Order Matters: Kingdom, Repent, Believe.

The north shore of the Sea of Galilee.

Mark 1:9-15

Third Sunday in Lent/ 8^th March 2015

I’ll cut right to the chase here this morning.  Pay attention to the order.  Look at the flow of the text.  We start at 1:9 with Jesus’ baptism by John (verses 9-11), and then we have Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness (verses 12-13), followed by Jesus’s statement about the kingdom of God (verse 14-15).  Jesus leaves Galilee for the wilderness to be baptized, then he’s led deeper into the wilderness for forty days, and then Jesus returns to Galilee.  Upon his return, right after word arrived that John the Baptist had been arrested, Jesus begins his public ministry.  Everything Jesus came to do is summed up in these two verses, verses 14 and 15 of chapter 1.  The life of a Jesus-follower is summed up in these two verses. 

Here they are again:  “Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’”

And it’s here, in these two verses, so simple, so profound, that we need to pay close attention to the order.  Getting the order correct is crucial.

Let’s break it down and you’ll see what I mean. 

Jesus arrives in Galilee. 

What is the first task of his ministry?  

He comes proclaiming, preaching. What is he proclaiming, preaching?  The good news. 

Whose good news?  God’s.  God’s good news.  

The euaggelion tou theou.

What is this good news that’s coming from God? Here’s what Jesus says: the time is fulfilled—peplerotai ho kairos. What time is it?  Kairos time! And what is kairos time?  Kairos is time, a kind of time. It’s a moment among many moments pregnant with possibility and opportunity.  It’s not ordinary time, common time, second after second after second, tick then tock then tick then tock forever and ever.  Kairos is not that kind of time. Jesus would have described that tick-tock understanding of time as chronos.  But there are special moments within chronos so full of meaning and significance, moments that emerge and erupt the ordinary flow of tick-tock time that are singular, when something different and new occurs, and what arrives in that moment, every other moment is forever changed.  That’s kairos time.

This new thing emerging, erupting, exploding in ordinary time in Jesus’s life, this new dimension of time Jesus would have described as kairos, which is exactly how Mark describes it.  That’s what Mark wants you and me to see here.  The beginning of Jesus’ ministry is a kairotic moment and what occurred in that moment continues unabated throughout time, for all time, right down to our time, to this time.

So what erupted into time then and continues to break into our time now?  Jesus said, “The kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the kingdom.”  This is the order we need to pay close attention to. 

Kingdom. Repent. Believe.  In this order. Not: repent, believe, and then enter the kingdom of God.  Neither is it:  believe, then, repent, and then the kingdom of God will come near.  No.  Getting the order correct is crucial.  Where you begin will shape the contours of your life.  Where you begin will determine where you end up and shape how you get there.  By “there” I don’t mean heaven.  For Mark, the kingdom of God is not a synonym for “heaven.”  The kingdom or, better, the realm of God (the Greek could also accurately be translated as empire), is not “up there” or “out there” after we die.

The realm of God—God’s realm of fairness, justice and righteousness, God’s way of mercy and peace and fierce love, God’s judgment upon evil and every injustice in the world, God’s redemptive power to heal and to restore, to save and to make whole, this kingdom, this kin-dom, this realm, this empire, this sphere of benevolent influence—has come near, drawn close to us, it has erupted into the space-time continuum in the body and spirit of Jesus of Nazareth.  Our life fissures and splits open with his arrival, in this kairos time.  All that the kingdom symbolizes and means is now embodied in Jesus, in what he says, but also in what he is. God has entered into time through the Son and time is never the same again. The power of God has now been unleashed upon the world in an entirely new way in him.  This new way, as theologians say, this novum, this new thing is the good news, it is what we mean by gospel.

And because all of this is now true—the kingdom is not on the way, it’s not about to draw near, it’s here and now, right now—we need to wake up.  Wake up!  Change your life!  Change the way you think!  Change your mind, change your awareness, which is what we mean by repent; and then believe, trust in the goodness of this good news.

Kingdom. Repent. Believe. Many Christians like to switch it around by starting with repentance.  We’ve all heard countless televangelists and revivalist preachers calling for repentance as a kind of warning.  If you repent, so the message goes, change your ways, and then believe certain things about Jesus or God or the Spirit, then you’ll enter the kingdom, which often means heaven.  Many Christians think this is the order of things: Repent. Believe. Kingdom.  But that’s not what the text says.  That’s why John Calvin (1509-1564) insisted, “Repentance is not placed first…as if it were the ground of forgiveness, or as if it induced God to be begin to be gracious to us.”[1] Forgiveness is not contingent upon repentance. We can’t force God to forgive us by repenting.  Jesus arrived in the Galilee proclaiming the kingdom, because God is gracious, not because we are.

