Texts: 2 Kings 2:1-12; Mark 9:2-9
It was the second century bishop and theologian, later to be considered one of the patriarchs of the early church, Irenaeus, who once said: “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.”
This is the Sunday of the Transfiguration: a “bookend” if you will, with the first Sunday after the Epiphany (the baptism of Jesus, and the last Sunday, the transfiguration of Jesus) recounting an event in where a voice from heaven makes Jesus known to the world. Today’s texts describe, in varying ways, the glory of God, and our reception of that “glory”. “Glory”, meaning brilliance and resplendence, is a noun—not an adjective. It is used to translate the Hebrew word: “Shekinah”—which also means the dwelling place of God. Glory, thus, is the place where God may be seen, heard, experienced.
The first lesson tells the story of the end of Elijah’s life, and the passage of the prophetic mantle—which the pastor’s stole is meant to symbolize—to his disciple Elisha. Note in this reading how often Elisha, the follower of Elijah, could have made do with the level of discipleship he had already demonstrated, yet there is something about Elijah that keeps the younger man pushing onward. I invite you to think about the people who may have had such charisma that they drew you onward…beyond where you needed to be and to go, but who pointed you, in some sense, back or onward to the real tasks of your life.
The story began: “When the Lord was about to take Elijah up to heaven in a whirlwind”. Whirlwind signals the power and presence of divinity; as does fire. At the end, a fiery chariot with horses of fire suddenly appeared and separated Elijah from Elisha; and Elijah went up to heaven, the text says, in a whirlwind. If we are not careful, we may let the fiery horses and chariots capture our attention, and miss the real event, which was the passage of responsibility to the disciple, who must wear the mantle into the future.
Every year, if we follow the liturgical calendar of Christian tradition, we hear the story of Jesus on the mount of transfiguration. Here Mark has gathered up in a single event what the fourth evangelist, John, scatters throughout his Gospel—the glory of Christ. In a few terse words, Mark permits us to participate in a drama of recognition—that moment in which the reader and the chosen few present were permitted to see Christ in full glory, to see God in person in the flesh.
The Transfiguration recalls the baptism of Jesus, with the voice from heaven and the identity of Jesus as God’s son. Here, however, the voice speaks to the disciples, not Jesus alone as it did at his baptism, according to Mark’s account. The story is also meant to prefigure and anticipate the resurrection.
It is also true that Mark has patterned his report after the stories of Moses’ experiences of God on Mt. Sinai. All the elements are there: the six days of waiting, the cloud, the glory, the voice, the descent from the mountain. Moses’ face shone due to his experience in the presence of God. Exodus describes the making of the tent of meeting.
With the appearance of Elijah and Moses at the transfiguration of Jesus, Mark is saying that Jesus is the anticipated messiah and that the kingdom of God has come on earth, in him. The message of the occasion belongs as much Jesus’ followers, as it may have been meant for Jesus. They do not understand the event, being afraid and confused. Peter’s fumbling effort to honor and preserve the moment is met with silence. Therefore, they are enjoined to be silent about the experience until after the resurrection. They are not ready to be witnesses to Jesus’ messianic role, nor are their listeners ready to hear it. Apart from the cross the full story cannot be told.
Have you ever wondered what the glory of God is like How that “glory” would appear if you could see what Moses saw on Sinai, or Elisha saw day to day in the prophet Elijah—or at his departure; or what Peter and James and John saw that day on the mountain with Jesus.
We have all seen people shining in moments of great achievement. They can seem almost to be wearing halos, so brightly do they shine, if only for a few moments. Each of us has seen something of beauty so magnificent that it took our breath away: I’ll never forget rounding a corner in the Louvre in Paris, looking for the Impressionists wing, when I found myself within 6 feet of one of Monet’s waterlily paintings, so glorious it shimmered and brought tears to my eyes. Or perhaps you have heard music so pure that your heart leaped in response, until you thought it might break from the loveliness of the melody, the depth and breadth of the chord progressions, the tension and final harmonic resolution.
