Transfiguration, 2011

Text: St. Luke 9:28-36

The Rev. Jerry Kistler

St. Stephen’s Reformed Episcopal Church

Montrose, Colorado

“Hear Him”

As He prayed, the appearance of His face was altered, and His robe became white and glistening.

Some of you can probably remember the 1985 Academy Award winning movie Cocoon, directed by Ron Howard, and starring the great old actors Jessica Tandy, Hume Cronin, and Don Ameche. It’s the story of how a group of elderly people from a Florida retirement home are rejuvenated and made young again by sneaking into the house next door and surreptitiously bathing in the swimming pool that aliens have transformed into a virtual fountain of youth by storing in its water several cocoons containing the people they were forced to leave behind on a previous trip to earth. And these cocoons sort of spill out their life force into the water so that it becomes contagious. So, in other words, it’s a very believable story. Aliens are responsible for everything!

But there’s a scene in the movie where the character Jack, the hapless fishing boat “captain,” is peeping on Kitty, one of the female aliens, through a little hole in the wall, and watching her take of her clothes in the room next door. But suddenly she starts to peel off her skin, and a brilliant light radiates outs from the opening behind her head, and it gets brighter and brighter as she continues to shed her artificial suit of skin, until she’s standing there fully revealed as this radiant creature of light. And of course Jack falls the floor in terror at what he’s just seen, and utters an expletive. I wont’ remind you of which one.

So, you see, when Jesus was suddenly transfigured, and became dazzlingly white before the eyes of the disciples, that’s exactly not what happened! Contrary to one of the more crazy modern interpretations of the Transfiguration, Jesus was not an alien from another planet, who took this opportunity to let Peter, James, and John in on the secret, along with two other aliens who appeared as Moses and Elijah. Okay, that’s not what happened! And more importantly, it’s also not like in the movie that Jesus was sort of pealing off His outer humanity and showing the disciples who He really was on the inside, so that the message would be that it’s only important who Jesus is on the inside—that He is the divine Son of God—and that His physical body and human nature were really not all that important. No, the text says the appearance of His face was altered, and even his clothes became radiantly white. It was His humanity that was being revealed in glory—the glory that He would have when He accomplished His mission and sat down at the right hand of the Father; the glory of the Son of Man, revealed in the Book of Revelation, as the one whose countenance was like the sun shining in its strength. It’s the same glory that we will share in, in our humanity, in the great day of the resurrection of our bodies, for John says, “that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as His is” (1 Jn. 3:2).

So the Transfiguration is as much a revelation of our own future glory, as it was a revelation of the glory of Jesus’ perfect humanity in which He now forever resides at the right hand of God the Father.

But the details of the story of the Transfiguration have always been fascinating to me. For instance, what’s the significance of Moses and Elijah being there with Jesus on the mountain? Well, let me ask you this: who were the only two people recorded in the Old Testament ever to see the glory of God on another mountain—on Mt. Sinai? Moses and Elijah. Isn’t that interesting. It was Moses and Elijah who beheld the glory of the Lord on Mt. Sinai, and now they’re here with Jesus on the Mountain of Transfiguration as His glory is revealed. Why? Because their presence testifies to the fact that the One they’re speaking with in glory now is the same One they spoke with in glory way back then on Mt. Sinai. Jesus is the I AM who revealed Himself to Moses in the burning bush, and whose glory he saw for a moment form the cleft in the rock; and Jesus is the God who passed by Elijah as he went out on the mountain and stood before the Lord. That’s the significance of Moses and Elijah’s presence on the mountain.

But what is that Moses and Elijah were speaking to Jesus about on the mountain? Well, the King James Version says that they were speaking to Him about His “disease.” But actually the Greek text literally says they were speaking to Him about His “exodus”—the exodus He was about to accomplish. In other words, Jesus was about to fulfill the real exodus, the one the old exodus from Egypt merely pointed forward to. For just as the old exodus delivered Israel from bondage, so Jesus’ exodus—His death as the true Passover Lamb, and His resurrection that brings us through the sea of death into new life—His exodus would deliver us from a far worse bondage—a bondage to sin and death.

Well so then Peter was completely overwhelmed by the experience, like any of us would be. And like most of us who’ve had a sudden, unexpected and palpable break-through of the presence of God in our lives, he wanted to hold on to that moment and prolong the experience, rather than let it go and literally have to go back down the mountain to get on with his life and mission. So as Moses and Elijah were in the process of leaving, Peter suddenly jumps up and makes the suggestion that they build three booths—one for Jesus, one for Moses, and one for Elijah. And that way, you see, he could contain and retain the experience. But the test says he didn’t really know that he was talking about. You see, God just doesn’t work that way. We can’t box up our special experiences with Him to be our sort of daily bread. He might give us so-called “mountain-top experiences,” but then, just like Moses and Elijah, he sends us back down the mountain, because that’s where He wants us to be most of the time, living out the life of faith by the aid of His usually means of grace—the Word and the Sacraments—not by experiences. I wish we Christians would learn this principle!

But now as fascinated as I might be by the details of the Transfiguration, there’s really a more important message conveyed to us in this story by the voice of God Himself. For as the experience comes to its dramatic conclusion, and as the disciples are just about to have to walk back down the mountain to live out that life of faith and carry on their mission, suddenly a cloud from heaven overshadows them, and a holy fear falls upon the disciples as they enter into the cloud. It’s the same cloud the led the children of Israel through the wilderness and rested upon the top of Mt. Sinai; the same cloud that Moses entered and from which he received the Word of the Lord, the Old Covenant. It’s the cloud of the divine presence. And now on the Mountain of Transfiguration, God the Father speaks from the cloud and says, “This is My beloved Son. Hear Him!”