Kingdom. Repent. Believe.  Some Christians like to reverse it altogether by starting with belief.  Christians that take this approach tend to become anxious about what they believe or don’t believe, about what others believe or don’t believe, they work themselves up into a nervous state worrying about doubt creeping into their lives. They stress belief first. They say, if you first come to believe certain things about Jesus, then change your thinking and your behavior, then the kingdom will come.

The major problem with both distortions of this text, whether you start with repentance or belief, is that both of these salvation formulas are so egocentric and ego-driven.  These readings of the text make it all about us, what we can or cannot do or think or believe.  We assume that if we just perfect repentance, get our moral and theological lives in order, return to the straight and now, follow certain rules of behavior, behave like good little boys and girls, control our thoughts, then, surely, the blessing of the kingdom will fall upon us. But this is, as we all know, the royal road to continued disappointment and failure.  It doesn’t work this way.

The good news is not about you.  It’s not about what you can or cannot do to enter the kingdom.  It’s not about you and me trying to earn our salvation.  It’s not about us. We can’t usher in the kingdom of God. We can’t work toward it.  We can’t manipulate God with our “good” behavior, as if that would get God to open the doors and let us in the kingdom.   But, you might be asking, isn’t that what Jesus wants from us?  Isn’t this what God wants from us, perfection?  Isn’t that why Jesus came to die to deal with our sin, to judge our waywardness, to take our sin on a cross? Doesn’t Jesus expect a particular ethic from his followers?  Of course—which brings me back to the text.

The ethic God requires flows from understanding the kingdom.

Kingdom. Repent. Believe.  The kingdom comes first.  It’s a gift.  It’s an act of grace.  It’s given. And it has already arrived.  It’s already here, in Christ.  Right now.  What Jesus wants first from us is not our best intentions but for us to know in our hearts and minds that God is gracious, to know God’s justice, mercy, peace, and wholeness, to know that something new and beautiful and wondrous and redemptive has been born and is being reborn in us because of him. 

And when this awareness overwhelms us, when we are overcome by this grace, when we come to this consciousness, when we experience God in precisely this way, repentance, metanoia, will follow, it will happen, and we will come believe in the good news and trust in the good news because we know that it’s good. This awareness of the kingdom yields repentance, it changes our minds, and it informs what we believe, and, ultimately, it compels us to follow him, it moves our bodies and our feet and we move or march or act.  “And passing along by the Sea of Galilee, Jesus saw Simon and Andrew the brother of Simon casting a net in the sea; for they were fishermen. And Jesus said to them, ‘Follow me and I will make you fish for people.’ And immediately they left their nets and followed him.” (Mark 1:16-18).  I suspect that this is the reason why the disciples were able to respond so quickly to Jesus’ invitation to follow him.  They saw a different world before them, with new possibilities found in him.  Because they caught of a glimpse of that vision, the left everything and followed him.

Jesus offered them a vision of God’s kingdom. And he came preaching to help us to see it too.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1928-1968) saw it.  Had a glimpse of the kingdom.  That’s what he saw from the mountaintop.  He saw God’s vision for the world.  He saw where the kingdom would lead us. 

And all the people who marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, they saw it too.  That’s why they could march and walk and suffer and even die.  It’s the kingdom vision that calls us—and it’s the vision that changes us and invites us to repent from former ways and believe in the possibilities of a different narrative.  The visions calls us to act or to walk or to march or to work or to prayer.  It calls us to come alive.  And when the vision emerges, when kairos breaks into chronos, and we attempt to move toward that vision we should expect resistance against us, we should anticipate an enormous struggle against God’s kingdom.  And when that happens we need to go back and remember the vision because, as President Barak Obama said yesterday in Selma, “We know the march is not over yet.”[2]         

I agree with Richard Rohr, the Franciscan priest and writer, when he says, “Jesus is much more concerned about shaking your foundations, giving you an utterly alternative self image, world image, and God image, and thus reframing your entire reality.”[3]  The good news—this kingdom message embodied in Jesus—is all about “regrounding, reshaping and redirecting you from your core.” And it’s not really good news unless it’s doing all of this for us and to us.  Without transformation at the core level, religion or faith is essentially ego-driven and ego-centric.  The faith becomes something we “use” for our own ends and purposes, something we “do” in order to get something out of God or the church or our neighbor.  The Christian life unfortunately becomes all about doing, “repenting,” or believing or trying to belief certain things about God or Jesus or the Spirit.  The faith experience becomes consumed with a desire to try harder, be a better Christian, a better person, a better mother or father or son or daughter or spouse or partner.  No wonder people get disappointed and frustrated.

Why do we focus on “repent” and miss the reference to the kingdom?  We hear repent as: try harder. Work harder, be kinder, be more giving, more forgiving, more peaceful, less anxious, more accepting, more loving, be a better mother, father, spouse or partner, a better son or daughter…you know the drill, you know those internal messages in your head.  You also know, for the most part, they’re not effective.  Change can occur, but deep, lasting change never really occurs this way.  And all of these aspirations are important, but the Christian life is about so much more.

