Here is a sermon for Transfiguration Sunday, based on Mark 9:2-9, recorded in Howard Chapel at Barton College. Text is below if you’d prefer reading:
Mark 9:2-9
Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves.
And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them.
And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. Then Peter said to Jesus, "Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah." He did not know what to say, for they were terrified.
Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, "This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!"
Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.
As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.
“Six Days Later”
Transfiguration Sunday 2021
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“Six days later.”
That’s quite a way to begin a story.
Imagine with me for a moment that we were together watching a cinematic rendering of today’s gospel reading. Just talking about this is making me miss a time when we could sit together in a darkened movie theater, elbow to elbow. We’ve made it through all of the previews and the popcorn ads and the reminders to turn off our phones. And then, on a darkened screen, these words appear: “Six days later.” It’s like “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away” for biblical stories. The words fade, and we leap into the scene, a beleaguered Jesus hiking up a mountain path with three of his closest followers – quite literally, in this case, following him up the slope. And then, the spectacular special effects – the miraculous transfiguration, the mystical appearance of ethereal figures from the distant past, the mysterious cloud obscuring our view, the magnificent Voice of God from somewhere off screen.
And the whole time, as our senses are overwhelmed by the strange occurrences on this Galilean hill, in the back of our mind sit those three words with which the story began: “Six days later.” Words which, of course, make us wonder: what, exactly, happened six days ago that set the stage for the burst of sights and sounds we are currently viewing? Will the answer to this question perhaps be revealed in a series of flashbacks? Will we have to wait for a prequel to be released? What are we missing about the current scene that we might catch in a re-watch once we understand the events of six days ago?
“Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves.”
Of course, we aren’t watching a new release in a movie theater. We’re reading a translation of an ancient manuscript; and we can direct our own flashback just by turning back the page.
That Mark’s Gospel begins the story of the Transfiguration in this way is particularly notable. Mark’s Jesus rarely waits around for six days before doing anything. One of Mark’s favorite words is the Greek euthys, often translated as “immediately.” The word appears more than 40 times in Mark’s relatively short gospel. Jesus seems to do just about everything “immediately.” Mark’s gospel doesn’t have time to wait around – it’s got stuff to do.
So, when we as readers or listeners get to this line, “Six days later,” we are cast back from the beginning of the 9th chapter, pushed to remind ourselves what has come before, six days ago.
And if we do indeed turn back the page, we are reminded that, just six days ago, in the village of Caesarea Philippi, Jesus asked the disciples what names people were calling him. Among the answers they came up with were Elijah and one of the prophets – names both referred to and repudiated when Moses and Elijah appear on a mountaintop six days later, talking to Jesus. And then Jesus said, “Ok, but what about y’all – who do you say I am?” And Peter, who’s always quick to act and quick to talk if sometimes a bit slow to think, said, “You are the Messiah” – or, to say the same thing with a different translation, “You are the Christ.”
Now, those of us who have spent some time in church, who maybe, say, grew up going to Sunday School, are accustomed to thinking of this as the right answer. We nod our heads in the affirmative. Of course Jesus is the Christ. Of course Peter has given the correct answer, has passed the test, will get an A+ in his course on Discipleship from Professor Jesus. But Jesus always surprises. Rather than, “Yes, Peter, you’ve got that right!,” Jesus said, “Don’t tell anybody you said this.” Perhaps Jesus knew that once word gets out that someone’s a Messiah, their teachings get trampled as half of the crowd rushes to put them up on a pedestal, while the other half rushes to put them up on a cross. “You are the Messiah, the Christ,” Peter said. “Let’s not talk about this anymore,” Jesus responded.
And then Jesus and Peter really got into it, with Jesus starting to explain that being a Messiah might actually involve quite a bit of unpleasant suffering, and Peter saying, “That can’t possibly be true!,” and Jesus, who apparently did not attend the most recent seminar on respectful workplace communication, calling Peter Satan and telling him to back up. In the words of New Testament scholar and theologian William Placher, “Peter expects a Messiah and thinks he knows what that means, but he has it all wrong, just as anyone with the usual expectations about wandering miracle workers would have it all wrong.”[i] So much for that A+ in Discipleship class.
This tendency to “have it all wrong” extends beyond the identity of Jesus and discussions among his closest followers. In fact, Jesus goes to great lengths first to call a larger crowd to him and then to let that crowd know that just as Peter has misunderstood the nature of messiahship, so too have the followers of Jesus tended to misunderstand discipleship. To follow Jesus, to look for the Christ, is not about gaining power, prestige, or popularity, but is, in the words of the great theologian (and campus chaplain) Howard Thurman, to “choose rather to do the thing that is to them the maximum exposure to the love and therefore to the approval of God, rather than the things that will save their own skin.”[ii] If we balk at Jesus’s harsh words to Peter, perhaps it is because we understand their deeper meaning – not only that Peter gets wrong what it means to be the Christ, but that we can so often get wrong what it means to be a Christian.
