 |
| A.Hanson, Minnesota 2014 |
Sometimes I
like to imagine bible stories acted out on a stage. I imagine the backdrops, the scenery, the
actors, the scripts. And I think that the Transfiguration story falls more
within the realm of bizarre performance art or something like Cirque du Soleil
than anything else. There are a lot of
things happening with bright light and clouds and booming voices and ascents
and descents of mountains. Let us set the scene…
Just
before we catch up with Jesus and the disciples in today’s Gospel, we have the
group walking through the desert. Peter
has just declared that Jesus is the Messiah, but Jesus has sternly ordered the
disciples not to tell anyone. I imagine
that the disciples are eagerly trotting after Jesus, attempting to take in as
much as they can. One day as they break
from their long hours of walking, Jesus begins to teach his disciples that he
will have to undergo suffering and die before being resurrected. Peter, whose
eagerness often gets in the way of his listening, says, “Lord, this must never
happen to you!” Peter knows that Jesus
is the Messiah, and so cannot fathom why he wouldn’t just destroy his enemies
and take control of things. The normally gentle Jesus snaps at Peter saying,
“Get behind me Satan. You are setting
your mind on human things, not divine things.”
It is six days after this dramatic revelation that we find Jesus and
three of his disciples on top of a mountain.
Jesus
is lit up from within with a brilliant, painful white light. Transfiguration means
to change in form or substance, particularly in a spiritual sense. When the disciples get their bearings, they
see Moses and Elijah there with Jesus.
The three of them are sitting around having a conversation like this is
the most normal thing in the world. Somehow the linear timeline of life on earth
has gotten all jumbled together, and past, present, and future are in a
glorious mess on top of this mountain. Peter recognizes that something pretty
exceptional is taking place, and has the most human response of all, a desire
to box up the entire experience and keep it contained there on top of the
mountain. He offers to build tabernacles, or little structures, for Jesus,
Moses, and Elijah to live. As Peter
blathers on, a huge cloud rolls in.
Imagine something like the thunderheads that roll over the prairie with
a summer storm, with cloud-to-cloud lightning, and this massive cloud surrounds
the disciples. A voice rumbles from
within it saying, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!” The disciples shudder in fear and fall to the
ground. The cloud rumbles away, and
Jesus is left standing over his three disciples who lay in the dirt. He gently touches them, saying, “Get up. Do not be afraid. Let us go down the mountain. There is work to do.”
This
is the last Sunday before Lent begins.
It is not a coincidence that Lent is marked on either end with
mountaintop experiences. Strange things
happen on top of mountains in the Bible.
Encounters with the divine. And this story is no exception. God shows up
to make the definitive statement about who Jesus is, “This is my Son, the
Beloved; with him I am well pleased.” Transfiguration is the point where Jesus
turns his face towards Jerusalem and what awaits him there. The light from the transfiguration is
illuminating his path all the way to the cross.
Because as you know, Lent ends on top of a mountain as well. Golgotha, the mountain with the cross.
The
transfiguration story is a pivotal point in the life and work of Jesus. He has been definitively claimed by God for
the salvation of the whole world. But
this is a new thing. This is a
terrifying thing. It does not make one
bit of sense to the disciples. It doesn’t make one bit of sense to us. But in a
way, isn’t this kind of what it is all about? Since when has anything that the
God of heaven and earth has done in Christ Jesus made sense? The transfiguration is about us seeing, in
searing brilliant light, the sort of God that we have, not the one that we wish
that we had. It is about seeing the beauty in the absurd. It is the crazy revelation that God came to
earth fully human and fully divine to keep company with all of us sinners and
loves us so much as to die on a cross for our sake.
But God also knows that we, like the
disciples, fall down in fear and shield our eyes from this truth carved out in
brilliant relief from the bright light of Christ. The most hopeful part of this Gospel
story for me is Jesus reaching out to the disciples in their fear, actually physically
touching them, and saying, “Do not be afraid.”
We too are so very often afraid.
Uncertainty threatens to devour us.
Financial insecurity and job loss..
Aging parents. Illness. The creeping
darkness of depression in a winter that never ends. War and violence around the world.
The
disciples are wrestling with what it means that their Lord will suffer and die
and the crippling fear of things to come that they cannot understand. As we enter into the season of Lent on Ash
Wednesday, we too dwell in fear with mysteries that we cannot understand. But God reaches out to us again and again and again and again through
the Word, through bread and wine, through the waters of baptism, and through
one another, touches us, and says, “Do not be afraid.”
Let
us pray:
Dear God, you come to us in mystery and in ways
we cannot understand. Bear with us and
continue to make yourself known when it seems like you are far away from us in
our fear. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment