“Jesus Came Down”
Mark 9:2-9
February 19, 2012
Professor McGonagall is
the transfiguration teacher at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. For those of you who are Harry Potter fans
like me, you already know this. But
whether you are a Potter fan or not, this may be one of the few references we
find to transfiguration outside of this particular story in the gospels.
Transfiguration in the
Harry Potter stories means changing one thing into something else. So the students practice turning one object
into another. I believe in the movie,
they try to turn rats into teacups. It’s
not an easy magical skill to master as you can imagine.
According to J.K.
Rowling’s understanding of the word, transfiguration means to change from one
thing into something totally different.
But is that what’s going on in our scripture passage? Let’s hold on to that question.
The Greek word that is
translated as transfiguration is metamorpho. Our word metamorphosis
also comes from this. I learned the word
metamorphosis when I was a sophomore in high school. My German teacher talked about it in class
one day and suggested a book called The
Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. It
tells the story of a man, Gregor Samsa, who goes to sleep one night as a man
and wakes up the next morning as a large insect. He is still Gregor. He know who he is, has the same awareness he
did the night before, but he is completely different. He is metamorphosed into an entirely new
creature.
Is that what happens in
Mark’s telling of the transfiguration of Jesus?
Does the human Jesus change
into an entirely different creation when he goes up on that mountaintop? Or is just that his true nature shines forth
in that moment? Mark’s text is not exactly
overflowing with details that help us understand what happens.
“Six days later, Jesus
took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart,
by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, 3
and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach
them. 4 And there appeared to them Elijah
with Moses, who were talking with Jesus.”
Jesus goes up the
mountain with Peter, James and John.
Every biblical scholar I’ve read refers to these disciples as the inner
circle of Jesus’ disciples. They were the
ones who were closest to Jesus. However
last summer at the Synod of Lakes and Prairies Synod School, Anna Carter
Florence, the keynote speaker for the
week and an amazing preacher and teacher of preaching, made the comment that
perhaps they weren’t the inner circle as much as they were the remedial
group.
Maybe they weren’t so
much favored by Jesus as they were in need of some extra help, some extra
understanding. And this makes sense to
some degree because our text starts off with the words “six days later.” Six days later from what? What happened six days earlier? Six days earlier Jesus had begun to teach the
disciples that being the Messiah, the Son of Man wasn’t what any of them
expected it to be. It meant that the
Messiah would suffer. It meant that the
Son of Man would be rejected by all the religious authorities. It meant that the Messiah would die and after
three days of really being dead, would rise again. According to Mark, Jesus tells them this
quite openly.
Jesus tells them all this
because of an answer Peter gave to Jesus’ question, “Who do you say that I
am.”
Six days before our
text today Peter confessed that Jesus was the Messiah, but the minute he heard
the rest of it, the cost of it, he told Jesus to stop talking such nonsense.
Now, six days later,
Jesus brings Peter, James and John up a mountain. And there he is transfigured before
them. Mark gives us no other explanation
as to what that means other than Jesus’ clothes turn a dazzling white, whiter
than any human made bleach could make them.
In other gospel accounts, Jesus’ face shines. There are a few more clues as to the
transfiguration of his countenance as well as his clothes. But this is what we have in Mark. Jesus is transfigured before them. And while he is transfigured, he is joined by
Elijah and Moses. The disciples see
these two great figures of their faith, their history, talking with them.
They are terrified,
which I think is a reasonable response.
I probably would have been terrified too. Peter, out of his terror, wants to respond
somehow, so he offers to build booths for them to stay in. Just as he makes this offer to Jesus they are
overshadowed by a great cloud. And out
of that cloud a voice speaks.
“This is my Son, the
Beloved; listen to him.”
The voice that only
Jesus heard at his baptism is now audible to these three disciples as
well. Although I’m sure the numinous
atmosphere must have felt dreamlike to the bewildered, terrified disciples, it
wasn’t a dream. It was real. They witnessed, at least for a moment, the
human Jesus that they knew transfigured into the divine Jesus that was also his
true nature. For just a moment they
witnessed glory.
