Transfiguration. Why mystery is essential to faith

Transfiguration: Matthew 17

I love the mountains.  They are sacred to me.  The sounds, the views, the sense of grandeur they convey; science has only increased their beauty, showing us how they formed over thousands of years, millions of years ago from receding glaciers.  There are people in Tibet that consider some mountains the location of the gods, too sacred to ascend.  They pray to the mountains.  For thousands of years people have gone to the mountains for holy moments.  Mountains are not full of natural resources to exploit, they are full of the awesome presence of GOD.  Mountains are often the sites of holy encounters.   Have you ever seen something inexplicable?  Something so strange that you could hardly describe it?   Have you ever been so awe struck by something that you saw that you had to tell others, maybe even written down the details so as not to forget it? The Transfiguration of Jesus is a hard story to swallow.  It sounds like Loch Ness monster spotters meet UFO devotees.  And even more important, It sounds too much like other stuff that happened before in the bible.  It sounds like the gospel writers are busy trying to prove Jesus’ identity with a story that is so sort of supernatural that we modern skeptics can’t possibly believe it is true.  As if the resurrection were not enough. 

 

According to the stories we heard for today, something happened that Peter could not forget, something awe-inspiring.  In the second lesson, we hear the testimony he gave about this experience.   It is a story about an experience with Jesus on the mountain that sounds so much like other old testament stories that we might think this story is more mythology than history.  There is a story in the prophet Daniel about the coming of the Son of Man, a messiah figure the prophet promised would descend on the clouds shining white like the sun.  He would come to bring God’s justice and peace to God’s people.  It sounds like the stories of Moses and the burning bush, and Moses receiving the ten commandments from God which we also read today.  As Moses comes off the mountain his face is transfigured and he glows, a reflection of God’s glory in his face.  People were afraid to look at Moses. Unlike Moses, Jesus is not reflecting God’s glory as if in a mirror.  According to the story, the light the brilliance the white hot glow emanates from Jesus, as if Jesus becomes light.  The gospel writer is saying something about Jesus, contrasting this mountain experience with Moses’.  Jesus is the source of the light that once reflected off of Moses’ face.  Jesus is not another Moses, Jesus is God.  There is light and mountains and clouds.  I have been in the mountains when the sun shone just right through the clouds and made that sort of heavenly beam of light.  You know what I mean? That is what the gospel writers mean this story to say.  It also sounds like Elijah hiding out on the mountain when God appears in the sound of sheer silence.  Except God speaks and the voice echoes the words heard once before at the Jordan river, confirming Jesus’ divine sonship and our rightful orientation toward him---we are listeners, he is the speaker, the teacher.  His voice speaks and we listen. 

So if transfiguration is the biblical writers using a little poetic license to make a point, so what? If you believe in Jesus, the story fits nicely into our conception of him.  Virgin birth, walks on water, miraculous healer, calms storms, raises people from the dead, is himself raised from the dead, glows on mountains.  For believers, this is just additional proof that Jesus is God. 

But what if you’re not a believer?  I suspect that enlightened skeptics see through this mythical, magical, mysterious message as mere religious delusions by people trying to validate and justify themselves.  After all, seeing is believing and without a personal experience how can we be sure that what has been reported is trustworthy?

If we read the gospel accounts, we notice something interesting about the timing of the transfiguration story, its location in the bigger story that is being told about Jesus.  This story is preceded and followed by Jesus’ first and second announcement to his friends about his impending arrest, conviction, suffering, execution, and death.  Something sort of otherworldly and extraordinary is bracketed by very real events; events that were familiar and are familiar. Crucifixion, capital punishment, innocent suffering, peace established through violence, the unjust treatment of compassionate leaders, the exploitation of the vulnerable and weak.  Pain. Physical death.  Not everyone can relate to brilliant, sacred, powerful mountaintop experiences; but everyone understands pain.  Not everyone encounters a sacred mystery.  But everyone encounters the specter of death.  But what if the ordinary, the mundane, and the not so transcendent were all we ever knew or believed in?  What if all that we trusted and all that we believed were based on empirical evidence?  What if the only truth we could know came from our senses? Would we be diminished somehow? 

Transfiguration may be a way of connecting Jesus to the biblical past. It may be a sign post pointing past the remarks he made about his death to his resurrection.  It may be true that the first century religious audience did not separate historical fact from fiction the way we do.  But we need this story.  It is a test.  Are we listening?  What do we believe?  Is it possible to take Jesus as a sage, a religious teacher, an extraordinary rabbi and NOT recognize Jesus is the Son of God, the God Man in the flesh?  Some have said that it is enough to follow Jesus’ teachings, to become a good human being.  The part about his death and resurrection, his ascension and sovereignty as God’s Son, is more mythology than we need. 

But the whole gospel, one that is really good news for all people, must say something about GOD, the brokenness of this world, and HOPE in a better one.  Without mystery, God cannot be revealed and we cannot be healed.  Without mystery, things we cannot see or know or understand, this world is all there is.  All we have is all we can experience with our senses alone.  And that is not enough. It is not enough because death itself becomes nothing but a curse that renders all of life brief, meaningless, and inconsequential.  Without the mystery, without the mountain, we are alone in the universe.  And left to our own devices, we will destroy ourselves for sure. 

Transfiguration of our LORD confirms that we are not alone down here.  That’s what Peter could not forget and why the biblical writers wrote it into their gospels.  Jesus is not another martyr in the lost cause of humanity.  Jesus means more.  Like that feeling you get when you come around a corner and see heavenly light shining through the clouds, coming for you. We have the capacity in our souls, in our spirits to dig deeper, to search for answers to questions, to encounter mysteries we cannot solve.  The mountains are calling for us to come away from the world, to look up from our lives to see something greater, to encounter the living God creator of all things.   Listen to Jesus.  God is speaking, appearing, arriving, visiting…God is closer than we think.  And farther away than we can possibly imagine.  Amen.