Luke 9:28-43a
Exodus 34:29-35
2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2
Transfiguration
May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be
acceptable in your sight oh Lord our strength and our redeemer.
They were not ready for what was going to happen that day
when they followed Jesus up the mountain to pray. I was recently given the opportunity to visit
Mount Tabor where tradition tells us the transfiguration took place. As my traveling companions and I stood at the
bottom of the mountain waiting for the van to come and drive us up to the top,
I remember wishing we had time walk up.
Even though the walk would have been long and steep, the day was
beautiful and peaceful, a lovely day for a hike. I can imagine that it wasn’t very different
for the disciples on the day Jesus took them up the mountain. They probably joked and chatted with each
other as they walked, admiring their surroundings, and as they reached the top
of the mountain, with its gorgeous view of the countryside, they dozed in the
warm sun and cool breezes, lulled into a sense of comfort and complacency. They were not ready for the startling
revelation they were about to encounter.
They were not ready to have the veil pulled away before them, seeing
Jesus in all his glory talking with the prophets of Old. It didn’t matter that they had already seen
Jesus perform some pretty amazing miracles, it didn’t matter that Peter had
already proclaimed Jesus to be the Messiah of God, they just were not ready to
be faced with God’s glory.
They were not ready to hear the voice of God speaking
directly to them, telling them who Jesus is.
They were not ready and they could not cope. Not many would be strong enough and brave
enough to stand on a mountain top and respond when God speaks to them from the
heavens. Moses did it, Elijah did it,
but Peter James and John were just not prepared to face that challenge. So they said nothing, and would not speak of
it again for some time.
The reaction of the disciples was really perfectly normal. In
today’s Old Testament reading The Israelites were not ready either. Again and again in Exodus they see God’s
glory descend and they are terrified by it, they could not even bare to see the
glory of God reflected in Moses’ face.
And it is this same God that is incarnate in Jesus Christ, the
same God whose glory terrified the Israelites, whose glory was describes as a
consuming fire.
Every year we hear the story of the Transfiguration on this
last Sunday before Lent and are reminded that we, like the Israelites and like
the disciples, are not yet ready.
In his poem, The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake wrote, “If the doors of
perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For
man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his
cavern.”
God understands that we are not ready. And so we are given scripture, written in
such a way that reveals God’s brilliance through ‘a glass darkly’, and we are
given the sacraments through which we might each approach God’s glory at our
own individual pace. God is patient with
our uneasiness and will meet us where we are, but continually encourages us to
‘wipe clean the doors of perception’, to peel back the thin veil between us and
the infinite. We are constantly being urged to step out of our safe little
caverns, and into the consuming fire of God’s glory.
But how do we really prepare for something like that? Is it even possible? It is easy to fool ourselves into thinking
that if we are just able to understand theology well enough or have an organized
enough life, or are penitent enough we can be prepared for anything God throws
at us, but the truth is we will probably never be ready, not really. We can’t really change ourselves enough that
we would actually be able to cope with God’s glory, it is just too big. Rather it is God’s glory that changes us,
once we surrender to it. And perhaps surrendering
is enough of a task in its self. If all
of our prayer, Lenten discipline and study is done with the intention of trying
to tame God’s mystery, rather than as a way of submitting to God’s work in us,
than it is done for nothing.
Because the truth is, the mystery that we think we have
safely under our control, safely locked away in the tabernacle, cannot really
be contained by the boundaries we have put around it. So as Paul reminded the Corinthians, we too
must act with great boldness and look to the incarnation of a fearsome and
untamable God in the person of Jesus Christ, and we must look to his death on
the cross and the glory of his resurrection and boldly face what that means for
us, that we too have a stake in God’s infinite mystery if we would only
surrender and be transformed.