I realize that this
doesn’t bring us any closer to understanding exactly what happened in that transfiguration. But I’m not sure that it serves our purposes
to know. Maybe it doesn’t matter that we
don’t understand it. We just have to
trust that something happened to Jesus on that mountaintop that gave the
disciples, inner circle or remedial group, a glimpse of the fullness of who
Jesus was – his humanity and his divinity all together, all at once.
And while they were in
the power of that moment Peter expressed what I suspect all of them were
feeling, the desire to stay there, to stay in that moment. Which isn’t surprising either. When it came to Jesus, the moments when the
disciples “got it" were few and far between.
Actually, in Mark’s gospel, they never really get it. They never fully understand who Jesus is and what he came
to do and fulfill. So it makes sense to
me that when they are confronted with his glory, when they have his Sonship
confirmed by a terrible, wonderful voice from a cloud, it was natural that they
want to stick around. Staying on the
mountain keeps what they’ve seen and heard real. When they go back down the mountain, the
glory is going to fade, the voice is going to become distant, the edges of the
moment will start to dull and blur.
Because that’s what
happens, isn’t it? We have what is
referred to as a mountaintop experience, and we want to stay in it. When I was a young Senior High youth advisor,
I went with my youth group to the Montreat Conference Center outside of
Asheville, North Carolina. Every summer
Montreat hosts several weeks of youth events for Senior Highs. It is a life changing experience for everyone
who has the opportunity to go. The
conference itself is amazing. Friends
are made, bonds are formed. It’s
incredible for youth and adults alike.
And you are actually on top of a mountain. So when I say it was a mountaintop experience
for me, I mean that literally and figuratively.
Yet once the week was
over, we had to go back down the mountain.
We had to go home, back to the daily grind of our lives. We had to go back down and reenter reality
once more. I remember feeling so joyous
while I was on the mountain, so alive and ready to be a better disciple, a
better person, but once I left the mountain that feeling of joy, of zeal was
hard to sustain.
Maybe the disciples
suspected this would be true as well.
Maybe they didn’t. But either
way, they went back down. More
importantly, I think, Jesus went back down.
We never think about what it may have meant to Jesus to be
transfigured. Did he know exactly what
would happen to him when he took the disciples up the mountain? Did he discern a call from God to climb that
peak that day? Or did he just have a gut
sense that going up the mountain was the right thing to do, for the disciples
and for him?
Regardless, Jesus went
up. And Jesus came down.
I wonder if going down
the mountain was even harder for Jesus than it was for the disciples. I wonder that because Jesus had to have known
what he was he was descending to. He went
back down to so much pain, so much need.
Yet Jesus came down.
Jesus came down.
He came down because
staying on the mountain was not what he was there to do. He was called to a broken world, and that
broken world was in the valley below.
There he was called to be, to preach, to teach, to heal, to proclaim the
kingdom of heaven.
Staying on the
mountaintop, basking in God’s glory is a wonderful thing. And we are indeed called to glorify God. But if there is a danger in descending
because we may forget our moment with God, then there is an equal danger in
staying because we forget the world that needs our witness.
Staying on the
mountaintop is equivalent for me to the many contemporary praise songs I
hear. It’s not that there is anything
inherently wrong with contemporary praise music, nor the need to praise and
glorify. But what bothers me about these
kinds of songs is that often they become more about the person doing the
praise, then about the One who is praised.
They become, as my friend Kristen memorably put it, “Jesus is my
boyfriend” kind of songs. Or maybe for some
of you, they become Jesus is my buddy songs.
Jesus is not my best bud. Jesus
is the One who came down. Who went
willingly into darkness to bring about the Light with a capital L. Jesus
crossed that threshold from the mountain to the valley because he was faithful
to God and the narrow way he was called to travel. Jesus crossed that threshold. Jesus came down.
Transfiguration Sunday
is our threshold. It is the threshold
between Ordinary Time and Lent. It is a
glimpse of glory before we cross into the darkest time the world has ever
known. So just like Jesus and the
disciples, we are called to come down from the mountain and to walk through the
valley that awaits us. But even as we
walk that valley, let us cling to the memory of the mountain, the memory of God
that lives in us. Jesus came back down
and so do we, to bear witness to the glory of God that illumines not just a
mountain but the whole world, whether we can see it or not. Alleluia.
Amen.
Oh, I always love it when you quote Harry Potter in your sermons. :) Hugs dear friend.
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