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The Transfiguration of the Lord

Mark 9:2-9
February 19, 2012
Feasts of Transfiguration

   In the course of the liturgical calendar the church returns, year after year, to certain events in the life of Jesus. In December we celebrate his birth. We call this “Christmas” or the “Feast of the Incarnation.” On a Sunday near the first of January the theme becomes our Lord’s baptism. This Sunday (surprise, surprise) is called “Baptism of the Lord.” Come spring, we focus on Christ’s suffering and death during what we have come to call “Holy Week.” Then, of course, comes Easter, which lasts not just one Sunday, but six – the season for celebrating Christ’s resurrection.

   Today is the hinge of the Christian year, a time for looking back and for straining forward. We call it the “Feast of the Transfiguration” or simply “Transfiguration Sunday.” We keep returning to this story year after year, and to this holy mountain. I suppose you could say we keep coming back for the view.

   We come to join Peter, James, and John as Jesus leads us up the ragged slope to the top, where, for the briefest of moments we see Jesus in the fullness of his glory. For lack of a better word, Mark says he is “transfigured” before us. His face is changed, his clothes become dazzling white, and we see him conversing with Moses and Elijah, prophets of old. Past and the present come together. Time means nothing. Jesus means everything. A cloud enshrouds the mountaintop. We hear the voice of God. “This is my beloved Son; listen to him!”

   And then it’s over.   We stumble down the mountainside doubting what we have seen with our own eyes. By the time we reach the bottom, most of us have convinced ourselves that what we experienced never happened. We came to church, that’s all. Just like we do every week. Nothing spectacular. Nothing out of the ordinary. Just one more Sunday in the church year.

   No one understands this story, if by understanding you mean comprehension, containment, reduction. The whole account is shrouded in the clouds, ephemeral, impossible to pin down. It has the character of a dream or a vision. We share the disciples’ terror, and then their confused excitement, and before we know it, the dream is over.

    When my mother died I was on the tiny island of Iona, off the west coast of Scotland. I was 24 years old, in my first year of graduate studies. There was no time to go back to St. Andrews on the east coast. I went directly to the airport near Glasgow and flew home for the funeral. I came back a week or so later, still dazed and disoriented. When I entered the lobby of my residence hall, a letter from my mother was lying on the sideboard. It had been written and posted two days before she died. I didn’t open her letter that day. Several years would pass before I managed to do that.

    But that night she came to me. I am a little boy again, lying in bed, listening for Mother and Dad to come home from a party. The light in the hallway is on. I can see its horizontal beam through the crack at the bottom of my bedroom door. The light gets brighter and there is my mother standing in the doorway. She has on her pearl earrings, her black party dress, and the necklace she wore for special occasions. Her hair is dark and shiny without a hint of gray.

    By far the strongest sensation is the smell of her perfume. She enters the room, sits down on the bed beside me, and says, “Goodnight. Sleep tight. I love you.” And then she kisses me.

    When I awoke, I was back in that frigid room by the North Sea. I was fully awake, aware that I had been dreaming. I turned on the light and wiped the tears from my eyes. The room still smelled of her perfume.

    Any freshman psychology student would have an explanation for that experience, of course. It was my subconscious mind at work, finding a way for me to say good-bye, providing a means for my grief to work itself out. A common enough phenomenon.   My mother did not really come to me that night, did not smile and kiss me, did not assure me that everything would be alright. It was all in my head – a dream, not reality.

    Similar things are said about this story we revisit every year. It never happened, many scholars insist. It’s a resurrection story read back into the earlier life of Jesus. Mark placed it here, near the midpoint of his narrative, to provide dramatic foreshadow of events to come.

The story isn’t history in the modern sense of that word. It’s dramatic theology. Here is Jesus as he really is, Mark is telling his readers. Here he is unveiled for a brief moment. Here is Jesus as the demons see him – the glorious Son of the Most High whose authority cannot be doubted. Here is Jesus as God sees him, chosen and beloved. Here is Jesus through the eyes of faith, fully God and fully human. Here he is on this mountain as we will not see him again, until he should die on the cross and be raised to new life.

   That’s what this story means – at least in part – and that’s why we keep revisiting it year after year. It helps us to remember who Jesus really is when he goes back down that mountain and is treated so cruelly by his enemies as well as his friends.

   It helps us to remember when he stands before Pilate that he, not the Roman Governor, is judge and ruler of the universe. When the soldiers mock and beat him, calling him “King,” this story helps us to hear how true their acclamation is, however false their intent. And when the nails are driven through his hands and feet, and the cross is lifted high upon the hill called Golgotha, this story helps us to see hidden in that face made unrecognizable with pain, the face of God’s own suffering love.

   This story never happened, this tall tale of transfiguration. So say the historians. Far be it from me to argue. I couldn’t speak with historical certainty. I wasn’t there.

   I don’t say it happened. I say it’s true. And I say my mother did come to me that night, however much I dreamt it. She did touch me and she did kiss me goodnight. And as much as I still miss her 36 years after that night, I do not doubt that she joins us at this table this morning, where the bread and wine of Christ’s transfiguration are broken and poured out for us.

   “This is my beloved Son,” the voice from the cloud said. It’s true.

   “This is my body . . . this is my blood, given for you,” said Jesus. It’s true.

   “He was transfigured before them,” Mark wrote. It’s true.

   God has given us “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ,” wrote the Apostle Paul. It’s true.

   You probably have your own story to tell, something like Mark’s or perhaps like mine. The novelist and theologian Frederick Buechner tells about a time he was in despair over his daughter’s anorexia. She wasn’t eating and was close to death in a treatment center far away. He went for a drive and stopped at a roadside park. A car drove past with one of those personalized license plates. It probably belonged to some officer in a bank.

   “Trust” it read. That’s all. Just “Trust.”

   A feast of transfiguration.

   We cannot plan these feasts. They are gifts of the Spirit. We can’t control or manipulate them, however much we might like to. They come to us when need them most, and we expect them least, when grief or pride or pure exhaustion have so focused our attention that we cannot see what’s real, what’s true. We see so clearly what’s in plain sight that we cannot see what God is trying to show us. And then, for just an instant, all is clear, and all is well, and the sweet scent of God’s presence hangs lightly in the air.

   You can’t live on a mountaintop, although plenty of Christians try to do just that. They spend their lives trying to recreate that feeling they had the time they got saved at a revival or gave their life to Jesus at the end of a week of summer camp. They want worship to be like that – a feast of transfiguration every Sunday.

   But the Christian life doesn’t work that way. You have to go back down the mountain, where Jesus leads. If you don’t do that, you’re not really his disciple. You’re just a junkie hooked on ecstatic experience.

   You never know where the next feast will take place. It might be at your desk at work, or at home while you’re taking out the garbage. It might be in a nursing home or a hospital room, or on a picket line. It’s as likely to take place in a valley as on a mountaintop. One thing is for sure: Jesus will be there with you, even if you don’t see his face. It will be his voice and his touch and his sweet presence.

   And that will be enough.

Brant S. Copeland, Pastor
First Presbyterian Church
Tallahassee, Florida
www.oldfirstchurch.org

February 22, 2012