Monday 12 February 2018

Sermon Opoho Church Sunday 11 February, 2018 Transfiguration

Opoho Presbyterian Church               Mark 9.2-9                              February 11th 2018

The year seems hardly to have begun, but we find ourselves already on the verge of Lent, and thus today in the last week of the segment of our calendar we call Epiphany.  And our Gospel reading today, relating what we call the Transfiguration of Jesus, is surely an ‘epiphany moment’ par excellence.  Epiphany means revelation, the visual appearing of something not normally seen, and during the season of epiphany we read a number of stories about the visual and social impact of Jesus: the journey of the magi, the baptism of Jesus, the call of the disciples, all of these announce Jesus and reveal his identity to the world.  But none of those do so in such a striking and mysterious way as our transfiguration story this morning.  Here Jesus takes his disciples up a mountain (a place of revelation, like Mt. Sinai), and here he is suddenly changed – metamorphosed – in front of their eyes, gleaming with dazzlingly white clothes.  He is then joined by Moses and Elijah – two figures from way-back in Israel’s past – before they are all overshadowed by a cloud (another echo of Sinai and Moses), and a voice from God declares: ‘This is my beloved Son; listen to him.’
            There is something about this story that we find hard to get our heads around: it all seems a bit dream-like, unreal, otherworldly, and somehow out of kilter with the plainer, down-to-earth stories in the gospels that we find easier to handle, stories of normal human interactions, parables, and moral instructions.  We are used to a Jesus who teaches, eats, prays, and heals; but a Jesus suddenly transformed, suddenly shining with a blinding light, suddenly glorious and – frankly – supernatural, all that is a bit hard for us to wrap our rational minds around.  (When I told a friend I was preaching today on the lectionary reading, on the Transfiguration, he said ‘Oh no, poor you: that is almost as bad as having to preach about the Trinity!’).  So what is this story about?  What is it doing here in our gospels?  And why is it here, slap bang in the middle of Mark’s gospel, at a pivotal moment in the narrative?  In the transfiguration story, a voice from heaven says ‘listen to him’ (that is, to Jesus).  By placing this story here, Mark’s Gospel seems to be saying to us: ‘listen very carefully to this’. 
            What is happening here is not a meaningless blip in an otherwise straightforward story, but a glimpse through the veil, a sudden break in the clouds, a moment that reveals what is really going on, and what the narrative is truly about.  Living in Opoho, these last few months, when I read of a cloud coming down on the top of a mountain, it makes me think of Mount Cargill, with its frequent cloud-hat.  But this story as a whole and its place in Mark’s Gospel is more like one of those days when you wake up and the whole sky is covered with low, thick, grey cloud, from end to end, and you wonder for a moment how there is any light at all and where it is coming from; and then suddenly, about midday, a break appears to the north, over Flagstaff, and through a tiny slit in the clouds you see blue and then, through the slit, a shaft of brilliant sunlight falls direct onto Dunedin, and now you know what gives the day light.  The disciples have been with Jesus, day in and day out, in normal every-day activities, though he has an unusual authority and an extraordinary power to heal.  They could think – and we could think – that this is the life of a good and holy man, a prophet (like Elijah, perhaps), or a lawgiver like Moses, with a radical moral twist; but all of a sudden, to the eyes of his closest disciples, the clouds part and the truth is revealed.  All of a sudden, and with a light that both illumines and half-blinds, we see who Jesus really is.  The categories of our rational minds won’t fit, not because what we see here is untrue, but because it is more true than we can adequately grasp.
            This is a story rich in symbolism.  The mountain and the cloud remind us of Sinai, where Moses, also after a wait of 6 days, ascends into the cloud, and hears a voice from the cloud that reveals and imparts Israel’s constitution; he came down out of the cloud, you may remember, with his face glowing so brightly that the Israelites could not look at him directly.  No-one can be that near to the light of God and remain the same.  But here is Jesus not as the reflection of that light, but as the light source himself, the truth of his identity suddenly breaking out.  Elijah and Moses appear in this story, as figures of authority from the past who pointed forward to one greater than themselves.  Moses had spoken, famously, of a future prophet like himself, and he was recorded in Deuteronomy as saying of this prophet: ‘listen to him’ – words echoed here but now spoken by God from the cloud.  