Transfiguration B 2024
2 Kings 2:1-12
Psalm 50:1-6
2 Corinthians 4:3-6
Mark 9:2-9
Six days before Jesus hauled Peter, James and John up that mountain for a little surprise, he’s shocked the disciples by announcing that they weren’t going to Jerusalem to start a rebellion and drive the Roman pigs into the sea, which was certainly what everyone thought was the role of the Messiah.
No. Listen to what Jesus told them, Mark 8:31:
“Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes and be killed and after three days rise again.”
And I loved the shocked tone of Mark’s comment in verse 32:
“He said all this quite openly.”
He just came right out and said this crazy, completely unacceptable thing, this terribly wrong thing. And what was this “rise again” business? What did that even mean?
Peter blurted out, “No no no no no. God forbid it!” And Jesus turned on him angrily “Get behind me, Satan! You’re not getting it because you have your mind in the wrong things, on human things and not divine things.”
Peter probably thought of himself as Jesus’ right hand man, and Jesus just told him to take a hike. So, a big slap in the face. No Jesus meek and mild here. But Jesus doesn’t stop there, he turns to the crowd as if recruiting a replacement for the disgraced Simon Peter (Mark 8:34-37):
“If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”
Jesus was saying that to live in the midst of a corrupt and sinful generation and practice the path of love for God and neighbor, to live in expectation of God’s kingdom, is by definition to rebel against human kingdoms, and in the Roman kingdom, the punishment for rebellion was the shame and pain of the cross.
This is a message that was lost very quickly over the centuries that followed the resurrection, particularly when the church became the servant of the empire it had formerly expected to be destroyed. From crucified to crucifying, is a short way to express the difference.
But this should not surprise us, as Peter and the disciples, who actually stood in the presence of the living Jesus Christ, could not get what he was saying either. Mark says “six days later,” and I can imagine the silence that had fallen among the twelve during those days. No one wanted to get their heads bitten off like Peter, but no one understood what the Master was saying either.
We should note that Mark’s account, which may well have been based on Peter’s eyewitness testimony, mentions several times that people, including Jesus’ own family, thought he’d lost his mind. His own village so disrespected him that he was literally unable to do any deeds of power among them.
So, after six days of silence, God the Father decides to intervene.
The Greek verb metemorpho means pretty much what the English version, metamorphosis, means. Everywhere else in the New Testament, the word is translated “to transform.” But here, translators selected a different sense, because it’s in the passive tense, and because of the words Mark puts after it: “before them”, that is, Peter and James and John.
Jesus wasn’t “transformed.” He wasn’t some different Jesus. He wasn’t changed. It was Peter and James and John who were transformed. God enabled them to see what was hidden to human minds set on human things. He pulled back the veil that lay over their minds. I think the Hindu religion speaks of the third eye, the mode of perception that apprehends the hidden reality behind the illusion we usually experience.
In the book Breathing Under Water, that we’ll begin discussing this week, Richard Rohr says that we don’t see the world as it is, but as we are. God doesn’t change the world, God changes how we see it. If and when we truly seek him as our highest and most passionate goal, he will not rearrange the events of our lives. He will rearrange us. He will change the way we experience our lives, the way we see, hear, touch, taste and smell all the people, places and things we encounter.
Who knew what they thought of Jesus’ awful, unacceptable announcement of his mission, and his impossible invitation to follow? But I expect it was not pretty. But on that mountain, God enabled the three disciples to see the future, the risen Son of Man. God gave them a little taste of Christ’s coming glory. He also revealed that the living spirits of Moses and Elijah in conversation with him, demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that Jesus was not coming to abolish but to fulfill the purpose of God’s people, that, despite how strange his mission and his call seemed, it was absolutely consistent with the tradition of Judaism.
Peter the Blurter feels like he has to say something as he is bedazzled by Christ’s glory. Like the good kid in class, demonstrating he learned his lessons, he suggests doing the traditional Jewish thing of making the mountain a holy site.
God doesn’t answer him, but in another sense God does. “This is my Son! Listen to him!” As in, get over yourself. Stop trying to prove you’re a good student and actually listen to your teacher. Or as old-timers often say to the newcomer rambling on about how he intends to stay sober: “take the cotton out of your ears and put it in your mouth.”
All of our actions emerge from our desires, what we want. It’s the most basic lesson in acting. Figure out what the character wants and why, and then use the words and actions in the script to actively go after those objectives as honestly and as intensely as you can, because this is the most basic truth in life. We do what we do because of what we desire.
How do we as Christians discern what is true and what is not? There are many facts out there. We choose the ones we believe based on what we value, what we care about, what we ultimately desire.
We’ve been speaking about idolatry, and as we’ll learn in the Richard Rohr book we’ll be reading over the next seven weeks, idolatry is loving anything or anyone more than one loves God. The person or thing we desire most is what we worship. It is our god. Such false gods do not deliver what they promise they will, and they cripple us spiritually, by making us blind and deaf to the truth of God.
But when we take the cotton out of our ears and put it in our mouths, and listen to the Son of Man, he will give us our sight and our hearing, so that we can see what the truth really is.
It’s been my objective over the past two years to re-introduce you to Jesus. We hear a lot of scripture, we hear it in bits and pieces, we get into the practical applications, right? But the story of Jesus and his message is the heart of the gospel, whatever the apostles might have said about it all afterwards.
Jesus challenges us to follow him, not to worship him. Or perhaps, to worship by following. He is walking toward the one true light. And he has invited us to take up our spiritual rebellion with him, to live as children of the light in the midst of the darkness, and take whatever the world dishes out in response. Three men testified that they all saw and heard the same things. Jesus was transfigured before them. And they were transformed.
This is truly the Father’s Son, the divine entrance into our most intimate lives, to share with us our burdens, and give us the insight we do not have without him.
I hope you have heard that Jesus has strong things to say about greed and hypocrisy. He says absolutely nothing about going to heaven when we die. But he does say we need to die to enter the kingdom of heaven, a different kind of death, and a different kind of rising. The world might humiliate us for practicing the love of God against all common sense. People might say we’re crazy, or worse. We might have to stand up for people the rest of the world despises.
I realize that this sounds rather sectarian and cult-like, but I’m not talking about following me. Nor am I suggesting that there are not other ways to grow spiritually. But if we are professing to follow Jesus Christ, we must take seriously what he actually says, and we will not be able to hear him until we are ready to take the cotton out of our ears and put it in our mouths.
Amen.
