February 26, 2006, Last Sunday After Epiphany,  All Souls' Episcopal Church         

On a High Mountain
Mark 9: 2 – 9

 On this Last Sunday After Epiphany, the Gospel reading continues the Epiphany theme of manifestation of Christ to the world with the account of the Transfiguration of Jesus on the mountain. This also contains a foreshadowing of the Resurrection, as Jesus tells Peter, James, and John, afterwards, to tell no one what they have witnessed "until after the Son of Man has risen from the dead.”

The image of the shining radiance of Jesus on the mountain gives us inspiration, strength and hope as we anticipate our Lenten journey to the cross—which ultimately leads to another kind of transfiguration in the Resurrection.

Jesus has realized that His ministry will be denounced and rejected, and that He Himself will be slain in that rejection.  Some of His disciples must be prepared for that rejection and death by being made aware that there is a glory no execution can suppress. And so He chooses three disciples, Peter and James and John, called by some theologians “the inner three”.  He leads them up a high mountain that offers them both privacy and a symbolic closeness to God.  So, here, they get to see the Rabbi who has been teaching them as resplendent, dazzling.

This is as strange a scene as is in the Gospels. Even without the voice from the clouds to explain it, they had no doubt what they were witnessing. It was Jesus of Nazareth all right, the man they tramped many a dusty mile with, whose mother and brothers they knew, the one they had seen as tired, hungry, footsore as the rest of them. But, it was also the Messiah, the Christ, in His glory. It was the holiness of the man shining through His humanness, His face so afire with it they were almost blinded.

Jesus, then, takes up the primary strands of their religious tradition.  With Him there appeared from heaven:  Moses the Law-giver; and Elijah, who has been counted as head of the line of prophets.  Yet clearly they are subordinate to the transfigured Jesus.

The cloud that manifests God’s presence, envelops all of them:  while the Divine voice declares: “This is my Beloved Son: hear Him”

With the revelation complete, the vision leaves them.  Jesus is once more the Rabbi alone with His disciples.  It will not be time for them to share that vision with other disciples until they come to know crucifixion and its vindication by Resurrection.

So there is our story recounted to you.  Up on the high mountain, which could have been Mt. Tabor or Mt. Herman, but for Mark, it could have been any mountain.  Location was not important.  Only what happened.

And what happened transcended ideology or theology.  It superceded dogma or doctrine.  It went beyond buildings and budgets and committees and rituals. None of these things could be compared to the Glory of the moment on this mountain.

What happened on this unnamed mountain, speaking of it as an allegory, was  a dance…..The Dance…the improvisational magical dance between the Abba….Heavenly Father and the beloved Son…all caught up in the symphony of the Holy Spirit!

When Peter, James, and John climb the mountain with Jesus, they have little or no idea of the new “perspective” they are about to be given.  In Luke we find the detail that they had even, at one point, fallen asleep!!  To say that they were unprepared for the “light show” and unprecedented revelation of this dance is an understatement.

Of all the personal interactions that Jesus had with these disciples during His ministry, the Transfiguration is the most remarkable.  This experience gave them a new take on reality, and especially a new way of thinking about the Person of Jesus.

While the disciples did not move directly into believing that Jesus was the Second Person of the Trinity, they could after this, no longer see Him as a itinerant carpenter and preacher from Nazareth. That is why the transfiguration is primarily for these three disciples, the men who will lead the church in Jerusalem.  This is clear for a number of reasons:

First, Peter’s startling confession earlier at Caesarea  Phillippi is here confirmed:  Jesus is the Messiah.

Second, the voice is addressed to them, (Peter, James and John), not to Jesus:  “This is my Beloved Son: hear Him”. Whereas the Voice at Jesus’ Baptism, if you will recall, starts with:  “You are My Beloved Son”…….speaking directly to Jesus.