Elijah, whose mysterious removal to heaven in a fiery chariot we heard about in our reading just now, was also associated with a mountain and a voice from heaven (‘the still, small voice’).  More importantly, ever since the days of Malachi it had been thought that Elijah would return to usher in the last days, the time of the Messiah or the day of the Lord.  In Jesus’ day that expectation was certainly alive and well, and there was speculation about whether John the Baptist, or Jesus himself, was that reappearance of Elijah from heaven as the sign of the impending end.  But here is Jesus, not as Elijah, or as a Moses-like prophet, but as one they speak with, and, as it were, point towards:  Jesus, in other words, as the final, definitive embodiment of all the hopes of history.  And the voice from the cloud, which echoes the voice at Jesus’ baptism, puts us in no doubt about the special identity of Jesus: not, ‘this is my prophet’, nor ‘this is my lawgiver’, nor even ‘this is my friend’: but ‘this is my beloved Son’ (that is my unique, my only Son).  What we are dealing with here is no Galilean guru, but the Son of God.
            So right at the centre of this very early Christian text, and in the letters of Paul written even before this, stands the conviction that has been at the heart of the Christian faith all the way through history: that Jesus is the final, definitive, irreplaceable, and incomparable revelation of God.  The Son of God, the Word of God, the Wisdom of God, the Alpha and Omega, the Lord of the cosmos, these and many other terms have been the properly exalted language in which the Christian faith has tried to express a reality that breaks open all our language about God.  You will notice how Peter fumbles about in this story, not quite knowing what to say or how to say it, and we feel much the same.  There is a sense in which the truth about Christ will always be beyond our ability to capture, because it is simply too great for us to get our minds, and thus our words, around it.  But one thing is clear.  We cannot speak about God without speaking about Jesus as God the Son; we cannot speak about creation without speaking of Christ as the one through whom and for whom everything that is came into existence; we cannot speak about ourselves as human beings without speaking of Christ as the Image of God, after whom we are modelled and for whom we are made; and we cannot speak about history without bearing testimony to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, as the hinge point of all time.  Everything in our texts, our creeds, our liturgies, and our prayers is marked, inescapably, with this absolutely massive claim about Christ. The transfiguration reminds us not to whittle our language down: precisely in the very human life of Jesus is breaking through to us a unique light and truth that we can only name as the presence of God, in the unique person of God’s beloved Son.
            I was fascinated by the debate that has arisen recently about the prayer used at the start of each day in the NZ Parliament, which the Speaker altered, before much consultation, to remove reference to the Queen and to omit the clause, ‘through Jesus Christ our Lord’.  The Queen: well, we won’t go into that here! That’s another whole topic! ‘Through Jesus Christ our Lord’: that raises interesting questions about what you do when many members of Parliament do not believe that Jesus is any kind of Lord, and certainly not theirs, and when, according to at least some surveys, the majority of New Zealanders no longer self-identify as Christians.  Far be it from me (as an Englishman) to comment on what New Zealand MPs should do with their prayer, but the larger question concerns us all: what does it mean to be a Christian when an increasing percentage of our contemporaries do not share our beliefs?  That may feel like a new question, but of course it is hardly new in the history of Christianity.  For its first three centuries Christians were a very small percentage of their communities, and being a minority is the context in which very many Christians find themselves around the world today.  What do we do in that situation?  The answer is not to lapse into a postmodern, ‘well, what I believe is true is true for me, but of course if you believe something else, that can be true for you, too’.  The Christian stance is to affirm, with all due gentleness, that Jesus Christ is Lord, whether people recognise that or not: Lord of all the reality that they and we inhabit, whether they see him there or not; Lord of all history, ours and theirs, whether they acknowledge him there or not.  Some MPs might not be able to say with any honesty ‘Jesus Christ our Lord’, but he is their Lord – in the sense that he is Lord of all – whether they know it or not.  Our task is not of course to force people to believe this or say it – as if we had to capacity to do that anyway; our task is to bear humble, but consistent testimony, to those of other faiths and none, that the reality we are all trying to grasp, and the truth we are all attempting to understand, is definitively, uniquely, and unsurpassably revealed in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.  The voice on the Mount of Transfiguration says, ‘listen to him’.   
