The disciples had spent the previous six days in shock. Peter had just proclaimed Jesus the Messiah—and Jesus had thrown cold water all over that by explaining that he was going to be handed over to those who feared his influence. Turned over for suffering and death.
Six days… just like Moses was up on the mountain, being given instructions for the tabernacle and the ark that would accompany the people. Six days… like the six days of creation.
Peter and John and James go with Jesus—and instead of merely joining him in prayer, they receive a vision before them that tears back the veil and offers them a glimpse of the very glory of God. It’s like they are jolted into a new awareness. It’s electrifying. And so Peter, the disciple most like so many of us, babbles the first thing that pops into his head. Who, after all, wouldn’t want to continue to wish to be dazzled, to have proof of God’s glory paraded in front of their watering eyes?
Maybe Peter is thinking that if they build little dwellings for each of the three great prophets revealed in the transfiguration, they can all just stay there forever, in this experience that seems so dazzling it seems outside the strictures of time, itself.
Maybe, also, Peter reflects that tendency we all have to try to domesticate God, to place God within defined boundaries. You know that tendency—the one that seeks to control how much we are willing to cede to God, while ultimately trying to retain control of the rest of our lives—like limiting our worship and seeking of God to Sunday, so long as the rest of the week is ours to do what we like.
I don’t think Peter meant it that way—I think he had just experienced something that had reset all his synapses, and maybe he wanted to stay there until he could figure it all out. That’s relatable, too.
In the press and crush of daily life, how wonderful to have some time set apart in the presence of glory. I am convinced that most of us crave that mountaintop experience—even as we fear it, and wonder if we wouldn’t lose our minds at actually experiencing a theophany such as this one.
Mountaintops, after all, offer a sprawling vista to view. They give you a sense of perspective. They remind you of how big the world all around you is. They lift you up above the doubts to a plane or altitude of certainty.
Mountaintops can also make you afraid for that very same reason—you can see how big the world all around you is, and move like a chess piece to the next logical thought—how small and insignificant and frightened we are. Maybe that’s also part of why Jesus urges his three apostles to come back down to the reality of the job at hand, down in the valley. And I wonder how long Peter and the others could have managed to stay there, anyway. And so it is in the life of faith—or more realistically, the life spent wrestling with and pursuing faith, and even sometimes fleeing from it.
What strikes me is the tension between the mountain and the valley in this passage.
As we close Black History Month, we remember one person who spoke so movingly and lived so honestly into that tension between the mountain and the valley.
I am reminded that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., on the night before he was assassinated, spoke of the transitory nature of the mountaintop experience—that it show us what can lie before us, but until we go into the valley below we remain stuck in a way, unable to take possession of the good things God offers to us—even in the midst of struggle and work that is also the life of the disciple.
Recalling that Moses himself was brought to the mountaintop to look down into the promised land—to see it, but not to enter it—Dr. King reflected on a previous attempt to take his life, and spoke with numerous death threats that had been leveled at him, even here. He knew that his work the next day, trying to help striking sanitation workers in Memphis, would not be met with joy from all quarters, to put it mildly. His mountaintop experience also served to remind him that the real work was down the mountain and into the valley.
In our own time, people climb mountains for fun, for the challenge of it. They seek the thrill of going where the air is thin and the Earth curves away at your feet on all sides. Yes, we crave that mountaintop experience. Down in our everyday lives sometimes it’s hard to see that perspective of being on top of the world. The life of faith right now, 2000 years after the apostolic era, is often one of straining toward faith against the cynical tide of our time.
Yet notice that Jesus knows where his work is—it is among the people, the poor, the oppressed, the forgotten, the discounted. Jesus knows that the glory within him has been there all the time. That’s perhaps why he doesn't engage Peter in his idea of building shelters for Elijah, Moses, and the transfigured Jesus. Jesus’s transfiguration is meant not to separate Jesus from us, but calls us to elevate our own understanding of the same glory implanted in each of us, as the poet and priest Malcolm Guite describes in one of his sonnets:
The Love that dances at the heart of things
Shone out upon us from a human face
And to that light the light in us leaped up,
We felt it quicken somewhere deep within,
A sudden blaze of long-extinguished hope
Trembled and tingled through the tender skin.(2)
Peter, James, and John are electrified and terrified by their brush with the Glory of God—and yet also rooted to the spot by it. However, Jesus reminds them that their work, the work of discipleship, of being co-workers in God’s kingdom, is not to be accomplished hiding from the world on some mountain.
The glory exposed on the mountain is not tied to being on the mountain. To really make the glory visible to all, we have to come down and engage in the work of discipleship. The work is down in the valley, where everyday people are waiting for instruction, hope, and healing.
This is the turning point in Matthew's gospel, midway between Jesus’s baptism and his death. Now he will turn his face toward the cross-- a parallel scene to this one. On the cross, Jesus will also be between two figures—the two criminals who were crucified with him. On the cross, his claim to be God’s son will be inscribed over him as a form of mockery, for surely the true Son of God would not be hanging on a cross. While he is on the cross, the crowds will wait around to see if Elijah will come to save Jesus. Three of Jesus’s followers will witness his crucifixion, although they will be women (Mary Magdalene, Mary and Salome, in this gospel). And thus we turn to face the cross, and prepare ourselves to enter the season of Lent.
But first, today, we will celebrate a transformative event, a baptism, in the life of one beloved child of God and her family—and that family includes us. Together with Chelsea, we will recommit ourselves to our own baptismal promises—and they are not promises to take lightly.
They are a recommitment to living a Christ-shaped life, one that takes seriously not just the reflected glory on the mountain but the work awaiting us as beloved children and heirs of God, entrusted with the work of discipleship. That work of discipleship is not about creating a cozy club of insiders sneering out those on the outside, as some would have us believe.
The work of discipleship is exactly the opposite: to draw the circle ever wider, to reflect Christ’s glory in our own daily lives not because we are told to but because we are willing to open ourselves up to being filled to overflowing with the love God has for the world and to channel that love in tangible action for healing, reconciliation, compassion, and renewal down in those valley spaces in society.
May we remember the ways we can bring that glory to shine for all to see—the glory of Christ that resides within each of us, the glory that calls the world to God because we are made for God. It is a reminder of the new creation we all become when we turn our lives over to Christ and take our places alongside him, boldly, bright with hope, coworkers for the kingdom.
May we all be brave enough to step down from the mountain alongside Jesus.
May we all be sustained by hope and purpose in eagerly taking up the work that awaits us in the valley, sustained and uplifted by Jesus’s never-failing presence and reassurance beside us and carry the hope and promise of the transfiguration into the darkened world.
Amen.
Preached at the 505 on February 22 and at 8:00 and 10:30 Eucharists at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville.
Readings:
Notes/Links/Attributions:
1) Top image: Armando Alemdar, Transfiguration.
2) Malcolm Guite, Sonnet for feast of the Transfiguration, at
https://malcolmguite.wordpress.com/2012/08/04/a-sonnet-for-the-feast-of-the-transfiguration/