Jesus’ ministry didn’t start with repent and it didn’t start with belief, it started with the kingdom message, the proclamation of the good news erupting into the world.  Think of the good news as geyser welling up from the depths and showering down upon us with grace upon grace.  We can’t cause the geyser to well up from the depths.  We’re not called to measure or “understand” the whys and the wherefores of the geyser or try to maintain its pressure or determine when and where it erupts the surface of our lives.  Instead, we are called to acknowledge its presence and force, we are called to allow it happen—because it is happening—and then allow it to wash over our lives and rain down upon us.  We need to surrender to it.  Allow it to happen.  Be grateful for it, rejoice in it, celebrate it.  You can’t cause the water to pour down upon you, you can’t make the geyser to its thing, it is done unto you. (see Luke 1:38).  This is what Richard Rohr describes as a “deep allowing.”

Allow the kingdom to wash over you.  

Receive the good news. 

Allow Jesus’ words to wash over you.  

Allow God’s love to overwhelm you. 

Allow God’s justice to convict you.  

Allow God’s grace to shake your foundations. 

Yield to it, again and again and again.  

When this occurs and every time it occurs we change, 

we are changed, metanoia happens, almost naturally.  

Think about it: 

how could we not change after an encounter with God?  Repentance flows from the transforming experience, 

and then we believe 

and trust 

and rest in the goodness of God’s kingdom.  

We give our lives over to it.  

Leaving our nets behind, we follow.

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[1] John Calvin, Commentary on Matthew, Mark, Luke in Christian Classics Ethereal Library.
[2] The full text of President Obama’s speech in Selma maybe found here.
[3] Richard Rohr, “Lent Is About Transformation.” 

Covenant & Cross

Genesis 17: 1-7, 15-16;

Mark 8:31-38

Second Sunday in Lent/ 1^st March 2015

Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper

I’m thankful for this week’s lectionary. To be honest, I’m not always a fan of the Revised Common Lectionary.  I often follow it, but not always.  What I’m thankful for this week is the way the lectionary links a text from Genesis 17 with the pivotal verses in Mark 8, where Jesus makes unsettling statements about a cross, that a cross is required of him and of us.

It’s this link, this alignment, this juxtaposition of these two texts that is absolutely fascinating, and drew me to something I’ve never considered before or never quite saw in this light.  In Genesis 17 we have the establishment of God’s “everlasting covenant” with Abram and his descendants.  “This is my covenant with you:  You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations.  …I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you….  I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you” (Gen. 17:3-4, 6-7).

Here God—Almighty God, El Shaddai—makes a pledge, a promise with Abram.  God rewards Abram for his faithfulness.  God makes clear what God’s intentions were from the start, when God first called out to Abram and summoned him to leave home (Genesis 12:1-3).  Here in chapter 17, God made a covenant with Abram and not just with Abram, but his children, along with his children’s children, all of his descendants, from generations to generations, multitudes.  God made a commitment to be faithful to Abram—no matter what.  God binds Godself to Abram’s destiny.  And as a sign of this arrangement, Abram becomes Abraham, meaning “ancestor of a multitude.”

There are many covenants in Hebrew Scriptures. There’s one with Noah (Gen. 8:20-9:17) and with David (2 Samuel 7).  But it’s this one, the covenant with Abram—this is the big one.  It’s this covenant that runs all the way through the story of Israel, all the way to Egypt and back again, all the way to Babylon and back again.  Throughout, God remains faithful to God’s people and never, ever gives up on them—even when they deserve as much.

Covenants are serious things.  This one in particular binds God to humanity (through Israel) and humanity to God—and nothing can tear it asunder.  Both parties, God and humanity, agree to the terms. And the terms of this covenant have shaped us ever since.

Now fast forward with me to sixteenth century Geneva, to John Calvin (1509-1564).  Calvin loved to preach and write about God’s covenant with Abraham.  Covenant and covenantal theology loom large in the history of the Reformed tradition.  I would guess that the most popular name given to Presbyterian churches in the U.S. (after numerical designations, such as First or Second, etc., or Westminster) would be Covenant.  Calvin felt very strongly—and correctly—that God’s covenant with Abraham was a sign that God is generous and good.  “Calvin interprets God’s power as God’s ability to do good for [God’s] people: Abraham discovered that the hand of God would be to him the wellspring of every good.  The very fact that God’s promises were made to Abraham’s descendants as well as to Abraham is, in Calvin’s eyes, the most remarkable testimony to the Lord’s amazing goodness.”[1]

And then Calvin does something remarkable.  Calvin links the generosity of the covenant with Abraham with the generosity of the gospel that we find in the New Testament.  Calvin wonders, Can the promise of the gospel possibly be less than the promise made to Abraham?  Of course not.  Therefore, Christians are Abraham’s posthumous children and as such we have a share in that covenant.  The gospel then becomes a clearer explication of what was made to Abraham.  The gospel doesn’t improve upon it or change it, but it extends it and expands it.  Because, in Calvin’s eyes, it was God’s infinite goodness that was poured out more liberally than ever before in the life and witness of God’s son, Jesus Christ.

