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| Theophanes the Great, 14th century (Russian), Transfiguration. |
Mark 9:2-9
Transfiguration
of the Lord/ 15th February 2015
Six
days after Peter’s confession that Jesus is the Messiah, six days after denying
the Messiah would suffer and die, six days after visiting the pagan, Gentile
region known as Caesarea Philippi, Jesus took Peter, along with James and John,
up a high mountain. He took them aside,
these three, to show them something, to experience something that would change
them and confound them and call them.
Tradition
says this “high mountain” was Mount Tabor in Galilee. This is probably wrong. We know from the historian Josephus (37-100)
that there was a fort on Mt. Tabor with a garrison of Roman soldiers during
Jesus’ time.[1] Jesus wouldn’t have taken them there. I’ve seen Mt. Tabor, drove around its base.
It’s not that high. I’m sure there’s a
pretty good view from the top (there’s a Franciscan monastery there today), but
there’s an even better vista not far from Caesarea Philippi and that is Mount
Hermon. And it is high. When I was there in June several years ago
there was snow at the peak. It’s
situated where Syria, Lebanon, and the Golan Heights come together. Elevation: 9,232 feet. That is high, set apart, remote. It would have taken them days, maybe six
days, to reach the summit: a place with a vista, and in those rarefied heights,
a good place for a vision, a good place to hear voices.
The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and
Luke each contain a version of this story.
John’s Gospel, as a whole, can be seen as one mystical, transfiguring
vision. Mark’s story is the
oldest—simple, unembellished, to the point.
Placed within the context of all the stories we have about Jesus this
is, by far, the most mystical. The
resurrection is a mystery. But the
account of the Transfiguration is mystical, mysterious. It’s liminal, that is,
caught between two realms, two worlds, two dimensions: heaven and earth meet,
past and present meet, God and humanity meet.
It’s an experience full of light that reveals what was previously
hidden, clouds that cover and conceal, conversations overheard without ever
really knowing what is being said, and disciples saying stupid things that
don’t make any sense. And then a voice
thunders and reverberates, causing multiple voices to echo: THIS-this-this-this,
…IS…MY…SON-Son-Son-Son, MY, BELOVED-Beloved-Beloved-Beloved.
LISTEN-listen-listen-listen…to him!
And when the ecstatic vision was
over, when the world went silent, the disciples looked around and saw, as Mark
says, no one was with them any more, “only Jesus.”
You can’t stay in a mountaintop
experience forever. You have come
down. You can’t live on that religious
high. You have to go down the
mountain. Previously set apart, now it’s
time to return and reconnect. Invited to
go up the mountain—that’s an expression of grace. But the return—the return with Jesus—is also
grace. And both his presence and his
grace were needed for what was coming.
In chapter 8, Peter confesses Jesus
as Messiah, but Peter wanted nothing to do with a Messiah who suffers and dies. Up on the mountain, full of light and glory,
presence and blessing, I wonder if Peter and the others remembered his
statement about the cross. Who wants to
dwell on suffering and dying when we can bask in the radiant glow of
Jesus? But when they go back down the
mountain, down into the rest of chapter nine Jesus commands them, orders them
not to say a word about what they had seen until after the resurrection, but even that statement was mysterious for
them because they didn’t know what it meant. The disciples continue to follow
him down the mountain and deeper into chapter nine. Jesus heals an epileptic child (Mark 9:17-29). And then Jesus says it again: “The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human
hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise
again” (Mark 9:31). The text says, “But they did not understand what [Jesus]
was saying—and were afraid to ask him”
(Mark 9:32). Would you?
The story of Jesus’ transfiguration
is bracketed by these two, pivotal verses in Mark’s gospel: 8:31 and 9:31. When I was in seminary we were taught to pay
attention to these two verses, for Mark’s gospel is built around them. These two, startling verses say that Jesus
will undergo great suffering, be killed, and then rise three days later. In
between we have this extraordinary mystical experience. So, we have a reference to suffering on the
cross, then transfiguration, followed by another reference to suffering on the
cross.
What are we to make of this sequence? Well, it all depends whether you approach the
story from the West or the East.
