Unveiled




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.

The way that things appear to be is not the way they are. This is the surprising consensus of every serious religious, philosophical, and spiritual tradition on the planet. Beneath, beyond, behind the world that we can see and touch, there lies a fuller, truer, deeper reality, where dwell not simply beautiful things but Beauty itself, not simply good things but Good itself, not simply true things but Truth itself.

Time rests upon eternity, the finite upon the infinite. Plato, the father of Western philosophy, opined that most people cannot be philosophers, do not possess a true love of wisdom, because we are enamored of appearances, of instantiations, rather than the timeless form behind the passing matter, the reality upholding all the things we think are real. Everything here changes. Everything here dies. But that’s okay, because there is a realm more real than this, a world of life rather than of death, one Word whence comes the cosmos.

And to glimpse that—to catch a flash of the eternal within the here and now—that is religion.

In our Gospel reading this morning, Peter and John and James follow Jesus up a mountain. There something happens to them. They experience a revelation. For just a moment they see Jesus as He truly is. And they are awestruck, terrified, baffled. They don’t know what to make of it, neither in that instant nor when they come down from the mountain. The vision won’t make sense to them until the Resurrection.

A bit of background might be helpful here. The traditional location of this miracle is on Mt Tabor, a deceptively large and oddly hemispherical hill in the Lower Galilee, more than half a kilometer tall. It looks as though some angel dropped his bowling ball on high. Jesus hikes them up this hill, quite the undertaking, and as the daylight wanes the weary Apostles begin to doze. Suddenly they are startled by a dazzlingly brilliant light, bright as a bolt of lightning, and they wake to witness Jesus Christ transfigured in their sight. Yet He is not transformed: He is revealed.

The key to understanding this is Moses. There stands Moses, we are told, along with the Prophet Elijah, conversing with the Christ atop the mountain, discussing His imminent exodus, soon to be fulfilled within Jerusalem, where await for Him the Cross and the Tomb. You may recall from Sunday School, or from any number of Hollywood films, that the Exodus is the story of the birth of the Jewish people. God sent Moses to liberate the Twelve Tribes of Israel, leading them out from slavery in Egypt to freedom in the Promised Land.

Upon their manumission, Moses ascended Mt Sinai, there to speak with God directly, as the Shekinah, the concealing cloud of the divine presence, descended upon the mountaintop. After communing with the Lord, Moses’ face shone with holy radiance, terrifying his people down below. Having communicated the divine Law, Moses prophesied that someday another like him would come: “Listen to him,” Moses said.

Generations later, another wonderworker did arise: the Prophet Elijah. In word and in deed, Elijah seemed a second Moses. He too ascended a mountain in order to speak with God. Not for nothing, tradition held that both Moses and Elijah, at the ends of their earthly lives, were taken bodily up into heaven, there to dwell amongst the angels. This was at a time, mind you, when heaven was understood to be no place for humankind. The dead went to the land of the dead. Only the chosen few could merit celestial assumption.

Fast-forward to the Gospel for today. Here atop Mt Tabor we see Moses and Elijah, representing the Law and the Prophets: two men famous for speaking with God on top of a mountain; two men selected to dwell in highest heaven with the Lord. And we witness them speaking to Jesus; atop a mountain; surrounded by the cloud of divine presence; as He shines blazing bright with the light of God’s own glory. The symbolism isn’t subtle. The revelation’s rather clear.

Christ is the God with whom they spoke upon the mountain. Christ is the heaven where the prophets rose to dwell. Christ is the one whom Moses had foretold: “Listen to Him!” Here we have the reality beneath the veil of flesh. This rabble-rousing rabbi, this fierce prophet, who fearlessly champions the outcast and oppressed, the persecuted and poor, He is now, and has ever been, God! Holy crud and hallelujah. That’s jarring and joyful at once.

And Peter does something weird, though not as weird as we might think. He says, “Master, it is good for us to be here. Let us set up three tents—three tabernacles—one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” That seems to come out of left field. But Peter is a faithful Jewish man. He knows that of old God spoke to Moses in a tent, in a sacred Tabernacle. He knows that of old God thus dwelt among His people.

Moreover, Peter knows that when the Messiah comes, when the old age ends and the new day dawns, scribes and prophets promised that all people would see God face-to-face, as Moses had, each in little tabernacles of our own. So in a sense, Peter gets it. He sees the revelation of Jesus as the Christ, of God made Man, and he recognizes that this must be the New Covenant, the beginning and end of the world, when God again shall dwell amongst His people.

That’s how John begins his Gospel, remember: the Word became flesh and dwelt among us; or more literally, tabernacled in us. Peter sees this all, in a flash in the night. But then, just like lightning, the vision passes away. The light snuffs out; the cloud evaporates; Moses and Elijah disappear. And all that we have left to us is Christ. I wonder if this bit is more disturbing than the last.

We tend to think, I would suppose, that if we were to witness a miracle, if we experienced a vision, it would change our lives forever. There would be no more doubts, no more despair. Life would be naught but wonder and glee from here to the grave and beyond. Alas, I have not found this to be so. For I have witnessed wonders and miracles, of varying sizes and sorts. They tend to both shock and astonish, leaving us staring like deer in headlights. Yet after but a moment they are gone, while we remain in the mundane.

We question what we saw, what we heard. How reliable are our senses, how malleable our memories? Did that really happen? Did we truly see? Or was it but a dream, fading into the night? John and Peter and James stay silent, pondering, praying, perplexed. They’ve gotten a glance at eternity, in the shards of a shattered mirror. And it seems that they wouldn’t speak of it, until Jesus arose from the dead.

On either end of the great vale of Lent, there stand a pair of mountains. Here at the beginning, as Jesus turns His face toward Jerusalem—toward His Exodus as the Passover Lamb of God—we briefly glimpse His glory, a reassuring revelation of Christ as God-With-Us. At the other end of the 40 days there looms a second peak, the jagged crest of Golgotha, of Calvary, “Place of a Skull.” There again is Jesus raised to glory, on a Cross.

These two mountains are somehow both the same. Both are the presence of God, tabernacled in the flesh. Both are His victory, and both His humiliation: the murder of the immortal, the Creator uncreated, infinity flowing forth from Jesus’ piercèd side. What a wonder, what a terror, what a grace is here unsheathed. Christ has come to liberate the damned!

This, dear Christians, is our Exodus: from death unto life, from sin unto strength, from the darkness of a fallen world to reality unfettered. “Although I live in the slime and muck of the dark age,” wrote the poet, “in the thick black fog of materialism … the time of hell on earth … I still aspire to see your face.” Here in this Man is the face of God unveiled. The cloud has lifted; now we see Him as He is.

In the words of David Bentley Hart:

The entire life of the Christian should be an ascent of Mount Tabor, a penitent yet joyous approach to the Christ who is Himself the Temple of the Glory, from whom the Shekinah that resided in the Holy of Holies is now shed forth upon all of Creation.

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






Pertinent Links

RDG Stout
Blog: https://rdgstout.blogspot.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RDGStout/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsqiJiPAwfNS-nVhYeXkfOA
Twitter: https://x.com/RDGStout

St Peter’s Lutheran
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064841583987
Website: https://www.stpetersnymills.org/
Donation: https://secure.myvanco.com/L-Z9EG/home

Nidaros Lutheran
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YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@nidaroschurch6026

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