Glimpse

Propers: The Transfiguration of Our Lord, AD 2022 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

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

Whenever human beings are in a relationship, a community, or a culture, there are certain shared stories that bind us together, that link our understandings. Because we tell the same stories, we make sense of the world in similar ways.

I suspect that one of the reasons why postmodern folks are so atomized and lonely is due to the superabundance of stories, the superabundance of media, available to us. When anyone can watch anything at any time, our experiences are hyper-individualized. That’s why truly blockbuster movies have become cultural touchstones. We might not have anything else in common, but, hey—y’all saw The Avengers, right?

The problem with this, of course, is that pop culture is fleeting, ever changing and always dated. It’s got no staying power. We’re losing the permanent cultural stories that bind us together: Homer, Shakespeare, King Arthur, the Brothers Grimm. These tales have made the leap from fiction to literature because they shape our culture almost as much as they have been shaped by it. That’s why it’s important for us to study the holy Scriptures: because by internalizing these stories, they become our stories: they a part of us and we a part of them.

The Bible is the love story of God and His people, of Creator and Creation, of Christ and His Church. It unfolds across continents and millennia. When the sacred stories cease to be about strange peoples from strange times and instead become the story of God’s love for us—that’s when we know that we are and have always been part of one people, part of one story.

You don’t have to take every verse of the Bible literally in order to take it seriously. Quite the opposite. The Bible interprets itself spiritually. But here’s why it’s important: we believe that God is revealed in the flesh in Jesus Christ our Lord. And Jesus is a Hebrew. Jesus is a Jew. So if you want to understand Him, you have to understand His culture: the stories on which He was raised.

The New Testament assumes familiarity with the Old Testament, the First Testament. It makes references, allusions, and connections that you’re only going to get if you know the Hebrew Bible: the Law, the Prophets, the Writings, and beyond. A single image, a single word, from the life of Jesus Christ can summon up a host of biblical imagery: centuries of history and spiritual struggle. And this gives the Christian Scriptures a richness they could never have achieved on their own.

Like today, for instance. Today we celebrate the Transfiguration of Our Lord: a brief episode in the life of Christ which nonetheless serves as a hinge between His earlier public ministry and His long march toward the Cross. Before the Transfiguration, He preaches and teaches and heals the sick, laying a foundation for a movement, for a community. After the Transfiguration, He sets His face toward Jerusalem, which is to say, toward His death and Resurrection.

Now I’ll be the first to admit that the Transfiguration is weird. There’s so much going on, and so much of it bizarre, that we, like Peter, may not know quite what to do with it all. James and Peter and John follow Christ up a mountain to a place set apart. And while Jesus prays, He is transfigured before them, His face glowing, His clothes dazzling white. And here appear Moses and Elijah, both long gone, speaking with Christ of His departure, of His exodus.

And there’s a cloud of bright glory, and the thundering voice of the Heavenly Father, and Peter calling out that they need to make three dwellings, three tabernacles, for Jesus, Elijah, and Moses. And then all of a sudden it’s done. It’s over, as though someone had flipped off a switch. And they are left alone with Jesus—just plain old everyday Jesus—who descends now from the mountain to journey toward His death.

If the Old Testament provides images and ideas for the New Testament to reference and to utilize, then this brief episode—reported in all three of the Synoptic Gospels, and referenced in the letters of Peter and Paul—spreads out the entire deck. The preacher hardly knows where to begin.

Moses and Elijah, the great Lawgiver and Prophet of old, were famous for speaking to God atop a sacred mountain; now here they both are, speaking with Christ upon the mountaintop. Jesus glows like the Son of Man in the vision of Daniel. His garments are dazzling white, like the High Priest’s upon entry into the Holy of Holies. The Shekinah, the cloud of the divine presence, is the same as that which once swathed Sinai, and enveloped the Temple of Solomon at its consecration.

The fact that they speak of Jesus’ “exodus” isn’t exactly subtle. The Exodus, culminating in the sacrifice of the Passover lamb, is the foundational event of Jewish history, leading slaves to freedom and making of them one people with one sacred Law. And even Peter’s outburst about tents, about tabernacles, is no accident, no mad babbling of an overwhelmed mind. After the Exodus, the cloud of God’s presence would descend upon the tabernacle, the mobile temple-tent of the Hebrew people, in which God would speak with Moses face to face.

At the Festival of Booths, the Jewish people to this day still erect tabernacles: to remind them of their time in the wilderness, yes, but also looking forward to that day when all peoples shall know God as Moses did, each of us speaking to Him in little tabernacles of our own. Peter isn’t crazy. He’s a good Jewish boy. He knows his Bible. And he knows that at the end of the world, we all pitch tents.

So much history, so much hope, so strong a faith and so many stories, all culminating here in this one moment, in this one Man. We call it Transfiguration, but Jesus isn’t changed here, is He? Jesus doesn’t undergo a transformation. We do. This is always who He was: the God of the mountaintop, the God of Moses and Elijah; Daniel’s Son of Man, Solomon’s Holy of Holies; the presence of God, the Son of God, our High Priest and Messiah.

What’s transfigured in this story is our vision, our eyes. We finally get to see Him as He really, truly is. It is a glimpse of future hope, perhaps, the Kingdom come in time. But more than that, it is the revelation of eternal reality, spiritual reality. Here in Christ is God on earth. Here in Christ is God made Man. And as we are all being made into one in Him—one in His Body, one in His Spirit, through His death and Resurrection—so we also see what we have all of us always been meant to be.

That is our destiny, on that mountaintop. Glowing with divine radiance. Surrounded by divine presence. Listening to the divine Voice. That is our future—a future not just ahead of us in time, but beyond time. From the perspective of eternity, we are already saved, already in Heaven, already one with God in Jesus Christ our Lord. What remains is for this to play out in time. We must all walk with Christ through the valley of the shadow of death. We must all march to the Cross, and from there to the empty Tomb.

All men must make this journey. Yet in it, we are never alone. We have seen the eternal reality. We have seen Christ transfigured before our very eyes. And that gives us the strength, gives us the sure and certain hope, to light our way through darkness and make our way back home.

In seeing Christ for who He is, we have also seen His Kingdom, and our own place within it. We are joined to His own death, already died for us, that we need never fear death again, and to His own eternal life, already begun. The task remains for us now to see this life before us not with fleshly failing eyes, but with eyes transfigured in the vision of the Spirit. We are to be a foretaste of the feast to come: those who have seen the eternal Kingdom and who seek now to live it out in time, just as Jesus did, before us, for us, and in us.

We come down now from the mountain, down into the valley, down the long and winding road that leads unto our death. But we know who it is who awaits us at journey’s end, who has walked before us and by us for every step of the way. To live as a Christian—to live as Jesus Christ—is forever to have one foot in time and one in eternity, to walk both in this fallen world and in Kingdom Come.

Live like this, my brothers and sisters, and you will be transfigured, as will all the world around you, by the love and by the mercy of Jesus Christ our King.

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