“Hear Him!” God says. “If you’re going to be able to live that life of faith, if you’re going to be able to fulfill your mission, you must hear My Son. He is My Word to the world. He’s everything I’ve ever wanted to say to you. His Word is My Word. And therefore, if you would hear Me, if you would know My will for your life, if you would be faithful to My calling upon your life, you must hear Him.

Now that word “hear” doesn’t really convey the force of what God is saying to us, because we hear a lot of things, but most of the time it’s just a bunch of noise that we filter out so we can listen to things that are really important. That describes the scene in my house while I’m trying to listen to the news, while the kids are bouncing of the walls. “Listen” is a better word. But I think maybe the best word is that quaint old English word that we don’t really use much anymore, but maybe we should. It’s the word “hearken.” ‘Hearken to Him.” It means more than hear; it means more than listen; it means to hear and to heed. It means to keep the sayings of Jesus. It means to hear and to obey and to put our faith in His Word. That’s the force of what God the Father is saying to us from the mountain. It means when we’ve heard Christ’s Word, however it comes to us, we stop and take it seriously, and then do something about it. It means that we hear and heed Christ’s Word whether we like it or not, whether we hear what we want to hear or something that might be a bit challenging or even unpleasant to hear.

I mean, we’re all ready to hear and receive Jesus’ comforting words: “Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, I will give you rest” (Mt. 11:28). But what about His not so comforting words, such as: “you will be hated by all for My name’s sake. But he who endures to the end will be saved”(Mt. 10:22), or “He who does not take up His cross and follow Me is not worthy of Me” (Mt. 10:38)? What do we do with those words?

We all love Jesus’ words in John 3:16: “For God so love the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” But what about John 3:18: “He who believes in Him is not condemned; but he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.” Do you believe those words as much as you believe the others? Are those words authoritative in the way you think about your unbelieving next-door-neighbors, or co-workers, or family members? Have you truly hearkened to those words so that they move you to action, or have they just vibrated your eardrums a little, and not gotten any further than that towards your heart and your hand and your feet?

Do you give the same authority to Jesus’ commandment to “Go, make disciples of all nations, baptizing them…and teaching them all things that I have commanded,” as you do His command to “take eat, this is My body given for you”?

Do you love to hear Jesus’ words to the paralytic, “Son, be of good cheer; your sins are forgiven you”, and do you like to apply those words to yourself? I hope you do. But do you, with equal delight, apply to yourself the words of Jesus to Peter, when Peter asked how often he should forgive his brother: ‘Up to seven times?”, he asked. And Jesus answered, “[No], but I say to you, up to seventy times seven” (Mt. 18:21-22)?

You see, this is the challenge of really hearing Jesus’ words. We can’t pick and choose which ones we like, or the ones we find easy and undemanding, and leave off the difficult sayings and commandments. Not if we are true disciples and true children of our heavenly Father, for He said, “This is My beloved Son. Hear Him!”

You know, the whole issue in the Anglican world today, and in fact in the universal Church of Jesus Christ in this modern era, is the issue of the authority of the Word of God. It’s not homosexuality, or women’s ordination, or a host of others issues that are plaguing the Church, most evidently in the Episcopal Church. Those are just symptoms of the real issue. The issue is whether we’re going allow the Bible, the Word of God, to speak to us with an authority that compels our faith and obedience; whether we’re going to allow it to be the highest authority for everything we believe and do, or whether we’ll elevate other, more modern authorities to its level, or even above it. It’s about whether we’re going to pick and choose which words of Jesus we like, which ones fit with our contemporary prejudices, or whether we’ll accept all of His words as the words of the Lord of our lives. It’s about whether we’re going to choose to listen to Jesus, but say, “Well, you can’t take that Paul guy,” even though it was Jesus who gave St. Paul his words. “I delivered to you first of all that which I also received,” was his constant refrain. And the revelation that Paul received was confirmed by the other apostles, to whom Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would lead them into all truth. So we can’t take Jesus over St. Paul, for Paul’s word is Christ’s Word, and Christ’s Word is God’s Word.

Or the issue is whether we’re going to hear and heed that voice in our head, which most of the time is just the projections of our own thoughts and feelings and desires, which we then call God—“God is telling me to do so and so”—even when so-and-so clearly contradicts the commandments and teachings of Holy Scripture. “Well I know the Bible says I shouldn’t leave my wife and marry my lover, but I really believe God is telling me she’s my true soul-mate and that I was always meant to be with her.” I have had people tell me things like.

But, you see, when we do that, and when we take Jesus over Paul, and when we even pick and choose what we like about Jesus, then we are no different from the crazies who’ve decided it’s okay to have Gaya Masses—the worship of Mother Earth—or the worship of Sophia or Jimanji, or all kinds of other pagan and perverted sexual practices in the Church! Because our foundation is the same. It’s called self-will. It’s called the authority of the self and what we think is right and good in our times, verses the authority of the Word of God and what God says right and good for all time. That is the issue!

So where will we come down on this issue? God the Father said, “This is My beloved Son. Hear Him!” Are we really willing to do that? And if we are, where will that take us as individuals and as a church? What behaviors will we have to change? What concepts and beliefs, which we now hold dear, will we have to modify or jettison altogether to be faithful to Christ’s Word? Are you ready to go there? Will you hearken to the Word of Christ, or will you just hear His Word? These are questions any faithful Christian must ask himself or herself as he or she interacts with the Word of God. May Christ bless us as we seek to hear and to heed His Word. +