February 18, 2007
This is it: it’s the last Sunday of the season of Epiphany. Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent, so this is our final opportunity to sing our alleluias before being reminded on Wednesday that we come from dust, and to dust we shall return. Today is a doorway of sorts. From here, we look back at Christmas, and we look ahead to Holy Week and Easter. Today we witness one more epiphany, one more revelation about who Jesus is for us. We remember that epiphany means, among other things, “manifestation.” During this season, we have seen several manifestations of Jesus: we’ve seen his baptism, and the Holy Spirit descending upon him like a dove. We’ve seen him turn water into wine at Cana. We’ve seen him start his public ministry, preaching in a synagogue in his hometown of Nazareth, in Galilee. And this morning we are witness to the culminating event, the grand finale of the season of Epiphany: Jesus being ‘transfigured’ on a mountain. We call this event and this Sunday the ‘transfiguration,’ but if you don’t know what that means, don’t worry, you’re not alone. The church I grew up attending in New Hampshire was called Church of the Transfiguration, and I still never knew what it meant. It comes from a Greek word, the word for metamorphosis. As if we see Jesus in this story in more than one form – as Jesus of Nazareth, but we also get a glimpse of him as the chosen one of God.
The story itself is fairly simple, though not easily explained. Jesus went up on a high mountain to pray, taking with him three of his disciples, Peter, James, and John. The description of what happens up there is really almost otherworldly. We are told that the appearance of Jesus’ face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white. The disciples have this vision of Jesus with Moses and Elijah, and they hear God’s voice out of a cloud, similar to Jesus’ baptism; the voice says, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” That’s it. That’s the story.
The disciples almost slept through it; they were, Luke tells us, “weighed down with sleep” – maybe because they couldn’t possibly comprehend what they saw. Whatever they saw, it had an effect on them; they did not speak of it at all, for a long time. They were silent about it. It was enough of a mystery that they had no words for it, and they did not discuss it with each other or with Jesus.
Taking my cue from the disciples, I don’t think we’re meant to spend endless time trying to dissect this story. I don’t think we’re meant to comb through the details as if we are at an archaeological dig, trying to piece together exactly what happened, or to handle it enough so that it fits more neatly in our hands. I think we’re meant only to acknowledge that something important happened. Peter and James and John saw something change in Jesus, caught a glimpse of something about who Jesus was and what his relationship with God was. Something that affirmed Jesus as special, as important, as God’s chosen. Luke uses the word ‘glory’ to describe this; he tells us Jesus, Moses, and Elijah and appeared ‘in glory.’ I was curious, so I looked up that word glory in my bible dictionary, to find out that it has the connotations of weight, and importance. That, it seems to me, is the point of this story as much as anything else: that it communicates to us the weightiness, the importance, of Jesus in our story.
It may not sound like much, but I’m not sure that we need to get more of this account of the transfiguration. I think, as much as anything, it was a private moment between Jesus and God, and perhaps the disciples weren’t even meant to see it, let alone for Luke to write it down. They certainly don’t know what to do with it, witness Peter’s babbling about building booths to mark the place. But this is it. Once this transfiguration experience has happened for Jesus, he is on his way to Jerusalem. It will still take him a while to get there, and we will journey with him these upcoming couple of months, but he has stepped through the door now, and so do we. But as we stand at this threshold, before following Jesus through, we can look in awe and wonder at who he is and who he will be for us.
It’s this sense of awe that I want to think about for the rest of this sermon. I think it’s worth taking a step back, and looking at what both of our lessons, from the gospel of Luke and from the book of Exodus, say to us about awe, the experience of being in God’s presence. It’s worth looking at how Moses and Jesus are, being in the presence of God, and how the people around them react to it. Because it’s quite interesting to see what the readings indicate. Moses, also a chosen of God, spends quite a bit of time in God’s presence. And he seems to be quite fine with this. But it’s the people around Moses who have a harder time. Here’s what Exodus says: “As Moses came down from the mountain with the two tablets of the covenant in his hand, Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God. When Aaron and all the Israelites saw Moses, the skin of his face was shining, and they were afraid to come near him.” Even though God’s presence is once removed – they are merely in the presence of Moses, who has been in the presence of God – it is too much for them. The people are afraid to go near Moses after he has been with God, which is why he takes to wearing this veil, to cover his face and keep the people from being afraid. Fear is the response that Peter has as well, when he is in God’s presence on that mountain in the gospel story. We are told that as they are up on the mountain, “a cloud came and overshadowed them; and they were terrified as they entered the cloud.” Jesus, like Moses, takes this intimacy with God in stride, but it is his disciples who find it much more frightening. Which may be another reason why they did not say anything to anyone after their experience on that mountain: they had no words for what they had seen, and they were afraid.
Here’s the question that comes up for me with these lessons: have we domesticated God too much? That is, do we still even value what our holy scriptures call ‘the fear of the Lord?’ I think that some of us at least hear this phrase ‘the fear of the Lord’ in a negative way, probably from too many years of liturgy or preaching or selective bible reading which makes God seem like an angry, demanding, and unforgiving father – someone to be feared, or else. But this isn’t the real meaning of this biblical phrase ‘the fear of the Lord.’ The true meaning of this phrase has to do not with the way someone might be afraid of an abusive parent, for instance, but rather a sense of awe. The kind of response in us that makes our mouths drop open and stops whatever words were on our lips, except perhaps for a whispered, ‘wow.’ This is the way we are to fear God: by realizing the awe-inspiring nature of God. It implies a certain distance, this is true. It may make us reflect on how we human beings are made in God’s image and likeness, how we are like God but also how we are unlike God. How God is beyond us, even though God is also very present with us. It’s that distance, that otherness, that beyond-ness, that awe that inspired the author of the book of Proverbs to say that ‘the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.’ When a story like the transfiguration comes up, it makes me wonder if we tend to focus too much on how we are like God and how God is like us. And I wonder if we need, at least occasionally, to be reminded of how God is unlike us. I think we do need this. I think it’s too easy to domesticate God, to domesticate Jesus for that matter, to make them smaller and more understandable, more like us, more manageable. When the truth is, they are much more than understandable to us, or like us, or manageable. This sense of fear, meaning awe, is not a bad thing, in my opinion. In fact, I think it’s good for the soul, to occasionally at least recognize the otherness of God, and to get a sense of our proper place in the universe.
Remember back in the fall, we had that several-weeks-long stretch of readings from the book of Job? Remember that this is what it came down to, in the culminating encounter between Job and God: God appeared to Job ‘as out of a whirlwind’ – unrecognizable, and wholly other – and had a series of questions for Job. Where you there at the foundations of the world, as I was? Did you make the Leviathan, the sea creature, as I did? Do you make the grass grow in uninhabited lands, as I do? Job, of course, can’t answer yes to these questions, because he isn’t God. He recognizes his place in the universe, and he is satisfied. He knows that God will never be completely understandable to him, and this ultimately gives him a sense of peace.
Now, how you feel or how I feel about this otherness of God may be different. But I think it’s worth our reflection. I think it’s worth our recognizing, again, that there is much about God that we will never be able to grasp, or to explain, or to comprehend. That in some very real ways, God will always remain mysterious to us. This sense of mystery, this sense of awe, is a good and necessary thing for us. It’s not a bad way to end this season, being reminded of this essential truth. As we stand at this threshold, ready to step through it and follow Jesus to Jerusalem, may we be filled with awe at who he is and who God is.
Amen.