of course, I’m talking about the Church
Calendar, for you folks new to this whole Presbyterian thing. That’s the calendar that doesn’t follow the Gregorian one that the Western world observes .
. . the church doesn’t begin its year
with hangovers and party-burn out on the first day of the coldest month of the
year . . . it begins it with Advent, the first Sunday in December, or the last
in November, like it was this year. And
it’s good to think about why it does that . . . it does it to reenact the life
of Christ, in its worship and liturgy, every year. Thus, because we celebrate the birth of
Jesus—away in a manger, no crib for a bed—a week before January One, we begin our new year earlier as well.
Aha! You say. Gotcha!
Why don’t we begin the new church calendar on December 25 then, why do
we begin it four weeks before the
blessed event? Is it so we can throw
Mary a baby shower, or maybe help her decorate the nursery before the big
day? Well, it’s preparation, all right,
but not for Mary: it’s for us. To
prepare us for the cataclysmic event
that changed the world. It’s so we can
stop and take a breath, stop and wait upon the Lord as we are commanded to do, and while we wait, to
ponder it in our hearts, just as Mary pondered it all in hers.
And
this Sunday, here we’re on the cusp of another of those church periods of
contemplation and prayer: Wednesday
night we’ll have the traditional service, seven o’clock, right after supper, we’ll
do a service of readings, hymns and the imposition of ashes, then we’ll
continue our Lenten journey in the Fellowship Hall by experiencing the
labyrinth, an ancient devotional practice. Then we’ll have forty days of it, forty days
of thinking about how maybe we were
there when they crucified our Lord, and I don’t want to let the cat out of the
bag or anything—because we’ll talk about it next week—but it’s 40 days because
of the 40 wilderness days, when the devil tested Jesus with three temptations.
But the church puts Transfiguration
Sunday right before Ash Wednesday, and the question is why? Why would we put it right before his 40 days
in the wilderness, when chronologically,
it happens well into his ministry, well after
the temptations that begin it? Well,
let’s take a look: the first thing to notice is that it’s almost like a
tableau, like one of those bathrobe pageants a lot of churches—including this
one—put on around Christmas time, with Jesus and Mary and the wise men all
standing around for a half hour or so, only here the tableau is Jesus standing
beside Moses and Elijah in the heavenly spotlight.
Jesus leads Peter and James and John up
on the mountain—and it isn’t an accident that it’s the same three that are in
the garden—he leads them up onto the mountain-top and suddenly, his face and
clothing start to glowing, and all of a sudden there he is, flanked by maybe
the two greatest prophets in the Hebrew canon.
And they’re hob-nobbing away, talking about his departure from this
mortal coil, which is about to happen at Jerusalem, and that’s one reason the
church puts this event right before Lent.
It’s right as he sets face toward Jerusalem, as Luke puts it, and even
though it takes nine more chapters to get him there, we know what’s gonna happen when he arrives.
But there’s another reason, a perhaps
more compelling reason we celebrate
transfiguration three days before Lent, and it can be seen in the reaction of
the disciples, summed up by the actions of Peter, who is, as usual, a stand-in
for what the rest of the disciples are thinking. Here they are, all standing up on the
mountaintop, shining to beat the band, and the message is clear to them. They are, after
all, good Jews, and they get that Jesus is one with Elijah and Moses, that he
is of the same stuff of Elijah and Moses, that he is, as we often put it, a
continuation of the prophetic line.
And unlike in the Garden of Gethsemane,
when the same disciples doze off three times, this time they stay awake, even
though they’re weighed down with sleep.
And because this time they
stay awake, they get to see the whole thing, and what is the first thing out of
Peter’s mouth? Master it’s good for us to be here, it’s good for us
to be here on the mountain-top. Let’s
make some rooms, one for each of you, one for you and one for Moses and one for
Elijah. Just as the two were fixing to
leave, Peter tries to get them to stay up there, at least temporarily, by
building them places to stay, like tabernacles or motels or something.
Peter wants them to stay on the
mountain-top, to be enthroned up there like three peas in a pod, three earthly
rulers, and why shouldn’t he think that?
He was, as I said before, a good Jew, and good Jews at the time were
expecting a Messiah—in fact (and this is important) in the passage right before
ours, that’s what Peter calls him, Messiah.
Jesus asks “Who do people say I am,” they say “some say Moses and some
say Elijah”— and if you think that it’s a coincidence that those two are the
ones standing with him right now, I have a bridge to sell you. And when Jesus asks “but who do you say I am?” Peter pipes up with “The Messiah of God,”
which means the anointed of God.
