Between noon and three

This sermon was preached on Sunday, August 6, 2023, at St. Mark’s, Berkeley, the feast of the Transfiguration.

Collect: O God, who on the holy mount revealed to chosen witnesses your well-beloved Son, wonderfully transfigured, in raiment white and glistening: Mercifully grant that we, being delivered from the disquietude of this world, may by faith behold the King in his beauty; who with you, O Father, and you, O Holy Spirit, lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Readings: Exodus 34:29-35, 2 Peter 1:13-21, Luke 9:28-36 

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In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen:

It’s a delight today to keep the Feast of the Transfiguration on a Sunday — it more often falls on a weekday, and at St. Mark’s we observe it with a low mass in the chapel. But this year we keep it with all the Sunday festivity we can manage. And there’s a lot here to keep: last year on this feast I observed that it’s a moment like in so many stories, the hero in disguise reveals himself for all to see. It’s hard to get clearer than a dazzling light and a voice from heaven. 

But this year, I want to spend a little more time considering the inverse, that here is a moment of startling clarity for the reader, for you and me — but for the disciples on the mountain with Jesus, it was an intensely disorienting experience. So much so, that the effect on them seems to be utter stupefaction, blindness, even, and they are almost completely dumbfounded — as I suppose you and I most certainly would have been too, in their shoes. 

Peter, James, and John, these seem to be Jesus’s closest friends among the twelve, and he takes them with him on a few other occasions of great importance. They’re the three who witness his raising to life of Jairus’s daughter, for instance, and they’re the ones he asks to keep awake with him in the Garden of Gethsemane the night he was betrayed. 

As a result, these three enjoyed a privileged view into Jesus’s mission and personality. They seem to have been his closest earthly friends, people who knew him better than most. So it’s striking that they are frequently so hapless, that they simply cannot see what’s happening in front of them. 

Peter, their spokesman, consistently misses the point: here at the transfiguration, he offers to build three dwellings, one for Jesus, one for Moses, and one for Elijah, but says nothing about the thundering voice they’ve just heard or the blinding light in which Jesus’s appearance is changed. We know it made an impression on him, because in today’s second Lesson, a much older Peter, much closer to death, reflects on the transfiguration, citing it as evidence for the trustworthiness of the Gospel he is preaching. But at the time, on the mountain with James and John, he misses the point. Even John, often referred to as being “eagle-eyed,” far-seeing, deeply perceptive, says nothing about it, leaving it out of his gospel entirely. 

We live in a world where we place a premium on knowing things, on knowing things and being close with people who are principal agents. If you’ve seen the musical Hamilton, you’ll remember the song where the young Hamilton wants to be “in the room where it happens.” 

Peter, James, and John are certainly in the room where it happens, but they don’t fit very easily into a world like this with expectations like ours. They have an enviable proximity to Jesus, but at the most critical moments, they’re asking the wrong questions, they’re entirely wrong-headed, or else they just fall asleep. 

I can’t blame them: the transfiguration in particular was clearly a stunning occasion, blinding in brightness; strange to see Jesus’ face changed, stranger still to see these two saints of elder days suddenly present in the flesh and chatting with Jesus, and then nothing short of terrifying to hear the voice speak in thunder from the cloud. No wonder they behave as though in a stupor. 

But still, any modern influencer worth their salt would have pushed through all that and pulled out their phone to start live-streaming, or at least to take a few photos. Why were the disciples so liable to be taken by surprise, hadn’t they learned by then to expect something remarkable? And couldn’t they muster at least a little more mental presence for the event, so the rest of us who weren’t there can benefit? 

Even so, the transfiguration is an event that the Church subsequently has drawn much benefit from. The Christian tradition has understood it over the centuries in many and various ways, chief of all as a foreshadowing of Jesus’ coming death, complete with sleepy disciples, the top of a mountain, and two figures on either side. Other writers make much of Moses and Elijah being present, as figures of Law and Prophecy. Others note that this is one of the small handful of theophanies in the Bible, when the full triune Godhead appears visibly to people on earth: Jesus the Son, the voice of the Father, and the cloud representing the Holy Spirit. 

