Have you ever been in a situation in your life when you started to wonder if a
choice you had made or a direction you had taken was really the right one? And
just as you’re starting to really question and doubt yourself, you get a vision,
an image, a thought that reassures you that what you’re doing is right, that
things will work out in the end.
Many people struggle in their lives with a sense that they are headed down the
wrong path. They wonder whether or not they could have chosen a different path.
They wonder whether the path they’ve chosen will bring them to the place they
expected, or whether or not they will suddenly be either surprised or
disappointed by the consequences of their choices.
People who live with those struggles and pressures always seek some kind of
sign, some kind of comfort that validates their decisions. I think of my younger
sister Linda, who recently graduated with a Masters Degree in social work from
NYU.
She was a top student, and yet she hasn’t been able to find a social work
position in New York that wouldn’t have her fearing for her life. She’s now
working seven days a week as a cook in Manhattan. I know she wonders whether or
not that time and money were a good investment.
Relationships present another example of this issue: how many people do you know
who have invested themselves in a relationship, or even a marriage, and wondered
whether or not they will end up being unhappy after all is said and done?
Last week I spoke with a young woman who works for a non-profit here in town.
She told me that she has been living with this man whom she loves for about
three years. He has partial custody of his young son, and she has come to
believe that she is more of a mother to this boy than his own mother.
But her partner injured his back a few years ago and has been unable to work
since. He needs an operation, but it isn’t even clear that the operation can
guarantee him enough strength to go back to work. Meanwhile, she works three
jobs to support them, and none of those positions offers benefits like health
insurance.
I know she occasionally struggles with the question of whether or not he’s
properly motivated to get back into the workforce. She told me that they were
recently evicted from their apartment because they couldn’t afford the rent. Now
they are separated from one another, living in friends’ homes or apartments.
Can you just imagine what a difference it would make in her life to have some
kind of assurance that she hasn’t just wasted the last three years of her life
on a relationship with someone who may not be able to be the kind of partner she
needs? That kind of assurance would make all the difference in the world to her.
I think all of us who attempt, however feebly, to be followers of Christ wrestle
with whether or not what we do here is really worth it. And let’s be honest, we
sometimes have doubts about whether or not the investment we’ve made in this
church and this congregation is a worthy investment.
Everyone deals with those kinds of doubts, especially if you’re someone like me
who has a tendency to worry about absolutely everything . If it’s any
reassurance to you, the passage for today talks about how Jesus’ closest
followers wrestled with those same questions.
In the chapter that comes before this passage, Jesus asks his disciples who they
think he is. They all knew he was a guy from Nazareth named Jesus. But he was
asking them how they understood his life as a part of God’s overall work in
history to save the world.
They recounted the opinions of others who speculated that Jesus was the return
of the prophet Elijah. Elijah, an 8th century prophet, was supposed to return in
some form before God ushered in a new era in history, one which included the
destruction of the world as people knew it.
Other people thought that Jesus was a reincarnated form of John the Baptist.
Then Jesus asked his followers who they thought he was. Peter had a light bulb
go on in his mind: he said Jesus was the Messiah sent by God, God’s own Son.
Jesus confirms what Peter said, but then Peter and Jesus have an argument over
whether or not Jesus was going to be the kind of Messiah Peter expected him to
be. I think it must have been difficult for Peter, after investing himself in
Jesus’ own ministry, to come to the realization that Jesus was not going to be
this victorious, powerful leader who would also delegate power to his followers.
But in the next chapter, Peter gets the kind of reassurance that helps him stay
on track. Jesus takes Peter and tow other disciples, James and John, up onto a
mountain for some alone time.
Now keep in mind that this story is not just a narration of things that
happened. Matthew is telling us this story in order to help us understand just
who Jesus is. And if he can do that, then maybe our faith in Jesus will be
stronger.
To that end, much of what Matthew tells us here is highly symbolic: it’s
intended to explain Jesus’ identity using a lot of rich imagery from the Old
Testament. It’s kind of a way of saying that Jesus’ own life and person are the
fulfillment of what happened in the Old Testament.