It’s six days after this pretty public rebuke of Peter that Jesus takes Peter, and his frenemies and rivals for Jesus’s approval, James and John, up a mysterious mountain. And there, something happens that calls into question all of the disciples’ theories about who this Jesus is. Elijah and Moses are there – there goes those theories about Elijah or the prophets being Jesus’ identity. Jesus is shining, but there is a cloud, and thus Jesus’ identity is both revealed and concealed in a new way – and then God speaks, and calls Jesus by a name that Peter and the disciples left off their list. “This is my Son,” says God. “This is my beloved Child. For this reason” – not because he is Messiah or Prophet or Savior, but because the Belovedness in him reflects the Love that is the Divine nature – “listen to him.”
Six days ago, the people and the disciples had a lot of ideas about who Jesus was. Six days later, God just calls him “Beloved Child.”
In similar fashion, people have a lot of ideas about what to call God. Our scriptures, in fact, are filled with multiple images, with many names, for God – God is a Rock and a Father, a Redeemer and a Voice from a Cloud, “The One Who Sees Me” according to poor exiled Hagar, a Mother Bear according to the prophet Hosea, a mother bird according to many of the Psalms, a midwife according to the 22nd Psalm, Lord and Shepherd according to the 23rd. And yet all of these images, these names, these labels, are summed up for Christians in a single line from the First Epistle of John: “God is love.” All of the different names by which God’s children call out to God, all over this beautiful, weary world – God will respond to all sorts of different names. Because God recognizes these are attempts to call God by God’s true name: Love. Human language just won’t do for that – but then, of course, human language, and human action, with all its limitations, is all we’ve got.
If you’ve been paying close attention to Mark’s gospel, you might recognize from earlier in the story this voice of Love speaking from the cloud on the mountaintop. The divine voice which speaks of Jesus’s Belovedness urges us to turn back the page, again, not just six days back, but back to the beginning of this good-news-story, to Jesus’ baptism, where we first heard that voice speaking – with one little difference. On the Mount of Transfiguration, Jesus’s Belovedness reminds us that we need to listen to Jesus’s teaching, even when that teaching is, surprisingly, to not make such a big deal out of a glowingly divine Jesus speaking directly to Moses and Elijah while God makes proclamations from a cloud. Jesus, in fact, tells the disciples not to tell anyone about that; for rather than impressing people with the spectacular special effects, the disciples will be called to love people in surprising ways in the midst of the ordinary. When it was time to deliver an unpopular sermon on the likelihood of suffering and the need to give up power and prestige, Jesus made sure to call a crowd around him; but this miraculous event he wants kept a secret. Not exactly the right way to gain a big cult following!
But at Jesus’s baptism, according to Mark, “a voice came from heaven, saying ‘You are my Beloved Child, with you I am well pleased.” Sounds familiar, right? But again, note the one little difference. That God cares for and is pleased by God’s Beloved Child – that comes first in this story. The love comes first. The need to listen to hard words about discipleship comes second.
This reminder – that the story begins with God proclaiming how pleased God is with that which God loves – urges us to turn the page back, yet again, this time all the way back to the beginning. Because in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earths. And six days later, or so the story goes, God created humankind in God’s very own image, in the image of loving relationship, and sent them out to love and care for all that God had created, and called it all good, good, and very good. And then God, who had done a lot of hard work over the past six days, took a nice, long nap. Which is the kind of thing that you can do when you are able to rest on the assurance that creation is, in fact, good; and that you are, in fact, made of Love.
Six days later, what started out in chaos and vacuum had become a good and beloved creation. Six days later, what started out in conflict and confusion had been clarified with simple words: “This is my Beloved Child. Listen to him.”
Are we prepared, today, to listen to this voice – God’s voice, the voice of the Creator – when it tells us who Jesus is and, in turn, reminds us who we are?
I wonder what would happen if, right now, you were to turn the page back six days. Where have you been this week? What conflicts and confusions have you encountered? What sorrows and celebrations, challenges and serenities, have you experienced? When has your heart broken, and when has it been healed?
Take a moment and turn back the page. Reflect on the week that is behind us. Take a deep, cleansing breath.
And as we go about the next six days, may we open our ears, open our minds, open our hearts, to receive the good news from God:
God, who made us in God’s image and called us good.
God, who sees us as we truly are,
Who calls us by our true names:
Beloved. Beloved. Beloved.
Amen.
[i] William Placher, Narratives of a Vulnerable God: Christ, Theology, and Scripture (Westminister John Knox, 1994), 13.
[ii] Cited in Emerson Powery, “Mark,” in True to Our Native Land: An African American New Testament Commentary, ed. Brian K. Blount (Fortress Press: 2007), 138.