Yet other authors make much of the topic of conversation between Jesus and Moses and Elijah. In our NRSV translation, they are speaking of Jesus’s “departure,” which he is about to make in Jerusalem. But in Luke’s Greek, it is not just any departure, nor just any death. The word is literally “exodus” — Moses and Elijah are speaking with Jesus about the exodus he is about to make in Jerusalem. And this of course tracks with long Christian tradition for Jesus’s passion, death, and resurrection to be another exodus: this time not through water only, but making a way through death itself, so that all who follow can pass safely through to their eternal promised land in the nearer presence of God. 

All this commentary is extremely interesting, and if you’re like me, you’d like the disciples to have at least something more intelligent to say on the subject than “let’s make three tents,” just as the party is breaking up. As it is, all we really have in Scripture is their stupor, which, frankly, is not very much to go on. 

But then, despite how much it sometimes appears this way, the disciples are not in fact idiots — they are in the room where it happens, and they are dear friends of the one who does most of the happening. If we find their responses disappointing, if we find it difficult to learn much of use from them, it might be a good indication that we have some self-examination to do ourselves, some uncovering about what is motivating us and what is shaping our desire to learn. Is it simply to be armed with more facts and insights, to increase our satisfaction with our own cleverness? Or is it to grow in love of him who made us, who calls us out of darkness into his own marvelous light? 

Because in truth, the disciples’ stupor teaches us at least as much about what it means to follow Jesus as any of the rest of the insights subsequent tradition has drawn from this event. And what it teaches is simply that there comes a point in following Jesus, probably more than one, where we do not know the answer; where we are in the middle of some experience that is so strong, so intense, that we cannot make sense of it. Everyone around us might have made sense of it, and they may be full of advice for what we ought to do with it. But for us in the middle of whatever it is, the larger picture is missing, and no attempts to explain it really avail. 

It’s a different kind of moment for every person. For some it may be the news that their cancer is back. For others it may the loss of a job, or the beginning of a job. Or a change of house or living or family situation, or an overwhelming weight on the conscience. For some it’s the sudden discovery of a vocation, while for others it’s the loss of vocation. Maybe it’s a long series of unanswered prayers, or a spectacularly unexpected answer to a prayer. Maybe it has to do with where you experience God; or maybe it’s an encounter with love, or grief, or stress, or an emotion that’s particularly strong for you just now. Whatever it is, it’s impossible to see the whole thing in any kind of perspective, and all you can do is lie stupefied before the immensity of the thing. 

If you know what this is like, you can have some empathy for Peter, James, and John. No amount of working around it or working through it is finally effective, because it’s the sort of thing that fundamentally stops your capacity to function, to sense, to make sense of whatever it is. 

For the disciples, being brought to this moment is not a mark of failure, but is exactly the point. If we want to learn who Jesus is, the nature of creation and our place in it; if we want to contemplate the full depth of the love of God, there will come a point when our sensory faculties, our language, our reason, our intellect, will finally no longer avail. Not because we have to turn them off in order to accept these doctrines, but because their full truth so fills and overflows our capacity to receive them that we cannot but be blinded the closer we get to them. In the stupor of Peter, James, and John, they behold the unveiled glory of God. 

I’m not suggesting that we will necessarily follow suit. But I am suggesting that being okay with our own blindness at times is no bad thing, and that in fact it is the necessary precondition to receiving all that God has to offer us. 

So if you are feeling blind at the moment, at a loss for words or explanation, don’t be in too great a hurry to figure it out, to push through, or to move on. Sit there a while, consider building a dwelling under that cloud, offer hospitality to whatever and whoever you find there. When the cloud finally rolls away, you may find that you have been transfigured: that you have encountered God without knowing it, that you have passed from death to life, that your eyes can now see in ways they couldn’t before. 

God grant that when that happens, we give thanks for the blindness that gave us sight, for the stupor that carried us through the gates of life, and for the Son whose radiance enlightens our minds and inflames our hearts. 

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Amen.