We
in North America are the product of what we might call the westward expansion
of the Church. The historical narrative
we live in goes something like this: Pentecost in Jerusalem, the transformation
of Saul into Paul, Paul travels all over Asia Minor, Paul is called to Europe,
travels to Greece, and dies in Rome, the Roman Church carries the baton for
several hundred years, the Great Schism occurs in 1054 leaving the Roman
Catholic Church in the West and the Greek Orthodox Church in the East, Luther
and Calvin and Knox and others get ticked off with the Roman Pope in the
sixteenth century, the Church splits again, part of the Church moves west from
Spain to the Caribbean to South America (a Roman Catholic track) and from
England to Jamestown and Plymouth (a Protestant track), the Presbyterians show
up on Long Island in 1640, in 1683 the Presbyterian minister Francis Makemie
(1658-1708) arrives in Maryland and eventually we have Catonsville Presbyterian
Church. We know more about the Roman
Catholic-Protestant development of the Church and its theology. We in the West
know very little about the development of the Church and its theology as it
moved north from Jerusalem into Asia Minor and into Armenia and Russia and
northeast into Syria, Iraq, and Iran, and into India, or southeast into Arabia. It’s not what I learned in seminary.
The Christianity of the West is not
the same as that of the East. While we together
serve a common Lord, we emphasize different things. The divergence and
difference between these traditions can be seen in how each approaches the Transfiguration.[2]
Eastern
theology has always been far more mystical.
Eastern theologians view the redemption achieved by Christ as cosmic,
saving persons along with an entire
cosmos or world, and, therefore the Christian life is viewed as participating
within the new creation wrought by the resurrection (as Paul, himself, said[3]). Their outlook has always been more mystical
than moral.
The
West, on the other hand, is moral rather mystical in its emphasis. The Roman Empire’s philosophical bent combined
with its obsession with law had an enormous influence upon Western Church, as
seen sometimes in our obsession with theological ideas such as justification
and distinct theories of the atonement, slipping into a moralism or legalism which
misses the cosmic context of the Christian life.
The
East approaches the cross in light of the resurrection, almost to the point of
absorbing the cross into the resurrection, emphasizing the glory of
Easter. The West, on the other hand, often
isolates the cross from the resurrection.
We see this in the way the West, within the Roman Catholic church but
also in large portions of the Protestant world, has focused primarily on Jesus’
suffering on the cross as a means to obliterate the transgressions of the law,
focusing on the forgiveness of sin.
Eastern
Christianity has a special fondness for the Transfiguration, it’s honored and
cherished. This is evident in the
thousands of beautiful icons of the Transfiguration produced over centuries in
the East.[4] The Eastern Church elevated this story
liturgically, designating it as one of the Great Feast Days of the Church, while in
the West it has secondary status. I’ve
never seen a packed-house in worship on Transfiguration Sunday here in the
West, have you?
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| Transfiguration, St. Catherine's Monastery, 12th century. |
The
West, being moralistic and practical about so many things, wants to know what
the text “means,” the lessons learned, the theological claims being made. The West focused on the Transfiguration as an
event and tried to develop dogma
around it. The East, by contrast,
prefers to see it as a “symbol of something that pervades all dogma and
worship.”[5] They want, they encourage us to allow the
image, the icon, the story, the scene conjured by the creative power of our
imaginations to shape us and move us. The East prefers to indwell the image,
rejoice in it, glory in it, bask in the warmth of Christ’s presence, allowing
the radiance of his life rain down upon us as we stand or kneel there on that
mountain in holy terror and awe and confusion, letting it shape us, inform us,
speak to us. God says from the clouds, “Listen to him!” This requires
attentiveness and silence, it requires being still, being fully there—on that
mountain, not somewhere else—listening with the ear of our hearts.
In our liturgical calendar we remember
the Transfiguration on the Sunday before Lent.
Placed at the threshold of Lent, given such prominence, one would think
that the story and all that it conveys would inform the way we enter into this
season in the church. And, yet, it’s
often overlooked or just left as a baffling story that we ought to read and
preach on because the lectionary says so.
