Long Dark Way

Propers: Transfiguration, A.D. 2018 B

Homily:

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

A glimpse of glory—that’s all we are given before the long, dark walk through Lent. One glimpse of glory, like a deep breath before the plunge.

On either side of Lent there is a mountain. Here, at the beginning, upon Mt Tabor, we have the mountain of Transfiguration. For one brief moment, the glory of God is revealed in the person of Jesus Christ, outshining the sun. The great prophets of the past, Moses and Elijah, who famously communed with God upon the mountaintop, appear now, beyond death, speaking to the Christ, their God made flesh. They represent the whole of the Law and the Prophets, the sacred Scriptures of the Hebrew Bible, pointing to the Messiah, pointing to Jesus.

And it’s everything for which the Apostles have hoped, everything for which they’ve dreamt! Here, at last, is Jesus unveiled for all the world to see, radiant in glory, resplendent with power! Israel has awaited this moment for a thousand years. The whole of Creation has groaned for this moment since the breaking of the world. And Peter, God bless him, cries out for joy: let us make tents for You, let us make tabernacles, for the time is at last fulfilled!

That may sound a little funny but it actually makes perfect sense. The tabernacle, the tent of meeting, is a recurring image in the Bible. It is where God breaks into Creation, where He again dwells amongst His people as once He did in Eden. The Ark of Noah was a tabernacle; the Temple of Solomon was a tabernacle; and of course the Tent of Meeting, into which the glory of God would descend to converse with Moses, was the Tabernacle, the mobile house of God on earth.

Keep in mind that John’s Gospel begins with his proclamation that the Word became flesh, and dwelt—tabernacled—amongst us. It is God come down, the Creator entering Creation, to move with His people and to dwell where they dwell. It is no coincidence that we drape the elements of Communion to look like a tent.

In the harvest season, the people of Israel would build little huts or tents, little tabernacles, so that they might stay out in the fields until the harvest came in full. It was a holiday, the Festival of Booths—because while they sat in their little tents, gathering the harvest, they looked forward to the End of the Age, to the coming of the Messiah, when God again would dwell with man, and each person would see God face-to-face, as Moses did, in a little tabernacle of his or her own.

And so if Peter wants to pitch tents, it’s not because he’s off his rocker. It’s because he knows that the Messiah has come, that the glory of God has been fully revealed in the person of Jesus Christ, and now comes the End of the Age, the fulfillment of every promise, the realization of all our hopes!

But then, like a light switch, it ends. The glory departs. The voice falls silent. The cloud of God’s presence, the Shekinah, dissipates. Moses and Elijah are lost to sight once more, raptured back up to the invisible heavens. And all that’s left of this apocalyptic vision, of this fleeting glimpse of glory, is Jesus, just standing there, until He descends, down from the mountain, down into the valley of shadow, down on the long road to Jerusalem.

For at the other end of Lent stands a very different mountain, at least to mortal eyes: the mountain of Golgotha, the Place of the Skull. Here He will inaugurate the Kingdom of God on earth—crowned with thorns, enthroned upon a Cross, pouring out His life’s Blood for the world.

Often in this life, my brothers and my sisters, we have only a glimpse of glory to sustain us through the long dark march to the Cross. Would that it were not so. Would that we could always be optimistic and fearless and cheery, like those prosperity preachers on the television, with their flawless suits and dazzling rictus grins.

But the glory of God is not revealed in such things, in wealth and power and strength. The glory of God is revealed in the Cross, in the God who sets aside all the things we think our gods should be, and instead takes the form of a Servant, of a wandering desert Rabbi hardened by the wilderness. The great paradox of our faith is that the two mountains—one of Transfiguration, the other of Crucifixion—are really one and the same. The true glory of God is in that kenosis, that divine self-emptying, that allows Him to meet us in our struggles, to walk alongside us in our doubts, to lift us up from the valley of death because He has been entombed along with us!

Sometimes we wish it were not so. Sometimes we wish God would just snap His almighty fingers and force the world to be good, force it back to the way it was supposed to be—no more suffering, no more despairing, no more death. But love doesn’t work that way. Love doesn’t force. Love cannot be a tyrant, even a tyrant for our own good. Love must love; love must give. Love must dwell amongst us, walk beside us, suffer with us. Love must give and forgive and pour out Himself for the world—plunging into death to raise us up from the grave.

And because Love works this way, because God loves the world back to life rather than battering the cosmos into submission, the final victory will be all the more glorious! The Resurrection will be infinitely more wonderful because God has saved us in this way! When we rise, we will rise with Christ in glory! But the road is long, and the way is hard, and we must journey straight through the heart of the valley of death.

Yet we have this glimpse of glory to sustain us on our way.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.