Transfiguration Sunday: A Mountaintop Experience

 

            Today we celebrate Transfiguration Sunday. And transfiguration is really just another way of saying transformation. It simply means a change in form or appearance. And indeed, Jesus, on the mount of transfiguration, his appearance drastically changed. He suddenly began to shine like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white. In Mark’s gospel he notes that his clothes were so white that they couldn’t be bleached. I take it to mean that it’s so white that if you were to bleach it with the whitest bleach on earth, you’d only darken it.

The question is: what does this mean? Why does Jesus suddenly appear in this way? I believe that this event is meant to signal nothing less than Jesus’ full divinity. In Daniel 7, Daniel is given a vision of God as one whose clothing was white as snow. Psalm 104 speaks of God as being wrapped in light as a garment. And in Isaiah 60 as Isaiah has a vision of the perfect future, the new heaven and the new earth, Isaiah foresees something that is later repeated also in Revelation, that in heaven there will be no sun or moon to give light, for God himself will be the light. So, yes, in light of these Bible verses, I believe that Jesus shining like the sun and being dressed in dazzling white is Jesus boldly displaying that he is God.

            And why were Moses and Elijah there alongside Jesus? There are quite a few reasons. Perhaps because Moses and Elijah were the two greatest prophets of the Old Testament, and they were there to signal that in Jesus, one even greater than either of them was there. As it says in Hebrew 3:3, Jesus is worthy of more glory than Moses. Perhaps Moses and Elijah were there to hearken back to powerful mountaintop experiences that each of them had had where they got to witness God himself. In Exodus 34 Moses got to see God on Mt. Sinai and in 1 Kings 19, Elijah got to witness God on Mt. Horeb. Perhaps they were here to signal that once again upon this mountain, they were again witnessing God himself. This time they were witnessing God in Jesus.

Or perhaps Moses and Elijah were there to fulfill two key messianic prophecies. We read both of these in our scripture readings for today. Deuteronomy 18:15 spoke of a day when God would raise up a prophet like Moses, and the Jews were awaiting such a day. And notice how it said in Deuteronomy 18 about this prophet that you must “listen to him.” And then what did God say about Jesus on the mount of transfiguration? He said about Jesus, “listen to him!” God’s basically saying, this prophet you’ve been waiting for that Deuteronomy 18 is talking about, it’s Jesus! He’s the one! And from Malachi 4:5 Jews came to believe that Elijah would come again sometime before the Messianic kingdom was inaugurated. And here was Elijah, he had come again, and here was Jesus, the Messiah whom Elijah prepared the way for.

So, Peter, James, and John are blessed on that day with a beatific vision. It’s no light thing for them to get to see Moses and Elijah. Those were the ultimate heroes of the Israelites. That would be like us Americans getting to witness George Washington and Abraham Lincoln or maybe it would be like us Protestants getting to see John Calvin and Martin Luther just suddenly appear out of the blue in front of us. But the disciples didn’t just get to see Moses and Elijah, they got to see Jesus in his full glory as they got to take in, without a shadow of a doubt, the knowledge that Jesus was indeed the long awaited for Messiah. Jesus was God himself.

Now, yes, these disciples got to hang out with Jesus all the time. But Jesus was typically shrouded in humility. He looked like any normal person. People would say of him, “Is this not just Mary’s son? Or Joseph’s son?” Isaiah had prophesied of Jesus in Isaiah 53 that he was one who “had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.” Yes, Jesus was humbly born in a manger. There was nothing that really stood out about Jesus that made him appear special. But here Peter, James, and John got to witness the temporary removal of Jesus’ veil of humility. They got to see Jesus in the fullness of his divine glory.

            Think how wonderful it would be to get to witness the full glory of God. Think of how people will invest much time and money to travel to see the beauty of a mountain or a canyon or the ocean. Think of the beauty we can occasionally witness in space of the splendor of the milky way or the wonder of a supernova. God, the Creator, his grandeur is infinitely greater than any of these other beautiful things in His creation. God’s majesty is so enormous, that we can scarcely take it in. It is to us like the shining sun, something from which we must avert our eyes. Too awesome and wonderful for us. But to see even God’s backside, or his footstool, or the dampened glow of his emanating light while we shield our eyes, that is a vision so powerful and so wonderful that that experience alone could sustain us in hope and in faith our whole life long. I think of the righteous man Simeon in Luke 2 who has waited his whole life long just to see the Messiah. And finally Jesus is born and he sees the Messiah. And afterwards he says that he can now be dismissed in peace for his eyes have seen God’s salvation. Like Simeon, if we but truly witnessed God once in this life, that should make us content. Our entire life would have been worth it just for that moment. Peter, James, and John get the experience of a lifetime on the Mount of Transfiguration; better than any luxury vacation, better than winning the lottery.

