Last Sunday of Epiphany

What’s happening here?  Plenty.  And there’s plenty that’s paradoxical here, the sense that one thing is true and its opposite is also true.  This passage also has plenty of connections to other parts of scripture.  So for today’s sermon, instead of focusing our attention on one particular topic in the scripture, we’re going to explore a variety of topics. 

We begin with Jesus going up on the mountain to pray, as he frequently does in Luke’s gospel.  You may remember from our sermon a couple weeks ago that Jesus went to the mountains to pray before coming down to a level place where he taught people what is often called “the sermon on the plain”.  We see a similar pattern in today’s passage, that Jesus first goes up to the mountain to spend time in prayer with God.  Immediately afterward, he comes down from the mountain to deal with the problems of the world.  This is a reminder to us that Jesus’s life includes both components: attention to God, and attention to people.  Or as Jesus himself puts it: Love God and love your neighbour.  If we do one but neglect the other, we end up warped or off balance.  Both are essential, and they are complementary to each other.

And this time as Jesus is praying, his appearance changes and his clothes become dazzling white.  Glory!  And not only that, Peter and John and James see Moses and Elijah talking with Jesus.  This has plenty of connections with other passages of scripture.  It provides a sense of continuity with God’s work in human lives in the centuries before Jesus.  Moses represents the Law, and Elijah represents the prophets.  Luke has an emphasis on “The Law of Moses and the Prophets.” In Luke 16, the rich man and his brothers should listen to “Moses and the prophets” (16:29, 31). In Luke 24, when Jesus teaches the two on the road to Emmaus, he begins “with Moses and all the prophets” (24:27). Later that day, with the other disciples Jesus teaches them that “everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled” (24:44).  [noted by commentator Brian Stoffregen].  

There are other connections as well.  As we heard in today’s Old Testament reading from Exodus 34, Moses too goes up to the top of a mountain to listen to God, and his face starts shining, which the people can see when he comes down from the mountain. 

The scriptures often describe God’s glory in terms of radiant light.  However, there is a paradox in the scriptures because they also describe God as a cloud, which is in some ways the opposite of a shining light.  We see that in the cloud in today’s passage.  It is not the first time.  In Exodus 24, Moses goes up the mountain and “the cloud covered the mountain…the glory of the Lord settled on Mt. Sinai, and the cloud covered it for six days, and on the seventh day he called to Moses out of the cloud.  Now the appearance of the glory of the Lord was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain in the sight of the people of Israel.  Moses entered the cloud, and went up on the mountain.  Moses was on the mountain for forty days and forty nights.”  Now, if that 40 days and 40 nights reminds you of the 40 days and 40 nights of Lent, you are right on target.  It is one of the reasons we read about the Transfiguration on the last Sunday before the beginning of Lent.  

After Moses gets the stone tablets of the law, they are placed in the ark of the covenant in the Temple, and in 1 Kings 8 we read, “and a cloud filled the house of the Lord, so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud, for the glory of the Lord filled the house of the Lord.  Then Solomon said, ‘The Lord has said that he would dwell in thick darkness’”. [1 Kings 8:10-12a].

In 1 Kings 19, when Elijah is running away at the lowest point in his life, he tells God he wants to die, and falls asleep under a broom tree.  An angel wakes him up, gives him food and water, and tells him to get up and eat and drink, otherwise the journey will be too much for him.   Elijah goes on the strength of that food for 40 days and 40 nights, to Horeb, the mount of God.  While he is on that mountain, he hears God in the sound of sheer silence, and then the voice of God telling him what to do next. 

And what is it Jesus is talking about with Moses and Elijah?  Our translation says it is Jesus’ “departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.”  “Departure” means Jesus’ death specifically, and probably more broadly his death, resurrection, and ascension into heaven.  But the word in the original Greek is Jesus’ “exodus”.  It reminds Luke’s audience of God leading the children of Israel in their exodus out of slavery to freedom.  As we’ve been talking about God’s presence appearing as both light and cloud, we remember that God led them by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. What Jesus is doing is the fulfillment of that, leading us in our exodus so that we are no longer slaves to sin, but are set free in Christ’s forgiveness, and led to a promised land that is heavenly and eternal.  

