Holy Wisdom Monastery
The Transfiguration
2 Kings 2:1-12; 2 Corinthians 4:3-6; Mark 9: 2-9
February 11, 2024
Roberta Felker
(Peter, on the mountain)
Not the light but how it spoke, his transfigured
flesh an instrument of consonance and discord.
As if that were not enough, Elijah? Moses, too?
James grabbed his knife. John stood mute, dis-
figured by fear. And I? Well, some people act. Some
wait, and then there are those who think out loud.
Let’s build three sheds! I shouted, instantly
regretting it. What I meant was hold still, but my words
never come out right. When light stopped throbbing,
tympani broke the sky. It shook us hard. That voice.
Nothing I want to hear again, believe me. Later,
stumbling downhill, following his easy stride,
we knew our former selves were done. Sweet Jesus
my body bucked with the secret we were sworn to keep…
~ Christine Hemp
In the Western Church, the Gospel assigned for the last Sunday before Ash Wednesday is always the story of the transfiguration. Today’s mountaintop experience, the beginning frame for the season of Lent, turns Jesus decisively toward the cross. And it turns us away from the bright stars of Christmas toward the deep wilderness of our own Lenten journeys.
Leading up to today, Mark tells us that Jesus was teaching the disciples a new truth about the cost of following him: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” Jesus predicted his own suffering, death, and resurrection, telling his companions that they wouldn’t escape suffering themselves. The disciples rejected the idea of this kind of Messiah, and Peter rebuked Jesus; as you may recall, that did not go well.
It’s while the weary disciples are processing all this that Jesus took his three closest friends on a long climb up a high mountain. Jesus has been engaged in his ministry in the lowlands of rural Galilee — no mountain in sight — and then, without warning, the grade in Mark’s narrative turns sharply and abruptly upward. A change of landscape, both geographically and spiritually. And here, in the midst of what must have been the dread and uncertainty that came with hearing about the trials ahead, Peter, James, and John experienced a face-to-face encounter with the glory of Christ. The same man who had just told them about his future execution as an insurrectionist was transfigured – caught fire from within, face like a flame, clothes dazzling white – before their very eyes.
Then, in the circle of his spotlight, who should appear but Moses, who brought the law of God to the people of God. And Elijah, one of the greatest of the prophets. Both faithful servants who suffered because of their obedience. Both veterans of their own mountaintop epiphanies. Dead men come back to life. Sweet Jesus.
Peter grasped at the spectacular vision, desperate to capture the spirit of the moment. He had stumbled into the sublime, and he wanted to harness it. We can empathize. Peter wanted this episode to make a difference in his life —for it to shift the axis of power, ignite the revolution he had dreamed about. He designed a plan to make this fugitive episode durable. He rambled about tents to house the majesty of it all—tents for the presence of God, like the tabernacle of old.
Peter’s words were still on his lips when “that voice” boomed from the cloud. An interruption. Don’t build monuments to honor Jesus – “listen to him.” The Son. The Beloved. Listen to him. The vision faded, the disciples saw only Jesus – Jesus of Nazareth, whose mother they knew, the man with whom they had walked so many dusty miles – but now, also the Christ revealed in his glory, his holiness shining through the human. No wonder the theologian Frederick Buechner, described the transfiguration as, “… as strange a scene as there is in the Gospels….” We can imagine that the disciples, ordinary men confused and overwhelmed in the presence of such a strange scene, might well have been relieved when Jesus told them to keep what had happened to themselves. What would they have said anyway? So, sweaty and dirty and thirsty, following His easy stride, they stumbled back down the mountain. To the life that would lead them to another hill, to Golgotha. Sweet Jesus.
Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron tells us that, “In the process of discovering bodhicitta (an awakened mind) the journey goes down, not up. It’s as if the mountain point(s) toward the center of the earth instead of reaching into the sky. Instead of transcending … suffering, we move toward the turbulence and doubt. We jump into it…. Right down there, in the thick of things, we discover the love that will not die….”
The stunned disciples’ encounter with the transfigured Jesus on the mountaintop changed their understanding of Jesus. In the coming days, as they witnessed their friend’s arrest, suffering, and death, I like to think that they were able to summon the image of Jesus’ glory shining in and through his brokenness – and that they began to grasp that the Jesus of the Transfiguration and the Jesus of Good Friday were one and the same. That his was a love that could not be found on the mountaintop of privilege but could be found only by feeding the multitudes and then by going deeper, down to the very core of human suffering. Such love is anything but weakness; it is the love that will not die.
And, too, the vision of Jesus changed the way in which the disciples understood themselves. They knew their former lives were done. Strengthened by the indelible memory of their mountaintop experience, the three fishermen came back down, right into the thick of things. They returned to the world as it was– to the other disciples, flagging in energy as well as in faith, perhaps, who were unable to heal a young boy possessed by a spirit. To Jesus’ healing of the child: a shimmering of grace at a place of disjuncture and fracture. Listen to him.
If Richard Rohr is right that “God comes to us disguised as our life…” what might it mean to live our lives, transfigured? To move from treasuring experiences of the illimitable to being propelled forward by them? To move from contemplation to action, from mysticism to dirty hands?
The desire to linger in the wonder is strong. But the transfiguration isn’t a moment to be captured. It is a dose of glory to get us through the night. Most of life happens in the valleys, in the meantime, what poet W.H. Auden calls, “the most trying time of all.” Sometimes nothing is more discouraging that ministry in the messy middle. Try speaking a word for peace in a war-mad world. Try promising hope to a culture that mistrusts what everything it cannot grasp. Down in the valley, it’s sometimes hard to see how Jesus’ mission can be sustained.
So welcome, Lent! A time to return to Jesus’ persistent invitation to take what we have seen, what we have received, down into the trenches of everyday life. A time to remember and be reassured by today’s glimpse of what is to come at Easter, at Mt. Calvary, on another mountaintop: the love that will not die. Sweet Jesus.