And if that’s the case, then Jesus can be the savior of the world. I think
that’s at least part of the point Matthew is trying to make here. It is at
Jesus’ transfiguration that his disciples get a glimpse of who Jesus really is
and why he can save the world.
Whenever Matthew talks about Jesus going up on a mountain, it’s a way of making
him look like Moses, who went up on Mt. Sinai to receive God’s laws. Last week
we talked about Jesus going up onto a mountain to teach his disciples about how
to follow him.
This week Jesus also goes up onto a mountain and, as it happened with Moses, God
descends onto the mountain in the form of a cloud. But before that happens,
Jesus’ appearance changes. He goes from looking like a normal guy to looking
like an angelic being of some type.
Jesus’ face shines like the sun, and his clothes start to glow. Later on his
disciples are stunned by all that happens and they fall to the ground. Jesus
touches them and tells them not to be afraid.
The reason I point this out is because those elements I just told you are common
in most Jewish accounts of someone meeting an angel or a divine being. (Slide).
We have an almost exact description of this encounter in Daniel 9, which is
about 200 years earlier than this story in Matthew. Later on John will describe
Jesus in this same way in Revelation.
So Matthew is telling us that this guy who walked around healing and preaching
and performing miracles has another side to him that wasn’t apparent before.
Jesus is in this world, but he also belongs to the world of angels and divine
beings. And his place in that world is as God’s own Son.
As God’s own son, he is greater than all of the other revered religious in
Jewish history. If you were to ask Matthew’s readers who the greatest figures in
the Old Testament were, two names which would naturally be near or at the top of
the list were Moses and Elijah.
Moses was revered because God gave him the law, which he wrote down for the
people. That law set Israel apart, in their minds, from everyone else. And when
they followed that law, it made them righteous like their own God.
But even Moses said that God would raise up another prophet who would continue
to teach people. The people were supposed to listen to that prophet and follow
his words. Anyone who didn’t do so would be punished.
So it makes sense that when the voice of God speaks from the cloud in this
story, the voice tells the disciples to listen to Jesus. But Jesus wasn’t just a
prophet like Moses that people had to heed. He was God’s own son. Moses wasn’t.
So Matthew wants to reinforce that Jesus is greater than Moses.
The other person who appears with Moses and Jesus is Elijah. He was widely
considered to be the greatest prophet of Israel. Like Moses, he was also invited
to the top of a mountain to experience God’s presence. You might remember that
in Elijah’s mountaintop experience, he sees an earthquake, a windstorm and
wildfires, but he doesn’t hear God’s voice until a silence breaks out after
those events.
The point of his appearance is to show that Jesus is an even greater prophet
than Elijah. Elijah was renowned for his miracles. Like Jesus, he fed a large
number of people with a small amount of food. He also raised a child from the
dead. But he was not God’s son. Jesus is even greater than Elijah.
As you might imagine, Peter and the other disciples are shocked by this event.
Peter doesn’t really know what to say, but he does know that he wants this thing
to keep going for as long as it can.
He offers to build temporary shelters for Jesus, Moses and Elijah. Those
shelters are reminiscent of the kinds of shelters or booths that the Israelites
built for themselves while they lived in the desert on their way to the Promised
Land.
But the shelters were unnecessary. It was all over pretty quickly. God descends
in a cloud and says the same thing God said at Jesus’ baptism: This is my Son,
the beloved, in whom I am well pleased. These words are also taken from the Old
Testament prophets.
They are meant to show that whereas Israel itself or the king were identified as
God’s own son, now Jesus himself is God’s son. All the love and patience and
nurture that God had given to Israel over the years were fulfilled in the person
of Jesus because he truly was God’s son.
After the God spoke these words, everything vanished. No cloud, no Moses or
Elijah, no Jesus glowing in the dark. As they were walking away from this
experience, Jesus told them to keep this little story under wraps until after he
had come back from the dead.