            And so understandably, Peter wants to prolong this moment as long as possible. He says it is good for us to be here. Indeed, it is good. What could be better than this moment? And he offers to make three dwellings, literally tabernacles, one for each of Moses, Elijah, and Jesus to stay in. And here, as is often the case with Peter, he speaks with good intentions, but he speaks a bit rashly, not fully comprehending the situation. Basically tabernacles are places where gods or spiritual beings could dwell and reside and be worshipped in. Peter wanted to honor these holy men, to give them a place to stay, perhaps to even make this mountain into a destination site where pilgrims could come and witness these holy men and pay homage to them in their respective temples.

            But Peter doesn’t quite get it. In trying to make three tabernacle tents, Peter is seemingly trying to treat these three holy men as equal. And he’s perhaps even trying to treat some mere humans, Moses and Elijah, righteous as they were, as if they were divine. And so God interrupts and speaks from heaven to make sure that Peter understand that these men are not here as equals to Jesus, but here to witness to how Jesus is greater than even them. But upon hearing the voice of God, the disciples became greatly afraid. Why? Well in the Bible it is very common for people to be fearful when they hear God’s voice or are approached by an angel. It could be just another one of these instances. Or it could be that they’re afraid more specifically, afraid that they will be punished for their theological error. In Peter’s zeal to honor the holy men, he realizes he was accidentally about to commit idolatry, he was going to count Moses and Elijah as equal to Jesus, as equal to God. He could be rightly punished for this. But Jesus, ever patient with his disciples who continuously misunderstood and made mistakes, said, “Do not be afraid.” Jesus was there not to punish them for misunderstanding who he was, but to enlighten them about who he was, to showcase his glory.

            But then, suddenly, the moment was gone. After rising back up from their crouched position of fear, Moses and Elijah have disappeared, and Jesus returns to looking like his normal self; and then, in verse 9, they head back down the mountain. Peter wanted to prolong the wonderful moment of transfiguration as long as he could, but it was destined to be only a momentary glimpse. I wonder if you’ve found that life is sometimes that way for you. That for most of life God is hard to see and we feel like we’re living in the ordinary and the routine, but that just a few times in your life, you witness God in a way that feels miraculous or wonderful. Like Peter, James, and John we may occasionally get to have mountaintop experiences in life. Sometimes we might have them at a youth camp or a mission trip, sometimes we might have them in the midst of a vacation, or when reading a book, or dreaming a dream, or when falling in love, or when you witness the miracle of a newborn child. In life we might only have a few moments where we see God in ways that feel certain and extraordinary. And that might sound like that is not enough; that we need more of these experiences to sustain us. And yet these moments are such that just one moment like these could be the foundation for an entire life of faith. One genuine experience with God is so powerful that it is often all we need to devote the rest of our lives to him.

            So do not be dismayed when you have to walk back down the mountain. Do not be dismayed when your moment of beatific bliss is but temporary. That is how it must be. For we cannot yet live long in that heavenly realm. We yet have work to do here on earth. Yes, when the disciples came down from the mountain, they quickly realized that even though they had changed, the world around them had not changed. They were quickly reintegrated into all of the ordinary difficulties of life. They encounter an epileptic boy who needs healed. They encounter the need to pay taxes. This can sometimes be a jarring experience. When we’ve had a genuine and life transforming encounter with God, it can be jarring to reenter back into the world where to us it felt for a moment like time stood still, and yet the world has kept turning. And it’s jarring to be personally transformed by God to only discover that so many others still live as if God does not exist; where so many live exalting themselves, pursuing their own selfish dreams, treating others poorly… And it can be hard to understand how any live like that, how not everyone has come to understand the transformative reality of God; even though we probably were living just like that hours or days before our divine epiphany…

            After a divine experience, we will probably feel more and more like this world is not our home, more and more like our true citizenship is in heaven. But we cannot live in heaven yet. For there is yet work to be done here on earth, there are yet ways God wants to use us in all the broken mess of this current world.

            Friends, I pray if you have not yet had an experience like what happened on the Mount of Transfiguration, that you one day would. I pray that by you getting to see the glory of God transformed and magnified before your eyes, that you would leave transformed. And every week when we gather here on Sundays, I hope we get to partake in some small degree of what Peter, James, and John got to partake in. I hope that when we’re here we feel the presence of God, that we better come to see and understand God, and that we take time to worship God. And it is good for us to be here, in church. Those who aren’t here miss out. It is good for us to be here, and if church doesn’t yet feel that way, if church feels more like an obligation than it does like a joy, well I hope you start to get to experience just how good it is to praise God and bask in the goodness of His presence.

But as good as church is, every week we have to leave. And we go back into the world. And Mondays happen. Ugh, Mondays… did the weekend end so soon again? And yet God wants us out there, at work, at school, at home, back in the real world. Because there is still work to do. On Sundays we gather together and glimpse heaven, and then we’re sent back out to make the rest of the world be a little more like heaven too.

            We cannot stay on the mountaintop. God sends us back down into the valleys. We cannot stay on the mountaintop, but we will one day return to it. And one day, in the new heaven and the new earth, Jesus will shine in full dazzling glory each and every day, illuming our lives with light, and hope, and joy. We’ve been given a foretaste, and may that be enough, may that free sample hook you and entice you to labor on towards that day when you’ll get to experience God’s goodness in its fullness and entirety.