Peak Jesus
Transfiguration Sunday
Epiphanytide ends with a bang.
Throughout this season, the glory of Christ shines. From the star leading the Magi across borders to gospel acts of deliverance and healing, the radiance of Jesus arouses wonder and astonishment. Then, at Epiphany’s culmination, he turns the volume up to 11 – past all known limits and comparisons. On the Mount of Transfiguration, Christ’s glory lands on us with unmatched intensity and beauty. The unveiling of Jesus’ true and ultimate identity as the Beloved Son of God seems inescapable. All three Synoptic gospels bear witness to the Transfiguration event, and even the Gospel of John sings Christ’s glory in the same key even if it contains no precise parallel. Like clockwork, the lectionary annually concludes Epiphany with peak Jesus.
And yet, for all of its ubiquity, the Transfiguration of Jesus is so unparalleled, so unearthly, that we scarcely know what to do with it. We can’t help but follow in the footsteps of our ancestors in the faith. When confronted with Jesus’ transformation, Peter can’t fathom what he is seeing. A glorified Jesus conversing with Israel’s greats leaves the fisherman dumbfounded, except that he must open his mouth and remove all doubt as to how out of his depth he is. Seeing Jesus clothed with heaven’s glory and his very being shining with the Father’s eternal light, Peter nevertheless calls his master “Rabbi” and proposes making dwellings for Jesus alongside earthly heroes. When the sacred and the numinous confront us, our words are unworthily human-scale, our instincts earthbound. We attempt to make practical sense of Jesus even as he stands before us glorified. Even Mark the gospel writer succumbs to this reflex. Although Jesus’ very being is transformed, Mark can only mumble a comparison of Jesus’ clothing to what imperial laundry detergent can effect: “his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them” (9:3). The gospel writer’s own words are dreadfully inadequate. The lengthiness of this present paragraph describing the poverty of our responses to Jesus’ glory verges on repeating the same error.
Our Jesus is too small.
The terror the disciples experience before the transfigured Jesus is perhaps a more fitting response. Sure, Elijah and Moses aren’t thrown into fear and trembling before Jesus, and neither were they panicked in their Old Testament encounters with God on Mount Horeb/Sinai. But perhaps their relative steadiness results from the gracious step by step preparation God provided for their encounters with divine glory. The disciples, however, are thrust into this scene more like Isaiah’s sudden audience before the Holy One of Israel. The prophet can only cry out, “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” (Isaiah 6:5). As “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one being with the Father,” Jesus shines with the same glory as the God of Isaiah, Elijah and Moses. “They are not two different gods,” says Fleming Rutledge.
And yet, in our longing for a relatable Jesus, we can settle for one who is overly familiar and ultimately innocuous. In our passion for a captain amid our fierce political storms, we can fashion an activist Jesus useful for our earthly struggles but far less than the Eternal Son of God. Transfiguration Sunday would instead compel us to behold the glory shining in the face of Jesus who is God Incarnate. Before this Jesus, all our words and works, all our devotion and piety, are laid bare as unworthy and insubstantial. We are undone.
And if the unveiling of Jesus’ glory were somehow not enough, the voice from the cloud commands us to listen to Jesus, not just generally, but specifically to stunning words he has just said:
If any want to become my followers, 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. (8:34-38)
Why do the gospel writers include the Transfiguration event immediately following these words from Jesus? Why does Jesus lead the disciples to this mountain before descending to suffering and crucifixion? The Transfiguration does not negate Jesus’ words about cross-bearing; it validates them. The crucifixion is not the absence of glory but its fullest expression. Throughout Mark’s gospel, only demonic spirits testify to Jesus’ true identity. Human eyes see only dimly, “like trees, walking” (8:24). Only at the cross does an earthbound mortal – a pagan, at that! – see Jesus’ glory unveiled and confess, “Truly this man was God’s Son!” (Mark 15:39).
Encountering Christ’s cruciform glory is precisely what we need heading into the coming year. 2024 feels like a Lenten journey into rejection, violence and the long defeat. Wars, elections, an unrelenting migration crisis, and climate-fueled disasters await in the valley below. At this early stage of 2024, the Transfiguration is the gift of light we need for the journey into shadows. Jesus’ unveiling and the validation of his words provide the clarity we need to follow our Savior into conflict with the powers and principalities without fear for our lives. Those who follow Jesus have already surrendered their lives. They have been undone in the presence of the glorified Jesus and are thus freed to follow him.
