Between noon and three

This sermon was preached on the Last Sunday after the Epiphany, March 2, 2025, at St. Mark’s, Berkeley.

Collect: O God, who before the passion of your only-begotten Son revealed his glory upon the holy mountain: Grant to us that we, beholding by faith the light of his countenance, may be strengthened to bear our cross, and be changed into his likeness from glory to glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Readings: Exodus 34:29-35, 1 Corinthians 13, Luke 9:28-36

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

Our Gospel today, the Transfiguration, is a tale of three mountains, or perhaps even more, depending on how you count. Wait, three? Aren’t we just on Tabor? Not all of them are geographical. You’re probably familiar with the traditional image of prayer being a mountain: Thomas Merton’s Seven-Story Mountain comes to mind, or St. John of the Cross’s Ascent of Mount Carmel. Our Gospel today begins with Jesus taking Peter, James, and John up a mountain in order to pray. Prayer is the point of their ascent, not the fireworks that come later. Jesus prays, while his friends doze off.

It should come as no surprise that the spectacular event of the Transfiguration occurs while Jesus is deep in prayer, and while the disciples are heavy with sleep. How many other moments of divine visitation occur at prayer! From Hannah in the tabernacle to Mary at the annunciation to Jesus’s own baptism in the Jordan, addressing ourselves to prayer puts us in a posture where God is known to make things known. Here at the Transfiguration, what is revealed is Jesus himself in divine glory, shining like the sun, while a voice from heaven claims him as God’s beloved Son.

Critically, he is not alone. Moses and Elijah are there, the great archetypal Prophets of old. And there is also the voice from heaven, speaking in the midst of the cloud that comes to overshadow them all. All of them are talking together, while Peter and the others try to make themselves useful. This illustrates another major point: that revelation, in the Christian religion, is never private, it is always something shared. God’s revelation of himself is something which creates relationships, draws links where before there was only disruption, especially across the chasms of time and space, matter and spirit.

What are they talking about? Luke tells us that Jesus and Moses and Elijah were talking about the departure that Jesus was about to make in Jerusalem. We usually interpret his “departure” to mean his crucifixion and death, especially considering where this story occurs in Luke’s narrative, just before Jesus “sets his face to go to Jerusalem.” But Luke is more specific than mere “departure.” The word he uses in the Greek text is “exodus.” Jesus and these two great prophets are speaking of the Exodus Jesus is going to make by virtue of his passion and death in Jerusalem.

Talk of the Exodus introduces the second of today’s mountains: Mt. Sinai. When Moses led the people of Israel out of Egypt through the Red Sea, they went first to Mt. Sinai, where in the midst of another cloud Moses spoke with God and received the Law. This was a major, perhaps the pivotal moment in the self-conception of ancient Israel, the moment when God became not just God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but their own too; when they became not just descendants of the patriarchs but their own nation, whom the gift of the law makes a people.

You may know, this generation proved faithless time and again, and God decreed that they wander in the wilderness until every last member of that generation died. Only then would he finally let the people enter the promised land. And yet, forty years later, Moses says to the new generation, “On Mount Sinai, God made a covenant not with our fathers but with us, with every one of you alive here today.” Moses is saying, that moment of encounter on Sinai persists, remains live, fully present, to all the people held by its promise, even if they weren’t born yet.

Elijah, too, knew Mount Sinai: it was the place where he fled for refuge after defeating the prophets of Baal and fearing the anger of king Ahab. At Sinai he looked for God, and knew him not in fire or earthquake but in the still small voice. God told him he had preserved a number who had not bent the knee to Baal, and ordered Elijah to return to them, and organize their defense. At Sinai, with Moses, the people had celebrated their deliverance from slavery in Egypt. With Elijah, their deliverance continued, now also from royal exploitation and oppression.

Maybe it’s fitting to recall in this context that Sinai was also where Moses had first met God, in the bush that did not burn, where he gave his name, ‘I am that I am.’ Today, on Mount Tabor, if Moses and Elijah are talking with Jesus about the exodus he is about to make in Jerusalem, then Mount Sinai can’t be far from their minds, with all it recalls of deliverance from slavery in Egypt, deliverance from exploitation by greedy kings, and the persistent presence of God in the midst of his people, to make himself known among them.

The exodus Jesus is about to make in Jerusalem should recall for us the third mountain of the day. Here we are on Mount Tabor, talking in a divine vision with heroes of Mount Sinai, of Jesus’s coming work — on Mount Calvary. Like Mount Zion, Calvary is not much of a mountain to speak of: only a mountain at all in the sense that the ground falls away around it; it is surrounded on all sides by higher, more dramatic hills. And yet the exodus Jesus makes there makes Calvary a far more glorious mountain than either Tabor or Sinai.

The exodus Jesus accomplishes on Calvary is by his passion and crucifixion; and the way it makes is not through the sea this time, but through sin and death. On the cross, Jesus parts the waters of sin and death, which constantly threaten to drown us, which separate us in ways sharp and grievous both from our beloved dead and from our true homeland in the nearer presence of God. Jesus makes a way through those treacherous waters for everyone to follow who wants to, without regard to origin, class, holiness, wickedness, or deserving. He makes his resurrection theirs too.

So, as glorious as Mt. Tabor and Mt. Sinai both are, as bright and stupendous the vision of Jesus in his glory, bright as the sun, talking with Moses and Elijah, the very subject of their conversation drives us to see a yet brighter and more splendid sight: the Son of God upon the cross. Brighter and more splendid than the transfiguration? It must have been an squalid, dirty affair, with a mob of people behaving their absolute worst. Glorious? Yes. Here a tool of shameful, agonizing humiliation, is made the very throne of God, where death lies defeated forever.

We’re used to seeing and hearing reversals in the Gospels: “Blessed are the poor,” “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,” “The last shall be first and the first last,” “He hath put down the mighty from their seat and hath exalted the humble and meek.” But here on Calvary is the final reversal, the one in which all the rest inhere: a dying man is the eternal son of God, a tool of state execution is the throne of heaven, the moment of humiliation and death is the moment of victory and liberation for all creation.

And this is the chief glory of the Christian religion: that just when all seems to be lost, it isn’t: “For unless a grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies it bears much fruit.” What the powers of this world consider defeat, shame, unworthy, alien, waste, God invests with incalculable dignity and worth; and just when those same powers have squeezed the last drop of profit from their captive, in their moment of victory they are utterly undone, bound forever by the one they crucified, while all their prisoners go free.

We can rejoice, then, that our hope burns brightest when the night grows darkest. But even more than this we can rejoice that in the ugliest corners of our lives and of our world, the sneers of the seeming victors blow easily away, and we find there taking root the beginning of love: love that persists through death and hell, love that makes itself present, alive, equally across all generations; love that claims us for its own, that opens our eyes to see as we are seen; love that makes itself known to us in the breaking of the bread.

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