What I admired greatly in my dad was his curiosity. He loved to learn. He was curious about the world around him. Wherever life took him, he’d go out and explore.
When his family was young, be bought a house that bordered on a park and an arboretum. My dad worked long hours at the office, but in the evenings and on Saturdays he went to the arboretum to learn about trees.
He learned enough about them to invite me to go with him on walks. We’d stop along the trail and he’d point out a tree which interested him.
“Son, do you see that tree over there?” That’s a beech. Do you see the smooth, gray bark? That’s one way you can tell.”
“Or look over there. Do you see that tree with long drooping branches? That’s a weeping willow. They are native to northern China, but we may see near ponds and creeks here in Michigan.”
Well, we don’t exactly have an arboretum here before us this morning. Much less do we have a guide as adept as my dad in pointing out the trees that have been planted there. But we do have a gospel lesson that contains a forest of symbols, and I will serve as a guide to point out and identify these symbols, so that we may understand what God is showing us in his Word. And, as we do so, we will try not to “miss the forest for the trees.”
Jesus brings James, John, and Peter with him to a high mountain. Let us recognize that this is Jesus’ inner circle. They have seen his power over death in raising of Jairus’ daughter (Mark 5:47), and will later witness his anguish in the Garden of Gethsemane as he wrestles in prayer with his Father over the cup that he has given him to drink (Mark 14:32-44).
And now, just as my dad invited me to go along with him to the arboretum, so does Jesus invite these three disciples to hike with him up a high mountain.
Consider for a moment a mountain. Have you ever gone hiking in a state or a region where there are mountains? Have you ever climbed one?
The ascent itself can be a spiritual experience. It is a liberation from the burdens of everyday life; it is the breathing of the pure air of creation; it offers breathtaking vistas of the spectacular beauty of God’s manifold creation (Ratzinger). Indeed, it can even give you sense of the closeness of God.
Little wonder, then, that in the Bible mountain is a symbol of revelation. Revelation means the unveiling of what has been hidden. In the Bible, it means God’s self-disclosure.
God chose to reveal his character, his will and his ways to God’s people. Thus Moses went to the top of Mount Sinai to receive from God the 10 commandments, the embodiment of God’s character, will, and way for Israel and for God’s people.
And Elijah climbed to the top of Mount Horeb at a very desperate moment in his life. There God commanded him to stand on the mountain before God’s presence. After the wind, earthquake, and fire, there came a sound of a gentle whisper. God was present in the gentle whisper. In the storm of Elijah’s circumstances, God appeared to him as a gentle God. Elijah could then relax and let God speak.
If the mountain is a symbol of God’s self-revelation, it is at the same time a symbol of God’s closeness. If Moses and Elijah ascend to the mountain to meet with God it is only because God for his part descends to meet with them.
We call this God’s grace. God turns to us before we turn to him. God comes down to meet with us before we go up to meet with him.
If then the mountain is a symbol of revelation, it is at the same time a symbol of God’s closeness. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that it’s a symbol of God’s willingness, God’s desire, to be close to us.
This desire, this willingness on God’s part, finds supreme expression in Jesus Christ himself. In him God comes very close to us.
This is what the three disciples are about to discover when they reach the top of the mountain. There, before their very eyes, Jesus is transfigured. His garments became glistening, intensively white, “such as no one on earth could bleach them.”
This is no less a manifestation of God’s own glory, a glory in which Jesus shares, because he is God’s only Son. In his oneness with the Father, Jesus is “light from light, true God from true God,” as we recite in the Nicene Creed.
And yet the white light in which he is clothed is a symbol not only of divinity, but of our own future as well. In the Bible, the white garments are the garments of the angels and of the elect. In this connection, the book of Revelation speaks of the white garments of those who have been saved (Rev. 7:9, 13; 19:14).
But note that the garments of the elect are white because they have been washed in the blood of the lamb. Through baptism and faith, they have been united with Jesus in his crucifixion, and his crucifixion is the purification that restores to us to our original garment we lost due to sin. We can anticipate that we will be clothed in Jesus light and we ourselves will become clothed in light, because Jesus shed his own blood for us and for the forgiveness of our sins (J. Ratzinger).
We have already mentioned Moses and Elijah. At this point they appear and are talking with Jesus. We should not be surprised to learn that these two figures are symbols in their own right.
Moses stands for the law and Elijah stands for the prophets. The law and the prophets refer to the covenant history between God and his people Israel, as recounted for us in the Old Testament of our Bibles.
That Moses and Elijah are with Jesus here shows that Jesus stands in continuity with this history. But he stands in continuity with this history only to fulfill and renew it.
Isn’t this what we should imagine as the subject of conversation the three of them were having together?
In this connection, we should recall the scene on the road to Emmaus at the end of the Gospel according to Luke. There, beginning with Moses and the Prophets, the risen Lord explained to the two dejected disciples what was said in the scriptures concerning himself (Luke 24:13-35). Here, on the mountain, Peter, James and john “see” that conversation in visible form.
We may at this point feel overwhelmed by all that is going on here. But imagine the experience of the disciples! For his part, Peter makes a suggestion that sounds very strange.
He wants to set up three dwellings, there on the mountain, one for Jesus, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.
What in the world is Peter after here? Several Bible students see implied here a reference to the Feast of the Tabernacles.