And third, the command, “hear Him!” is meant to override the disciples’ reluctance to receive the unthinkable news Jesus gave them earlier with His Passion prediction—that they, too, would have to take up their cross to follow Him.

The Transfiguration is meant, and means for us today, that we cannot share the light of the Gospel unless we ourselves prayerfully seek manifestations of the Lordship of Jesus in our personal lives.

The Gospel is meant to be experienced.  We seek to taste of the “world that is not of this world” in order to be able to tell others about its importance.  Otherwise, our religion boils down to “ethics” or is reduced  to the cultural equivalent of superglue.  In either case, sharing the Gospel with no personal conviction, can becomes a form of “the bland leading the bland.", and evangelism, then, becomes a “moral” cause, rather than an irresistible urge to share the story that has touched, if not changed, our lives.

And now, another very important point: C. Robert Allred writes that the experience of the Transfiguration necessarily leads us to service.

“Peter, John and James enjoyed the Mountain Top Experience of seeing Jesus in all of His Glory, but Peter was dead wrong in wanting to build tabernacles or “booths” or buildings for permanence. Jesus knew that their ministry with people lay, not on the mountaintop, but in the valley below……………………

My friends, our ministry is in the valleys of life where people are hurting! The world needs so desperately the Christian message of love, compassion, forgiveness, transfiguration and resurrection. How bad does the world need this?

A number of years ago, the publishers of a new history encyclopedia asked 28 educators, historians and journalists to rate the most significant events in world history. Here is their list in descending order:

Think about it: Jesus Christ is fourth place, and it is a tie! There are those who might have Him in a lower place than this.

Evil remains rampant in our world.  Forces threaten human life.  Families are more fragile than ever.  Disease seems more prevalent.  Just when science develops a cure for one malady, another comes forth.  Poverty, hunger, crime, violence, racism, elitism, and the realization that we are in a world war against terrorism……..are all part of our societal fabric today.

But ours is still a message of hope and redemption.  It is the same message that Jesus commissioned the first disciples to go into all the world and proclaim.  Not only do we  have our life transfiguring experiences here, we march forth possessed by the power to proclaim hope, down in the valley, to a hurting world of humanity that God so dearly loves.”

Spiritual growth is rarely linear.  If we ask, we will receive.  If we seek, we will find.   When we knock, it will be opened .  That is the promise of Jesus, and sometime a measure of Transfiguration occurs.

Yes, even with you and me something like this happens once in awhile

I read a short account of a man who visited Evelyn Underhill before her death in l94l.  She was one of the authors I studied before my ordination many years ago.  She was a prolific writer and the great teacher of  the mystical life. This man visited her at her Campden Hill Square house after one of her bad illnesses.  She was seated facing a glowing fire.  He said, (and I quote) “As I entered, she got up and turned around, looking so fragile that a puff of wind might blow her away, but light simply streamed from her face which was illumined with a radiant smile.  One could feel that there and then one was in the presence of the Mystery of the Lord’s Transfiguration……..in one of the members of His mystical body.” (end of quote)

But in all reality, the experience does not have to be so intense and dramatic…….I see a measure of transfiguration in a man walking with his grandson in a park, of a woman happily working the soil in her garden, of the most unlikeliest looking person listening to a concert at the civic center, of a child standing in the sand at the beach watching the waves roll in at sunset, or of you or me having a beer with close friends at a baseball game in July. Ever once and so often, something so touching, so incandescent, so full of love, so full of brotherly love, so full of the Holy Spirit, so alive transfigures the human face that it is almost beyond bearing.

Nothing takes the place of Jesus Christ, the only Begotten Son, on the Mount of Transfiguration in the Spiritual Dance He experienced as He was Transfigured with His Heavenly Father. You and I, however, as believers, must be always open to the workings of our Heavenly Father and the possibilities as we come down from the mountain and move into the valley of need.

As we begin out Lenten journey next week on Ash Wednesday, and as a believer in Jesus Christ,

“In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost”

Amen