Moses and Elijah both had lives with plenty of suffering. It is worth noting, even here at the transfiguration, that none of this comes easy.  Even with all the glory here, Jesus is taking on suffering; Jesus is taking on sacrifice.  

Peter, John, and James see Moses and Elijah talking to Jesus.  Peter says to Jesus, “’Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah’”—not knowing what he said.”  There’s some wise advice that says, “When you don’t know what you’re talking about, stop talking.” Peter has never been good at following that advice, and is always blurting out whatever pops into his head.  We wonder what he was thinking: was it an effort to prolong the mountaintop experience indefinitely?  A desire to make himself useful or to look important?  Has he forgotten that heavenly beings don’t need physical shelters, and if they did they could make their own?  Is he thinking of the tradition of making booths on the holiday celebrating the Exodus and trying to impose that on this divine revelation? Whatever it is, while he is babbling away, God jumps in to interrupt him by sending a cloud that comes and overshadows them, and they are terrified as they entered the cloud.  

In the structure of this passage, the cloud is the center of the passage, and it’s what fascinates me most.  We don’t know how long the silence lasts as the cloud overshadows them and they are terrified.   We know it gets Peter to shut up, which is probably a good thing.  I was curious about the cloud overshadowing them, and I was especially curious whether the word “overshadowed” that Luke uses here is the same word Luke uses when he describes the angel telling the Virgin Mary how her pregnancy will happen: “the Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God.”  I looked up the Greek and it is exactly the same word.  

There is a sense that something mysterious and miraculous is happening here that we don’t fully understand, and are not really capable of fitting into our little human brains.  The people who think they’ve got God all figured out often have a tendency toward smugness or arrogance, and they’re the people Jesus gets most exasperated with in his life, and the ones who Jesus is most likely to skewer in his parables.  In contrast, the people who have the humility to know that they don’t have God all figured out, but they want God, whether hesitantly or desperately, whether feeling ashamed of themselves or trustingly, those are the people Jesus most often embraces in his life, and the people Jesus lifts up most often in his parables.  

I am grateful that we have light as an image of God: bright, clarifying.  I am grateful that we also have a cloud as an image of God: holy, mysterious.  We need both images of the paradox: that God is revealed to us and grants clarity and guidance, and that God is also beyond what fits in our little human brains.  We are sometimes left awestruck by what is too magnificent for our comprehension.  We are sometimes simply confused.  But I think there’s something valuable in the old saying that if God were small enough to be understood he would not be big enough to be worshiped.  The God that is at work here in the transfiguration is big enough to be worshiped.  

And this God has a message for us.  “Then from the cloud came a voice that said, “’This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!’”  God does not leave us alone in our confusion about who God is.  God gives us his Son, his Chosen, to take what is holy and glorious and mysterious and bring it down to earth in the middle of all the human suffering and all the societal suffering.  God gives us his Son to listen to as he teaches us to love God and love our neighbours, to receive God’s mercy for the things we are ashamed of, and to extend mercy to our fellow sinners, to welcome the stranger and include the outcast, to give generously and to rejoice thankfully.  God gives us his Son who loves us so much that instead of avoiding human suffering, he is willing to suffer with us and for us, to sacrifice himself for the forgiveness of our sins, and to offer us freedom.  

What’s happening here?  We don’t know completely.  We understand some of it, hopefully enough to be aware that there’s a lot more we don’t understand.  We pull together the recurring themes of scriptures from different times and places, different ways God is made known to us.  We see that even in suffering, God is present and active.  We see both the glory and the mystery.  And we listen to God’s Son, the Chosen.  We listen with openness to learn.  We listen with openness to receive God’s love for us, and God’s love for our neighbours, even the neighbours we find it hard to love.  We listen in all the ways we want God, in this mortal life with all its pain, and in the life to come with Moses, Elijah, Jesus, and all the heavenly host in glory.