Surely, these are tiny hints of “Gloria in excelsis”, just as whatever occurred on that mountain to Jesus and witnessed by Peter, James, and John was a wondrous, shimmering glorious moment of mystery—evoking awe, fear, confusion. If the details are elusive, the clarity of direction, and the energy released by this experience of God’s presence are easy to imagine. Perhaps they carried Christ through his passion and his crucifixion.
Clearly, for Mark, this is the case: he has put this event squarely in the middle of his gospel. It has been preceded by the healing of a blind man and is followed by the granting of sight to another blind man. It comes on the heels of Peter’s confession that Jesus is the Messiah, and the first prediction of the passion that is to come.
After Christ’s death, the scene must have returned time and again to Peter’s confused mind—much like ours when it comes to knowing who Jesus is for our lives—and the memory of the event must have returned as a light shining in the dark, disclosing Christ’s glory through the shame, his triumph through the humiliation, his crown beyond the cross.
It took Peter as long as it takes most of us to grasp the paradox that stands at the heart of the Christian faith: the paradox that Jesus of Nazareth, the glorious human being fully alive—is most authentically the revelation of who God is, and what God intends to do with and for human kind—in his dying, his awful cruel death.
The more I think of it, the more convinced I am that the transfiguration experience must have helped transfigure Peter himself, so that he could go down the mountain, take up the crosses of the world, and himself finally die on a cross, hung upside down because, as legend has it, he said he was unworthy to die in the glorious way of his Lord.
But what of us? How do we ordinary mortals, 2000 years after Jesus walked this earth, become touched by that glory—such that we too become the glory of God, fully alive? Most of us are what are called “once born Christians”. We aren’t the sort who have had those mesmerizing, transfiguring encounters with the holy. If we have, we don’t like to talk about it much. We are more likely people who have had little glimmers of it, here and there, along our journeys through our lives. Maybe goosebumps—at some encounter with extraordinary beauty, or some startling moment when truth broke through the clouds of our distracted thinking—are as close as we come to having a mystical experience. Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician and philosopher once said that “any religion which does not say that God is hidden is not true.”
Mark’s Gospel means to tell us, first, who Jesus is, and secondly, how to become a disciple, how to become one who can live as Jesus did—for that is what the word disciple truly means. Even in this experience of a holy moment when Jesus seems to be luminous and surrounded by the great prophets of their history, the first disciples do not fully understand, either who he is, or who they are called to be. Gradually, moment by moment, in Mark’s gospel, the veil is lifted until they finally see and hear, and a new world is given to them. So too with Elisha, it was by going on, further and further in the way of his master, the prophet Elijah, that he came to that glorious moment—and he too became a prophet sharing the glory of God. So too, perhaps, with us. As G.K. Chesterton once wrote: “The Christian ideal… has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.”
There is an old rabbinic story about the man who left his village, weary of his life, longing for place where he could escape all the struggles of this earth. He set out in search of a magical city–the heavenly city of his dreams, where all things would be perfect.
He walked all day and by dusk found himself in a forest where he decided to spend the night. Eating a crust of bread he had brought, he said his prayers, and just before going to sleep, placed his shoes in the center of the path, pointing them in the direction he would continue the next morning.
Unbeknownst to him, however, someone appeared in the night and turned his shoes around, pointing them back in the direction from which he had come.
The next morning, in all the innocence of folly, he got up, gave thanks to the God of the universe and started on his way again in the direction his shoes pointed. For a second time, he walked all day and toward evening finally saw the magical city in the distance. It wasn’t as large as he had expected. As he got closer, it looked curiously familiar. But he pressed on, found a street much like his own, knocked on a familiar door, greeted the family he found there and lived happily ever after in the magical city of his dreams.
What God does in the night is turn our shoes around and point us toward home. And it is down the mountain that the disciples went, to life and work, to death and experiences that confirmed what they knew–and to ministry after the resurrection that really confirmed the resurrection itself. Today, we too join them to proclaim not ourselves, not our beautiful little church, serene and holy as it is, but Jesus Christ—the pattern for our lives, the way to be in this world with joy and hope, with compassion and godliness. For it is the God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness” who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” Amen.