            Jesus Christ is Lord: but how and where?  The story of the Transfiguration comes, as I have said, at a pivotal moment in the gospel of Mark.  We might expect that after this revelation of Jesus’ true identity to the innermost circle of disciples, the rest of the story would be the progressive revelation of Jesus’ glory and power to wider and wider circles of people until all Jerusalem, and all the world, bowled over by his glory, came to honour him as Son of God.  What we get, instead, is a story of increasing rejection and suffering, a road that leads from this mountain top to mockery, betrayal, arrest, false accusations, brutal flogging, and an infinitely cruel, lingering and shameful death by crucifixion. What an extraordinary story!  The Jesus revealed on the mount of Transfiguration in his true glory, with shining clothes, will be crucified on Golgotha, stripped naked and shrouded in darkness.  The Jesus revealed here as Son of God, creator of life, will die, giving his life as a ransom for all.  The Jesus to whom Moses and Elijah point as the climax of history will be tried, mocked and executed by the Roman authorities as a failed political insurgent.  So is what is said on the mountain only true for a while, or only partly true?  Not at all.  The voice from heaven says, ‘This is my beloved Son’.  The centurion who watches him die blurts out the very same truth: ‘Truly, this man was the Son of God’ (15.39).  So is this the story of the Son of God who was finally crushed and defeated on the cross?  No – and this is where the story of the gospel blows our minds – the Son of God reveals himself to the world as the Son of God precisely on the cross, in giving himself for others, in the self-emptying love which is the very nature of God.  If Jesus were no more than a Galilean guru, his death would be a sad end to a good life.  But if he is who we discover he is on the Mount of Transfiguration, he is the Son of God, taking on our sin, our degradation, and our weakness, God in love drinking our cup to the very depths – and in the process changing the very condition of the cosmos. 
            Because what is seen on the Mount of Transfiguration is not a temporary or a limited truth.  When the one who is there acclaimed as God’s beloved Son then cries out from the cross in that piercing cry, ‘My God, my God, have you forsaken me?’, we might be tempted to think that the Transfiguration vision was a dream, a piece of wishful thinking in which everyone was deluded.  But, whisper it quietly, say it with a trembling voice: there is a rumour at the end of Mark’s story, a claim that seems unbelievable, but suddenly makes sense: that God is not defeated by death, that the darkness that envelops Jesus and us at Golgotha is not the end of the story, that the light and the love of God is finally, inexplicably, but truly stronger than death.  Mark’s Gospel, in its original form, does not show us much of the resurrection of Jesus, but what it says points back to our transfiguration story.  It is as if we are given here, at the transfiguration, a glimpse of a reality that is true right through the story and will finally win out both in and beyond the degradation of death.  The Jesus we see here as the glorious Son is both present everywhere to the very depths of our human suffering, and finally triumphant beyond death, shimmering with the very life of God.
 I turn 60 this year, and I take that as a happy but also a sobering moment, as I know that whether I live now for many years or for few, there will be increasing moments in the years ahead of sorrow, of pain, frustration, limitation, and perhaps the steady loss of all I prize most about myself (just to look at the bright side of things!).  What we learn from the gospel is that God accompanies us, in Jesus, to all those dark places, right down to their very depth; that there is nowhere so desperate that God cannot be there.  But what we also learn, from the transfiguration and the resurrection, is that the Jesus who accompanies us in and through our suffering is the Lord of light and life, who has grasped hold of us and will never let us go.  So let this strange and wonderful story be our anchor: the Jesus whom we glimpse here transformed, metamorphosed into his true identity as beloved Son, the expression of God’s unquenchable love, is the Jesus who, as Paul says, will one day transform our weak and failing bodies to be like his glorious body according to the power by which all things are subject to him (Philippians 3.21).  In other words, strange to say, what we see here of Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration gives us just a glimpse of what God has in mind one day for us as well.    Thanks be to God.


John Barclay

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