The
Church likes to go from 8:31 to 9:31, these two references to Jesus’ suffering,
two strong statements about the cross, often ignoring the Transfiguration. It’s easy to think, then, that Lent is all
about the cross—the cross is important, of course, crucial here. But it’s really important for us to place the
cross within the context of the resurrection, that is, the image of God that Jesus showed us in and through the
resurrection—the kind of image of God
that is given in the Transfiguration. It’s
a vision of a God who is present in
and through Christ, divinity and
humanity uniquely conjoined in him. In
his light we see light (Psalm 36:9). We
get a glimpse of the power contained in this man who will suffer and die on a
cross. We hear again what Jesus first
learned at his baptism, “You are my Son, my Beloved.” It’s the Beloved Son who invites us to the
mountain to see who he really is and it’s the Beloved One who walks us back down
the mountain, down and into the world where people are hurting and suffering
and dying—because that’s where the
Beloved wants to be, precisely in those places. It’s why the Beloved One
sets his face toward Jerusalem.
We’ll never know for sure, but I
wonder if the disciples heard Jesus’ statement about suffering and the cross
with just a little more insight after
the Transfiguration than they did before.
We have 8:31, then the Transfiguration, and then 9:31. The disciples still don’t fully “get it” by
9:31. Who would? “They were afraid to
ask him.” But this second time there’s
no protest from the likes of Peter, no resistance at all. While they don’t full understand him, and
they bumble along to the end of the gospel, they’re remaining open and learning
and trying to process what just took place on the top of that mountain. Because
you see, once you’ve been to the mountaintop you never again see the world the
same. Once your reality has been
transfigured you never again see your life the same. Everything, including suffering, the nature
of suffering, the nature of Christ’s suffering has been transfigured.
As a result, we as followers of
Christ should never approach suffering as an end in itself. We don’t celebrate suffering for suffering’s
sake; we don’t glory in suffering. Yet, Jesus never said, “Follow me and you’ll
never suffer again.” Instead, Jesus shows us that suffering can
be transfigured; that is, our experience of suffering is transfigured when we
know, when we come to know that whatever we face in our lives we are connected
to the power and presence of the Beloved One.[6] Because Jesus was committed to his calling
and because he was confident of God’s commitment to him, he was able to face
his own suffering and enter into the suffering of the people he met along the highways
and byways he traveled. And that’s what
we’re able to do because we walk with him and he walks with us.
That’s what we’re able to do: suffer
with and in and sometimes for
another, for the people we love. That’s
what love does. It suffers.
I
was moved, as I’m sure you were, by the brave witness of Kayla Mueller
(1988-2015), the hostage of ISIS who was killed in the last week or so. She sounded like a remarkable human
being. Not much was made about her
Christian convictions and the call in her life.
I listened to an NPR story this week and nothing was said about why she
was where she was—I mean really why
she was there, about what motivated her.
She wanted to alleviate human
suffering. This, on its own, is a noble cause, worthy of human effort. But, as her closest childhood friends said,
Kayla had “great empathy,” this “was her greatest strength.”[7]
And we discover what stands behind this
empathy, this ability to enter into another’s suffering, in these words that were
shared this week. They’re from a letter
she wrote to her father on his birthday in 2011, “I find God in the suffering
eyes reflected in mine. If this is how you [God] are revealed to me, this is
how I will forever seek you.” She wrote,
“I will always seek God. Some people
find God in church. Some people find God
in nature. Some people find God in love;
I find God in suffering. I’ve known for
some time what my life’s work is, using my hands as tools to relieve
suffering.”[8] In a letter written to her family while in
captivity, she said, “I have a lot of fight left inside of me and I will not
give in no matter how long it takes.”[9]
I have no idea what kind of inner
spiritual life Kayla had, but my guess is, somewhere along her 26-year journey,
she saw something, felt something, came to know something about the
Transfigured One, and that she was herself transfigured—because you can’t make
statements like these, backed up with a life of extraordinary strength, unless
you’ve had a similar kind of experience of God’s suffering love, which changes
everything. Because, as Jesus showed us
with his life, that’s what love does—it suffers in and with and through and for God’s children—for all God’s children. That’s the love that calls us and sends
us. It’s the kind of love that moved
Jesus to begin his walk toward Jerusalem—and, in love, he invites us to go
there with him.
[1] Josephus, Jewish Wars, iv.I.8.
[2] In what follows, I’m
relying on the helpful comparison found in Arthur Michael Ramsey, The Glory of God and the Transfiguration of
Christ (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1949), 133ff.
[3] See Romans 8 and 2
Corinthians 5.
[4] See Andreas
Andreopoulos, Metamorphosis: The
Transfiguration in Byzantine Theology and Iconography (Crestwood, NY: St.
Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2005).
[5] Ramsey, 137.
[6] Ramsey, 145.
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