This was—and—is a Jewish religious feast that commemorates Israel’s wandering in the desert, when the Jews live in tents (or tabernacles). But in religious holidays a commemoration at the same time becomes a definitive hope for redemption (Ratzinger). That is to say, in all religious feasts there is both memory and hope.
Consider our own Communion, also called the Lord’s Supper or Eucharist. It is a feast of commemoration. We commemorate the last supper that Jesus shared with his disciples before his betrayal, arrest, trial and crucifixion.
At the same time, our Communion prefigures the wedding banquet of the lamb, when all God’s people will assemble together in the presence of God and feast together in God’s eternal kingdom.
So also in the Feast of Tabernacles, the tents were regarded, not only a commemoration of God’s protection in the desert, but also as a prefiguration of the dwellings in which the righteous are to live in the world to come.
To quote one Bible student: “the manifestation of the glory of Jesus appears to Peter that the times of the Messianic age have arrived.” Thus, it was appropriate to propose those three tents as the eternal dwelling places of all the righteous, beginning with Jesus, Moses and Elijah.
Peter, as usual, was off target here. And suddenly we see that Jesus and the two prophets with him are overshadowed a cloud.
Can you remember where in the Bible you have seen a cloud before? Of what is a cloud a symbol?
You will recall that after their exodus from Egypt Israel trekked through the wilderness forty years. How did they know which direction to go?
How do we know which direction to go? Maybe like me you remember those crossroads in your life. You didn’t have clarity about which path to take. And the more you debated within yourself about a course of action, the more confusing it became to you.
And like me, you may have wished that God led you in your wilderness as he did the children of Israel. “By day the Lord went ahead of them in a pillar of cloud to guide them on their way” (Exodus 13:21).
The cloud then is a symbol of God’s guidance. In the New Testament God has given to us this guidance in his beloved Son Jesus Christ. That is why the voice from the cloud instructs the disciples: “This is my beloved Son; listen to him!” In listening to him, we cannot ultimately lose our way.
The transfiguration, which Peter wanted to continue, comes to an end.
Moses and Elijah vanish as mysteriously as they appeared. We now find Jesus alone with his disciples, who follow him down the mountain.
That concludes our tour. I have fulfilled my role as your guide. So what are we to make of it all?
The last few Sundays we have seen Jesus act with power. Mark wanted to impress on us that this power comes from God, in whose glory Jesus shares, because he is God’s Son.
If there was ever any doubt, there can be none now. There’s no mistaking it. The power and glory of Jesus have been portrayed before our very eyes.
But in the Sundays to come we will see the suffering of Jesus, a suffering that will culminate on the cross, the emblem not of power and glory, but of weakness of shame.
Already we have anticipated this as we make our way down the mountain with Jesus and his disciples.
Now we can also answer why the church reads the Transfiguration story today.
Today is the last Sunday of Epiphany. Later this week is Ash Wednesday, which marks the beginning of Lent—the forty days of preparation for Easter. However we observe Lent, we should not lose sight of its meaning. Jesus is on the way to a place where he’s going to suffer many things, be rejected by his people and their leaders, and be killed.
Earlier he tells his disciples that they cannot shirk this if they want to be his disciples. They have to go down the mountain with him. So do we. For we know that our lives too are conformed to the pattern of Jesus’ suffering and death in this life. If Lent doesn’t impress at least this much on us, then we are missing something essential to the faith we share.
Believers are sometimes mocked as irrational, emotionally and metaphysically deluded (Eric Varden). The Christian construal of life, presupposing a beneficent creator whose intentions and purposes are good, is contemptuously dismissed as a faint-hearted fairy tale, a form of escapism.
But this is not how the faith is told. At least this is not how we tell the faith here. There is the transfiguration on the mountaintop, but there is also a going down the mountain. To be sure, the transfiguration gives us a glimpse of how the story ends. The transfiguration in fact gives us a preview of the resurrection.
But we also know that we still live in the flesh, in history, in this world, not yet in a glorified body, not yet in eternity, not yet in the world to come.
But is it not the Christians who can live in history, in this world, precisely because they have been given a glimpse of how the story ends?
How else can they endure the miseries, the brutalities, and the atrocities that everywhere surround us in this world, and no doubt have affected each of us personally, to a greater or lesser degree? How many of us in this sanctuary carry trauma?
In a session I attended this past week at the worship symposium at Calvin University, we discussed the common responses people give to those who have suffered a major trauma.
Several made the insightful observation that responses like “it’s going to be okay,” or “you’re tough, you’ll get through it” are said not for the benefit of the trauma survivor, but for the benefit of the one making the remark.
Why might this be? Because the sorrow that accompanies trauma is contagious. We don’t want to be overwhelmed by the sorrow of those who are suffering. And so we make remarks that are not really true to the experience of the sufferer before us, not really true to the world that is still groaning as in the travails of childbirth, still awaiting its liberation from its bondage to decay (Romans 8:21, 22).
Instead, we make remarks that represent a flight into an imaginary world. Who then are those who are emotionally and metaphysically deluded?
Let it not be said of us Christians. For Christian faith gives us eyes to see the world as it really is. And Christian faith promises a Spirit, not of fear, but of power, of love, and of a sound mind (2 Tim. 1:7).
Let us, then, if in fact we stand in the faith, resolve to face a suffering world with courage, fortified by what we have seen on that mountain. Let us carry that image with us as we go down the mountain with Christ, following him through Lent to the cross, bearing our own crosses as we do until we reach Golgotha and the empty tomb with him. Amen.