This Week at the Center for Excellence in Preaching

This is a very strange passage.  True, the main contours of this incident are glorious and intriguing but an honest reading of this text cannot fail to note how it is shot-through with oddments, with curiously confusing little asides.

First, of the three Synoptic accounts of The Transfiguration, this is the only one where we are made privy to what Jesus was talking about to Moses and Elijah.  We are told directly that this was about Jesus upcoming “departure” and the things he was going to fulfill in Jerusalem.   We’re not sure how Luke got this information but it is our only biblical clue as to what the conversation was about (and just possibly why this incident happened at all, but more on that below).

Second, we are told that the appearance of Jesus was as bright as “lightning.”   Now lightning is pretty bright.  A bolt of lightning is one of the most powerful forces on planet earth, discharging 1,000,000,000,000,000 watts of electricity (that’s 1 trillion if you don’t want to count up all the zeroes) at a temperature of 20,000 degrees centigrade (which is considerably hotter than even the surface of the sun).   Anybody who manages to radiate the energy and light of a lightning bolt is mighty powerful and mighty bright.  Yet we are told that for a time during this epiphany of glory, the disciples were sleepy!  It took a bit, apparently, before they even fully woke up (and then saw something so odd they must have wondered if they were not, in fact, still asleep and seeing a dream).  But how could anyone be drowsy, even briefly, when such a spectacle was right in front of them?

Third, how could these disciples walk away from this event and yet, as verse 36 informs us, tell no one what they saw and experienced?   That seems all the more strange when you consider what constitutes God’s final word on the incident: “Listen to him.”  When God himself tells you that you have to listen to someone in that he is God’s own Son, you’d think the disciples who heard those words would immediately start telling also other people—starting with the remaining disciples—to do just that: to listen to Jesus.  But they remain silent.  And in this case there’s no textual evidence in Luke 9 that it was Jesus himself who sealed their lips.

So often we read incidents like this one in the Bible and we rarify them, put them up on a pedestal, and assume that if such a thing were to happen today and to us, it would change the world and shake up everything.   Yet in the Bible events like these sometimes play out rather differently than we think.  In this case this stunning revelation of glory took place well out of the public eye and then, even for those human eyes that did take it in, there was a mixture of confusion, sleepiness, and then reticence to speak of it in the future.

It is not what you would expect.  The Transfiguration counts as probably the single most dazzling in-breaking of divine glory that took place in the course of Jesus’ public ministry.   Yet it takes place behind the scenes, quietly.  In some ways, of course, the Transfiguration in all its shining splendor is what a lot of people thought the coming of the Messiah should have looked like all along.  Certainly Peter was keen on trying to capture and bottle the moment.  But, of course, the actual incarnation of God’s Son was all along not what you would expect.   So in a way the Transfiguration was a nod in the direction of acknowledging that yes—and as Paul would later write—in Jesus all the fullness of God dwelled.  The power and the glory really were there.   But the other stuff surrounding this epiphany of glory—the out-of-the-way locale, the confusion and odd sleepiness of the disciples, their silence about it after the fact—all serve to remind us that in God’s mysterious plan, the glory of it all would remain incognito, hidden.  It’s the gospel way, even when it comes to the Transfiguration.

In a way, the Transfiguration is sometimes seen as the exception to the gospel rule.  That is to say, we think that this was the one time when God and Jesus let it rip, revealed the truth of what was trembling beneath Jesus’ garments all along.  But seen from the right angle, even this glorious incidence of lightning-hot luminosity fits quite well within the larger narrative of the gospels: to believe in Jesus and to get caught up in the grace of his salvation, you need faith—a faith that does not go on what the eyes can see but on what the Spirit reveals to one’s heart.

In the Year C Lectionary, this comes just before the beginning of the Season of Lent.  Lent is itself a time to see all that Jesus suffered but then to move past what our eyes can show us on to what our hearts can absorb by faith.  Blessed are those who can see through to the real truth of things with the eyes of the heart.