It was kind of a backwards way of proving to them that he really would come back
from the dead. If what they saw was his real nature, then it didn’t matter what
the authorities tried to do to him. You can’t get rid of God’s own son by
executing him. He’ll always continue to live.
But the real power of this story lies in the way it reassures his disciples that
something beyond them, something beyond what they know of the world, something
even beyond what they had come to believe about God, was happening.
You see, if they are convinced that what’s going on with this Jesus guy is truly
empowered by God, if they come to believe that Jesus, more than anyone else, can
point them to whatever it is that God is doing in the world, and if they decide
that regardless of how bad things get in life, God has never really lost control
of the situation, well then they realize that they have nothing to fear.
They can go forward with a kind of assurance and confidence that not even the
Romans had. They know that nothing can stop them. They know that all of the
power of the world, all of the forces which seemed to keep them down and oppress
them were ultimately answerable to the God who had chosen them while they were
sitting in boats fishing on the Sea of Galilee.
I wonder how each of us would react if we got that kind of a glimpse of hope for
our own lives. As I said before, I think we all come to a point, probably many
points, where we wonder if everything we’ve done is worthwhile, whether we’ve
put our faith in something that isn’t quite what we expected.
We all face doubts about what we believe. It’s natural, and in a lot of cases,
it’s actually a good thing. Doubt helps us face up to the parts of our faith
that don’t add up. It helps us confront our blind spots and challenges us to get
beyond the junk food type of faith that sells lots of books and gets preachers
on TV.
At the same time, doubt should not make us waiver in our conviction that,
regardless of whatever else you believe, God did save, and is saving the world
through the person of Jesus Christ. We may not understand how, we may disagree
on what that salvation entails, we may quibble about when.
But this glimpse of Jesus as God’s own son reminds us that our faith, and even t
his world itself, points to something outside of itself, and what it points to
is the God who has revealed God’s self to us in the person of Jesus.
Many of us know the American classic by Thornton Wilder, Our Town, and we
sometimes ask ourselves, in seeing it again, why in the world this became a
classic. The first act deals with common trivia in Grover’s Corners, New
Hampshire, at the beginning of the last century, when people do ordinary things
like all of us do every day.
The second act lumbers on as Emily Webb and George Gibbs get married, and live
life as we have known it in all its sometimes boring simplicity. Little time is
taken for reflection, pondering, altering direction, and charting new paths.
In the third act, Emily dies, but somehow she is able to watch her family from
the perspective of the afterlife. Watching her husband grieving, she wishes she
could go back again.
Her wish is granted and she returns on her birthday. As she watches the
proceedings in the family left behind, she realizes how mundane and
self-understood everything is. She wishes her mother would have talked to her
more, that people would pause to reflect on how precious life is.
But nothing changes. Life goes on, and Emily returns to the cemetery, aware of
how precious each moment in life can be, how opportunities are always knocking
at doors that no one opens. She has seen what it’s all about. She has witnessed
the world from a perspective that is beyond this world, and her view of things
is completely transfigured.
How would you live differently if you had an experience like hers? If you could
see beyond the mundane, beyond the politics, beyond the pettiness, and see the
larger picture? How would your life be transfigured?
The good news is that through the power of God you can experience that kind of
change in your life now. You and I can be witnesses of Christ's transfiguration
just as surely as Peter and Jesus and John were. We are in that story too.
Through faith we are with Christ in the glory of his transfiguration. And his
glory gives us strength just as it gave Christ strength.
We do have crosses to bear, pains to endure, crisis to face. And as we move into
Lent, our crosses and Christ's cross will occupy more of our attention. We do
carry crosses, but we do not carry them by our own strength alone. We do not
face any crisis in our own strength alone. In faith we see Christ's glory, and
his strength becomes our strength, and his glory becomes our glory too.
Who are we becoming? That's a good question for this bridge, Sunday between
Epiphany and lent. Not "Shall we become someone?" We have no choice. We are
continually becoming someone different, continually changing, continually being
transfigured.
Who are we becoming? Christians are continually becoming like Christ.