Year B
Mark 9:2-9
The Very Rev. Denise Vaughn
It was Palm Sunday, and the family’s six-year-old son had to stay home from church because of strep throat. When the rest of the family returned home carrying palm branches, the boy asked what they were for. His mother explained, “People held them over Jesus’s head as he walked by.” “Wouldn’t you know it,” the boy fumed. “The one Sunday I don’t go to church, and Jesus shows up!” Jesus certainly shows up today on this the Last Sunday in the Epiphany season. This meeting on the mount of transfiguration, Mt. Tabor, is our last epiphany of the season, our last revelation or “aha” moment of our Lord’s true identity before we go down the mountain into Lent.
This meeting is especially clear in Mark’s gospel and comes just about in the middle of the Gospel forming a “hinge” between this event and the Lenten journey toward the cross. Prior to our text today, Jesus taught the disciples that he “must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.” Immediately after speaking about his death, Jesus takes Peter, James, and John up the mountain and he is transfigured before them in heavenly brilliance. A voice commands, “Listen to him!” as if to warn that we will fail to understand this dearly loved Son unless we open our minds to the suffering and cross now on the horizon. It is as if the text is saying to us, if you want to know who this Jesus is, you must see his future.
It is not enough to see him healing the sick, exorcizing evil spirits, preaching good news, and teaching about the kingdom of God. We must see him suffer at the hands of the religious establishment, die by the command of the Roman governor, rise three days later through the power of God, and rule as victorious Lord of Lord’s. Here we see Jesus’ fate joined to his ministry and Mark is inviting us to see and worship our Lord in the fullness of his being. When the mountain and the cross meet on Mt. Tabor, Jesus is profoundly revealed. It is an Epiphany moment. “He was transfigured before them.” And if we are not steeped in Jewish tradition, we really can’t understand how dramatic that mountaintop experience was for Peter, James, and John.
Moses and Elijah were two of the great “heroes” of the Jewish faith. It was like having a ring-side seat in heaven. Just imagine for a moment if on the top of a mountain you were joined by George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. That’s the kind of drama it was for those disciples. But Peter, and I am sure, James and John, miss the point. Peter says, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here. This is quite a show. Let us make three tents, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah. Peter wanted to make this awesome revelation, permanent. His eyes are fixed on human things, of course. He cannot grasp at this point that this was the magnificence of God’s glory breaking into human time and space.
This is where Moses and Elijah fit into our story today because each have seen and had an experience of the magnificence of God’s glory that is so important to the whole community of faith then, and now. Moses’s experience took place on a mountain top on Mount Sinai where God gave him the Ten Commandments. That whole mountain was covered with the brilliant glory of God as lightning flashed and the thunder rolled. And when Moses came down from the mountain, his face glowed with brilliance because he had been in the presence of God.
Elijah, the prophet, became discouraged because he thought he was the only one among the Israelites still worshipping the one true God. And so, God sent him up on a mountaintop where God had arranged a contest between Elijah and the prophets of Baal. The prophets of Baal set up their altars and sacrifices and prayed to Baal to come down and burn up their offerings. But nothing happened. At the day’s end, Elijah set up his altar to the one true God and even doused it with water. As he prayed, God revealed his glory by sending fire from heaven which burned up the offering, the stone altar, the water, and even the ground on which it stood.
In today’s OT story of Elijah’s triumphal ascension into heaven, into the glory of God, it is Elisha who is indeed also transfigured. He is transported through and beyond his role as Elijah’s apprentice to a completely new place. The transformed, transfigured Elisha will pick up Elijah’s mantel, strike the water with it, pass through, and journey on. Elisha is rewarded by the revelation of God bridging the boundaries between time and eternity, as he soon finds that God’s spirit remains and rests on him. The same spirit that rests on Elisha is the one that rests on us and on Jesus, as he was setting the stage on Mt. Tabor for the greatest revelation of God’s glory,-a revelation that was not to human beings but through a human being. God had come directly into the midst of life, not through a law given to Moses or through words uttered by a prophet but through God’s beloved Son a living human being.
Our texts today remind us that God’s self-revelation does not merely tweak who we are, what we think, and what we are called to do. In fact, it changes everything. God has the habit of transforming us not by necessarily allowing us wisdom or understanding that we can welcome with open arms, but by bewildering our knowledge our understanding of what God is up to and what we have to do with it. The Word is made flesh, and lives with us, and dies for us; our understanding of who God is and how God behaves are, most often, overturned. Yet, our conviction is: that the God who is mystery has met us, and continues to meet us in Jesus again and again. This is evident throughout the scriptures and especially in this transforming event that Peter, James, and John witness that day on the mountain.
It wasn’t until Pentecost and the coming of the Holy Spirit that Peter and the disciples finally “got the point.” And when they did, the purpose of their lives took on a new dimension. They started doing the things that Jesus did when he was with them-teaching, healing, forgiving. They even did some of the miracles that he had done. But most important, they became witnesses to this glory that had been with them in Jesus. They began telling others about this glorious God whose forgiving love had been made real for them in Jesus Christ. This is the purpose of Mark’s gospel to remind us that we are never done listening for God’s self-revelation in our lives and taking on the task of telling the good news about this glory of God.
As Paul so beautifully says, “For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’ sake.” “For it is God who gives the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” This light does not demand that our reasoning be sound or our lives be perfect or our faith be without doubt. This light is not something that shines on us but through us. This light has the power to transform us and others. This light is the glory of God, the glory of the transfigured Christ. “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” We will need to remember this as we go back down the mountain with the disciples and begin the hard road to Calvary.