In many ways, this is what the lectionary does.  And this is what struck me in a new way this week.  In other words, by linking these texts, the meaning of the cross, that is, Jesus’ statements about the cross are couched within the larger covenantal promise made to Abram.  Instead of seeing the cross as an isolated historical event it’s embedded within the larger story of God’s saving love.  The cross of Christ has a larger frame of reference.  The cross occurred within the ongoing narrative of God’s covenantal determination to not be God without humanity, to not be God without us! Or, to put it a different way, the cross is not something Jesus had to take up and endure, suffering for our sin, in order to get God to finally love us again.

In the cross, God is effectively saying to us—in big, bold, dramatic gestures—what God has always been saying to us from the beginning of time: I am forever bound to you. I will be your God. You will be my people.  And nothing —not even death—has the power to break my promise to you.  In love, God sends God’s own flesh and blood to make this point.  And the Son endures the cross and conquers death to show the extent of God’s covenantal commitment to be with us, and to love us, and forgive us, and hold us, as the old hymn put it, with a “love that wilt not let us go.”[2]  This covenantal commitment is seen in the way God remained faithful to Jesus throughout his life.  Jesus’ trust in the surety of this covenant enabled him to do whatever was needed—even death on a cross—to convey to us that God does what Jesus does, Jesus does what God does, and that Jesus is his name, Yeshua, Yahweh saves.

Writing about the nature of covenant, Calvin said this is “how [a] covenant is rightly kept: …God binds Himself to the promise given to us; so the consent of faith and of obedience is demanded from us.”[3] This covenant, then, places demands upon us. God expects us to do our part.

The covenant then frees us to take on our respective callings knowing that God is committed to us.  Confident of God’s faithfulness, Jesus invites us to pick up a similar cross, living lives of comparable faithfulness. Jesus invites us to take on and even crucify those things in our lives or in the world around us that act as if God’s faithfulness is not true, that causes you or people you know to think that God is not committed to you or them.  Jesus invites us to take on and crucify, to take on and even suffer with and for the sake of your neighbors so that your neighbors come to know or know again of God’s faithfulness, that God desires that they and their descendants “live long and proper,” that we are all children of God, and that we are held in a love that will never let us go.

Calvin wrote, “Once God has received us into [God’s] family, to treat us not merely as servants but as children, [God] undertakes to feed us, too, throughout the entire course of our life, so that [God] may fulfill the role for the best of fathers, concerned for his children.  And even that was not enough for [God]: [God] wanted to assure us of his unfailing generosity by giving us a pledge.”[4] 

Part of that pledge is this Communion table,

here in bread and wine, given to feed us. 

Here at the table we remember the cross. 

Here at this table we also remember the covenant.

---

[1] Brian Gerrish, Grace and Gratitude: The EucharisticTheology of John Calvin (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 121.

[2] The hymn “O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go,” was written in 1882 by the Presbyterian minister George Matheson (1842-1906). Matheson went blind while he was a divinity student at the University of Glasgow, yet he was determined to enter the ministry. He had an influential career in the church.  Matheson wrote the words to this hymn on the eve of his sister’s wedding.  Reflecting back on his challenging life, remembering his fiancé who left him when she learned that he was going blind, yet affirming God's faithfulness to him, the hymn came to him as a whole.  Matheson said, “I am quite sure that the whole work was completed in five minutes, and equally sure that it never received at my hands any retouching or correction. I have no natural gift of rhythm. All the other verses I have ever written are manufactured articles; this came like a dayspring from on high."  See also Ian C. Bradley, O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go (Fount, 1990). Here is the Westminster Chorus’ moving arrangement of this piece.

[3] John Calvin, Commentary on Genesis 17.

[4] From Calvin's 1543 edition of the Institutes of the Christian Religion, cited in Gerrish, 124.

Vistas, Visions, Voices

Theophanes the Great, 14th century (Russian), Transfiguration.

Mark 9:2-9

Transfiguration of the Lord/ 15^th 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.  

Transfiguration, St. Catherine's Monastery, 12th century.

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?

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.

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[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.

[7] http://www.foxnews.com/world/2015/02/10/family-us-aid-worker-isis-captive-kayla-mueller-confirms-her-death/.

[8] http://www.foxnews.com/world/2015/02/10/family-us-aid-worker-isis-captive-kayla-mueller-confirms-her-death/.

[9] The full text of the letter may be found here.