With Faces Shining Like the Sun
Scriptures: Matthew 17: 1-8; 2 Peter 1: 16-19
Transfiguration Sunday marks the transition from Epiphany to the season of Lent in the
Christian calendar. This week we will observe Ash Wednesday, the first day in the season of
Lent, a time when we prepare for Easter by observing a period of fasting, repentance, and
moderation.
I invite each of us to choose a personal spiritual discipline this year. It can be anything such as
refraining from certain foods, limiting my exposure to mass media, or taking walks in the
woods. A creative resource is the Lenten Creation Care Calendar with suggested activities that I
posted on the bulletin board by the entry. Traditionally, people have removed fat and sugar
from their kitchen cupboards. That’s why Fat Tuesday (where we eat ourselves sick on donuts)
has always preceded Ash Wednesday.
Ash Wednesday emphasizes two themes: our sinfulness before God and our human mortality. I
can find that depressing and don’t always want to go there. Still, there’s a powerful overarching
text, “Jesus has triumphed over sin and death through his life, death, and resurrection.” The
use of ashes as a sign of mortality and repentance has a long history in Jewish and Christian
worship. Remember the story about the king of Nineveh tearing off his robe and sitting in
sackcloth and ashes in response to Jonah’s prophesy of destruction. During our Ash Wednesday
service, I will place ashes on our foreheads while saying, “Remember, you are dust, and to dust
you shall return, Repent and believe the gospel.”
But today we’re with Peter, James, and John on the holy mountain when Jesus is transfigured
before them and his face begins to shine like the sun. He’s standing there chatting with Moses
and Elijah when a voice from heaven proclaims, “This is my Son whom I dearly love. I am very
pleased with him. Listen to him!” This same voice from heaven had proclaimed almost identical
words at Jesus’ baptism.
Many think this is a vision of Jesus’ divinity but it’s about his humanity. The imagery is
borrowed from a description of God’s resurrected people in the book of Daniel, “Those who are
wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky” (12: 3a).
Jesus repeats this imagery in his explanation of the parable of the weed seed sown among the
good seed. The weeds will be destroyed at the time of harvest. Then he shifts the metaphor.
(My college composition teacher would have drawn a big red circle on my paper and scribbled
in the margin, “mixed metaphor.”) Jesus apparently didn’t care about such stuff. Instead of
saying that the good seed will be carried into the granary, his says, “Then the righteous will
shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father” (Mat. 13: 43).
Jesus’ transfiguration on the mountain foreshadows our own transfiguration as God’s children.
Like Peter, I want to stay on this mountain. Right before this Jesus had told them of his
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impending death in Jerusalem and Peter had rebuked him only to be severely rebuked in turn.
Jesus even calls Peter’s notion satanic. It’s satanic because Peter thought the Messiah would
violently drive the hated and oppressive Roman occupying army out of Palestine. We cannot
drive out violence with more violence. Thinking we can do that is satanic. We just become
violent ourselves and violence has won.
Years later, Peter recalled being an eyewitness to Jesus’ transfiguration and hearing that voice
from heaven on the holy mountain (2 Peter: 1: 16-19). We want to stay on that mountain
because life can be hard. My last two sermons were about hard stuff. Two weeks ago, I talked
about ugly racial divisions in the church and about white, male privilege, the elephant in the
room we don’t want to talk about. Last week I talked about Jesus’ teaching on loving our
enemies and how American Christians have instead so thoroughly swallowed the nationalist
ideology of fighting our enemies to protect our freedom. I can identify with Elizabeth Palmer
when she writes:
You know that Transfiguration sermon that exhorts us to appreciate the transience of
mountaintop beauty only for a moment before we descend into the world's brokenness,
joining Jesus in the way of suffering? I used to like hearing that sermon. . . This year it's
the last thing I want to hear. I don't need anyone to tell me to descend the mountain. I
slid down months ago, and I haven't been able to find my way back up.
After the election, as hate crimes and hateful rhetoric increased, I became increasingly
aware of the human tendency toward violence. I spent New Year's Eve dreading 2017. If I
can't live in a glorious world where people are motivated by love and shine with grace,
can't I at least spend one Sunday morning marveling at the glorified Jesus before being
told to descend into reality?1
Elizabeth decided to look for moments of transfiguration within everyday life. This reminded
her “of the complexity of friendships, the deep interaction between suffering and hope, and the
surprise of grace.” We can also find such grace and the hand of God within the world of nature.
I love Wendell Berry’s poem “Returning” where he describes walking out of a dark valley
toward the light of the sunrise near his Kentucky home one spring morning:
I was walking in a dark valley
and above me the tops of the hills
had caught the morning light.
I heard the light singing as it went
among the grassblades and the leaves.
I waded upward through the shadow
until my head emerged,
my shoulders were mantled with the light,
and my whole body came up
out of the darkness, and stood
on the new shore of the day.
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Where I had come was home,
for my own house stood white
where the dark river wore the earth.
The sheen of bounty was on the grass,
and the spring of the year had come.2
Elizabeth Palmer notices that Jesus touched his terrified disciples on the mount of
Transfiguration. It reminds me of the child who told his mother he needs some-one with skin on
when she told him to trust in God. She writes:
The Hebrew word for glory (kabod) means "weight" or "heaviness." This speaks to the
gravitas of Moses' experience with God on the mountain (and perhaps also to the gravitas
of the Christian life--that we are called not just to be prosperous and happy, but also to
bear the cross--whatever that means).
Maybe this means that when Jesus touches us, it's a heavy touch that acknowledges the
suffering and sin intrinsic to the human condition--and yet, it is at the same time a healing
touch that lets us know that we are not alone in the human condition. God is also in it
with us, helping us bear the heaviness. I think that's the sermon I need to hear this year.
Not that there are two distinct types of moments in our lives--glory and suffering--and
that we are called to immerse ourselves in the suffering for the sake of building up a later
glory.
Rather, through Christ, we are bound up into relationship with a God who is present with
us in the glory and the suffering--which are always intertwined, this side of [eternity].
There is no "on the mountain" and "off the mountain." There are just the hours and days
and years that we've been given. But they're filled with grace despite all the limitations.3
During this season of Lent, we’ll all be searching for that grace a little more than usual. I don’t
know exactly what that will look like but I’m sure we’ll find it. Perhaps, like Peter, James, and
John, we’ll gradually begin to see our world, our own lives, and how God is with us in all our
limitations, joys, and sorrows in a new light. Listen to the last stanza of Thomas Troeger’s poem
on the Transfiguration.
Lord, transfigure our perception
With the purest light that shines,
And recast our life's intentions
To the shape of Your designs,
Till we seek no other glory
Than what lies past Calvary's hill
And our living and our dying
And our rising by Your will.
Being that kind of people is to go forth with our faces shining like the sun.
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1
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/15a5af7ce56192eb
Wendell Berry, Collected Poems (New York: North Point Press, 1987), 252.
3
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/15a5af7ce56192eb
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