And so it’s understandable that Peter
wants to enthrone Jesus along with the two prophets up on the
mountain-top. And was it the same
mountain-top where Satan tempted Jesus to rule the whole world? You got me, but it does give you pause . . . mountain-tops are perfect places for
palaces, and for fortresses like earthly kings had to defend all their stuff,
before they had intercontinental ballistic missiles, at any rate, so it’s
understandable that Peter, who thought Jesus was the king who’ll take back
Palestine from the Romans, would want him up on one.
But just as he says it, they are
enveloped in a gray cloud, and I imagine Peter is thinking “Holy guacamole, what’d
I say? What’d I say?” and they’re all
terrified as the sun is blotted out and a chill strikes to their bones, and
suddenly, a voice comes out of the cloud—and was it the same voice that came
out of the clouds at Jesus’ baptism? You
got me, but it starts out saying the same
thing as at the baptism, “This is my Son,” but instead of calling him “my
Beloved,” it calls him “my Chosen.” And
afterward, after they’re down from the mountain, Peter asks himself “chosen for
what?” but at the time, all he can do is shake in his boots, thinking now I’ve done it. And when the voice stops, the cloud lifts and
there in the ordinary Palestinian sunlight, Jesus is alone. Quite alone.
And just like to Peter and the others,
he is revealed to us in that moment
as well, as singular, a man apart, a man who even though in the same line as Moses and Elijah is different
from them, greater than them, perhaps. And
we can see the sequence, can’t we? (1)
Jesus and the other prophets are talking about his departure, (2) they’re about
to go their separate ways and (3) Peter says something stupid, something that
causes God to make a point: and that is that Jesus isn’t just like the prophets, that he is not an earthly ruler who might
rule from the heights, as earthly ones were wont to do. The voice from the cloud was correcting Peter
when it said: “This is my Son, the
Chosen” and if Peter didn’t know it, we certainly do, we know what he was
chosen for, and it wasn’t any
mountain-top experience … It wasn’t any serene hill-top life-style, the
life-styles of the rich and Palestinian, the life of a ruler of humans, of a
warrior holed up in his mountain like some latter-day David, descending in the
Spring, when kings go out to battle.
No.
Jesus was chosen for something altogether different, and that’s why the
church puts the Transfiguration right before Lent: to remind us of what he was
chosen for, and to foreshadow what is to come in just 40 short days. Jesus the Christ is chosen all right, he’s
hand-picked by God, but not for any earthly power and might, not to stay up on
that mountain top eating sweet-meats with his fellow prophets. Jesus the Christ, the anointed one, is chosen
to be the embodiment of cosmic incarnation, emptied of any God-hood, and become
fully human, even to death upon a cross.
We know all
that, because, well . . . hindsight is 20-20, after all, and we’re aware of the
rest of the story. But it seems to me
that we need to be reminded, on a regular basis, to listen to him, because just like Peter, who didn’t hear when they
were talking about Jesus’ death, we need to listen to who he really is as well. We’re admonished to listen to him, just like
Peter, as he tells us what he tells the disciples, not ten verses after today’s
passage: “Let these words sink into your ears,” he says, get this through your
thick skull: “The Son of Man is going to
be betrayed into human hands.” Far from
ruling gloriously over the rest of the world, far from lording it over his
countrymen like they expected him to, he would be betrayed into human hands and
die.
And I think that like Peter, many of us
project our own desires and longings onto Jesus. We develop prosperity doctrines, to justify our
over-the-top consumerism. We picture
Jesus as some personal, magic genie, there to grant our every wish, to help us
win football games and avoid the consequences of our actions, to reward us here
on earth for being Christians. Many of
us, whether we say it out loud or not, imagine ourselves privileged through our
relationship to Jesus, and we just know it's
our destiny to end up in that mountaintop right along side.
But in the Transfiguration, we are
reminded about who Jesus really is, what he really signifies: he is one who
stands alone, apart, who comes down
from the mountain instead of staying up there, eating bon-bons and commanding
armies. Who comes down to serve the people, to heal them and feed them and free them
from oppression. Why does the church
insist we hear this right before Lent? To
remind us of what Lent is all about: a time to do that thing the voice of God
commands us to do. And that’s to listen.
I say these things in the name of God
the one who creates us, God the one who redeems us, and God the one who
empowers and comforts us, amen.
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