The Transfiguration of the Lord |
February 22, 2009
Mark 9:2-9
Lux Lucet in Tenebris
The other day I was up on the third-floor landing, balcony level, with my camera. I wanted to get some pictures because a preschool child had reported that men with long tails were up on the roof. Sure enough, there they were, only those tails turned out to be safety harnesses with long tethers, and the men were the installation crew for the solar voltaic panels. As I came down the steps, I ran into a tourist looking for a way into the sanctuary.
I let her in and showed her around. This is one of the most enjoyable perks about being pastor of First Presbyterian Church. You get to show tourists this wonderful old meeting house. I was pointing out the slave gallery and calling attention to the oldest columns with their irregular surfaces, shaped with hand tools from the trunks of ancient trees. I looked up from my demonstration and noticed that my visitor wasn’t paying me any attention.
She was near the organ, turning slowly in a circle, with her head cocked sideways, looking all round her. “The light,” she kept saying. “Look at the light.”
She was right, of course. On a bright morning like that one, and also toward dusk, when the sun is setting, this room glows. It has something to do with the white paint, the frosted windows, and the lack of decoration. The architecture itself welcomes light -- invites light into the room. The space itself cries says, “Welcome, Light! We need you! Come in and illumine the Word of God.”
Other visitors are not so appreciative. Would-be brides have been known to get the keys from Diana in the church office, visit the sanctuary, and return in less than five minutes. They drop the keys unceremoniously on Diana’s desk.
“You should have told me there is no central aisle. What kind of a church is this?”
The answer, both architecturally and theologically, is “a church that loves light.” The prayer I often use before reading scripture at funerals summons the Holy Spirit to illumine the text so that “we might be lifted up out of our darkness and distress into the light and peace of your presence.”
Light and peace – for Presbyterians, the two tend to go together.
Our preference for light – for clarity and precision, uncluttered by symbols and visual noise – is one of the great strengths of our tradition. It’s also one of our most telling weaknesses.
That weakness is exposed when we encounter texts like today’s Gospel reading, the story of the Transfiguration of the Lord. Any Presbyterian preacher worth his or her salt should be able to shed light upon this story, to tell you what it really means.
I should be able take that scalpel my seminary professors bestowed upon me and cut away at the layers of tradition until I have exposed the core of this story. Then I could cut it up in bite-sized pieces and lay it out on a plate for your consumption: point number one, point number two, point number three, poem at the end.
That’s what preachers in the Reformed Tradition are trained to do – to shine a light upon stories like this one.
A priest in the Orthodox Tradition, on the other hand, would never be so foolish or so presumptuous. He would throw another pinch of incense into the censer, get the smoke going really well, and give the censer a few extra swings around the altar, in remembrance of the enveloping cloud on the Mount of Transfiguration. Then, because the Orthodox know how to treat a story like this, he would invite you and me to turn off the lights and enter the cloud.
As the cloud engulfs us we might feel something of the terror Peter, James, and John feel as they lose their bearings and can no longer say exactly where they are. Is North that direction? Or is that East? And certainty – where did that go?
At the foot of the mountain, on good old terra firma, they had a pretty good idea who Jesus is – a brilliant teacher, an inspired leader, a talented healer. But up here, on this mountain, with the cloud enveloping everything, it’s hard to be sure.
Suppose what Jesus told us a few days ago is true. Suppose he is going to Jerusalem to be arrested and tortured and killed, and on the third day rise. Suppose we should follow him there. What will happen to us?
Or suppose Jesus is about to leave us, the way Elijah left Elisha. Suppose he’s transferring the mantel of leadership to us, right now? Are we ready? Do we know how to live with the kingdom of God so close at hand? Suppose, when the cloud lifts, there’s nobody left but you and me. What will we do?
And now we see Jesus awash in light – pure light – a light that dazzles and drives us to our knees. He’s talking with Moses, the lawgiver, and Elijah, the forerunner of the Messiah. What on earth is happening? What in heaven is happening? To them? To us? To our quest for total comprehension?
I’m afraid I will fail in my preacherly assignment this morning. I will not be able to tell you, in three points, what this story means. I could tell you that Matthew and Luke tell this story in slightly different ways. I could tell you that John doesn’t tell it at all. He doesn’t need to. His Gospel is already full irreducible stories.
I could tell you that the great scholar Rudolph Bultmann believed that this was a resurrection appearance story read back into the life of Jesus. If any of that helps you, be my guest. Feel free to help yourself to any data you can collect.
But before you and I climb down from this mountain, we should listen to the voice that is speaking from the cloud. “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him.”
I’m not sure what to make of this voice, are you?
You could take it as the voice of the Gospel writer Mark, who knows full well that if he comes right out with a propositional statement – Jesus is the Son of God – people like us will mistake him for some kind of T.V. preacher and turn him off.
You could take it as the voice of the early church, bearing witness to what they learned about Jesus through their own experience.
Or you could take it as one kneeling in a darkened church, or at an open grave, or in the waiting room of a hospital, or in a chemotherapy treatment room – or any place where the cloud is encircling and you are losing your bearings.
It’s not just any voice. It’s the voice from within the cloud, and it’s saying “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him.”
Whatever else it does, this story invites us to listen to Jesus, to follow him back down the mountain, and to come to no conclusions about him until we have gone with him to Jerusalem, where he will challenge all our assumptions about how the Son of God is supposed to act.
He will not go to the Temple to receive the endorsement of the religious establishment. He will go to the Temple to overturn the tables of the money-changers and drive them out with a whip of cords.
He will not reinforce the categories that limit God’s love to a few, but will turn them upside down. He will put sinners and tax collectors first and religious experts last.
He will not inspire an insurgency against the tyrants who oppress his nation. He will surrender himself to their kangaroo court and expose the sham they call justice.
He will be condemned by the Sanhedrin and hung on Caesar’s cross, and, looking upon him, we will not recognize him as the same divine Son who stood in dazzling light on that mountain top.
On our way down the mountain, Jesus strictly warns us to tell no one what we have seen and heard up there within the cloud until we know the whole story, until “after the Son of Man has risen from the dead.”
That’s not because what we heard and saw on the mountain is untrue. It’s because, until we have experienced the Son of God on the cross and risen from the tomb, the story you and I might tell would be incomplete. What Mark calls “the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, can’t happen through you until it happens to you.
And that’s a gift, beloved. Jesus’ divinity – if that’s the term you want to use – is not a public truth, to be seen and grasped by anyone. It’s a revealed truth that comes to us in God’s own way and time – as a gift of pure grace.
Peter, God love him, wanted to bottle that truth, to suspend it in amber, to build three booths – one for Jesus the Son, one for Elijah, his forerunner, and one for Moses, the link to an earlier revelation. But you can’t build a booth for a cloud, can you? You can’t contain the uncontainable.
“The light – just look at the light!”
On the mountain, in the valley, on the cross, at the empty tomb, “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness shall not overcome it.”
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