Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
In the name of the One God, who is Lover, Beloved, and Love Overflowing. Amen.
Commentaries on the transfiguration stories inevitably follow a similar theme. After Peter has named Jesus as the Christ, Jesus takes his most trusted disciples up a mountain. There his glory is revealed to them, further confirming that he is the Messiah. While he’s transfigured, he meets with Moses, representing the Law, and Elijah, representing the prophets. These symbols of the law and the prophets confirm that Jesus the Messiah is the apotheosis of all Israelite expectation. He is, indeed, the savior foretold. In fact, some commentators point out that in Mark, the transfiguration story serves as the only resurrection appearance. In Matthew and Luke, it prefigures the resurrection.
Then we have good old bumbling Peter, who, of course, doesn’t get it. In that way, he’s a stand in for you and me. He wants to make three dwellings, presumably to hold on to this moment of revelation and glory. Many preachers will pick up on this impulse to tell us that we shouldn’t try to cling to the mountaintop moment.
Now, none of that is wrong. In fact, it’s a good and most likely correct reading of these narratives. But it’s not complete, and it’s not balanced.
Every time I read and pray with these accounts, I’m struck by the same line: “And when they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus himself alone.” First the shock and awe, the glory and the revelation. Then the fear and trembling. And then, like the still small voice that Elijah hears from the mouth of the cave, Jesus himself alone.
We begin the season of Epiphany with the revelation that salvation has come to the whole world and not just to the people of Israel. It’s scandalous. God has taken human form in a tiny, powerless child. And that frail little human will be the salvation of the whole world. Today, we end the season of Epiphany with a kind of bookend. Not only is Jesus the promised Messiah. Not only is he God almighty—the creator of everything that is. But he is also still—and scandalously—human. He is both the fullness of the Godhead and simply the human Jesus himself alone, the man who has taught and loved and healed. The man who has laughed with his friends, and danced at weddings, and grumbled when he hadn’t had enough alone time.
When Moses goes up the mountain to meet with God, so powerful is God’s glory that a cloud covers the mountain to shield and protect the people looking on. In another story, we’re told that to look on God’s face is to die. So, God shows only his backside to Moses, providing generations of preachers and congregations a good punchline. The imprint of God’s glory on Moses’ face is itself too much for the Israelites, so Moses covers his face with a veil. God, unrefined and unmitigated, has a power and a glory too strong for us humans to bear.
You can worship such a God. You can certainly fear such a God. You may even be able to love such a God. But it’s hard to foster a tender, loving intimacy with the threat of annihilation looming over you at every moment.
And so God pours Godself out into a human being. God takes on the fragile, dirty, messy stuff of our little lives. And not the life of some powerful king or emperor. Not the life of some great warrior who overthrows the oppressive powers of the world. But the life of a small and powerless baby who will grow into a loving man who dies powerless on a cross.
I think one reason we tend to focus so much on the glorification of Jesus in his transfiguration is that we still, two millennia later, cannot bear God’s humanity.
So enamored of this world are we, that we look for signs of power and success and wealth, not only in others and ourselves, but in God. We crave spiritual consolation. We look for our prayer and our worship and our work in the world to make us into better versions of ourselves. We don’t want to be human. We don’t want to be weak and frail and needy. We don’t want the joy that comes mixed with sorrow or the love that binds itself to death. And, even without realizing it, we often look for a God immune to the things of the earth.
But that God is not Jesus. That God is an idol.
Jesus tells us, in his very person, that the God who made all that is is intimately, perhaps painfully and gloriously, interested in the smallness and the weakness and the wonder of our human lives. Our lives that, as the psalmist says, wither like the grass. Jesus shows us that our salvation does not lie in greatness or power or wealth or strength, but in drinking these lives we have to the dregs.
Perhaps we’re most afraid, though, that God’s voice will ring out around us calling us beloved. We, who are so small and afraid. Could we possibly be that beloved, just as we are?
I’m reminded of George Herbert’s extraordinary poem, Love (III):
Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,In Jesus, the fullness of God and the fullness of our humanity meet, in the face of one who calls us beloved and who loves us into fullness of life. The banquet is laid. We must sit down and eat.
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lacked anything.
"A guest," I answered, "worthy to be here":
Love said, "You shall be he."
"I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
I cannot look on thee."
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
"Who made the eyes but I?"
"Truth, Lord; but I have marred them; let my shame
Go where it doth deserve."
"And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"
"My dear, then I will serve."
"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."
So I did sit and eat.
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