In the Bible, when a story takes us up to a mountaintop, it’s a fair bet that something dramatic is going to happen—indeed, it’s a fair bet that something deeply revelatory is going to happen. Luke 9 is no exception.  But the drama up there on that mountain seems to have been only partly intended to make an impression on the disciples.   The rest of the event seems to have taken place for Jesus’ edification.

Consider the wider context of Luke here. As Jesus prepares to make his final trek toward Jerusalem (see Luke 9:51), he is talking increasingly about suffering, betrayal, and death. It’s weighing heavily on his mind. But the disciples seem lost in a fog of cluelessness. They are not really tracking all of what Jesus is saying, and so when Jesus speaks openly about his impending death, the disciples sometimes say nothing at all (note what happens after Luke 9:27: we fast-forward 8 whole days with no reported reactions whatsoever of the disciples to what Jesus had said). Or they find Jesus’ rhetoric merely baffling and bewildering (see what happens in Luke 9:45 after another direct prediction of betrayal). Or they respond to Jesus’ talk about sacrifice and humility by incarnating its opposite in a wrangling over and jockeying for power and privilege in Jesus’ coming kingdom (see Luke 9:46-50).

In other words, long about the time Jesus could use all the support he could get, the disciples are simply unavailable to him in any meaningful way. They cannot encourage Jesus to stick with what they don’t understand (and would resist if they did understand it). Indeed, by their very demeanor and words, they are actually tugging Jesus another direction! Every time they respond to Jesus’ predictions about suffering with indifference or with actions that tug another direction, Jesus must surely have heard the tempter’s voice whispering into his ear, “See, even your friends don’t buy it! Go another way! Seize the day! Go on and at least try to establish an earthly kingdom. For THAT your friends will follow you to the bitter end!”

With no human or earthly voices available to encourage Jesus, his Father steps in to provide new voices in the conversation. Commentators have long pointed out that Moses represented the Sinai Covenant/Law (as well as the Exodus) and that Elijah represented the prophetic voice of the Old Testament as well as God’s covenant faithfulness in sending servants to continue speaking to and ministering to even a wayward Israel.

Having both of them appear on the Mount of Transfiguration seems to be a neat way of coalescing the whole Old Testament into Jesus’ ministry. Probably there is something to all that, but it does not appear that Moses and Elijah spent their time with Jesus reflecting on the ins and outs of the Law and Prophets. Instead we are told only that they “discussed his departure.” That’s why they were there. These recognized giants of the faith come to point Jesus in the direction he needs to go and to encourage him that down that path lies the salvation of the world.  If they were not there to encourage Jesus in the direction he had to go, I cannot think of what else they would have had to say about that departure.

But on a different note: it’s always been a mystery to me how the disciples recognized Moses and Elijah. It goes without saying they had no way to recognize them physically. It’s not like Moses had gotten his face onto the $1 bill or that Elijah had had his visage plastered all over the place in Israel the way we Americans do with Abraham Lincoln’s face. We are so familiar with Lincoln that we recognize even his silhouetted profile in an instant. But the disciples could have had no such visual associations with either Moses or Elijah. (In more cheeky moments I’ve wondered about these two men sporting “Hello! My Name Is _____” stick-on name badges. This, however, also seems unlikely.)

The fact is that the Transfiguration was a spiritual epiphany, a moment that was as much about what was communicated by God spiritually and mentally as what was taken in through the disciples’ eyeballs. It’s less what they saw and more what they heard that counted. That’s why God’s tag-line announcement, “Listen to him!” is likewise a key to this entire incident. This event was principally for Jesus’ sake, as was noted above. But it happened in no small measure because the disciples would not, could not, and flat out were not listening to Jesus. Jesus spoke of death and suffering, they pondered visions of pomp and circumstance in some political kingdom to come. Jesus spoke of betrayal and sacrifice, and the disciples mentally measured up drapes for the cabinet room where they would serve as Jesus’ powerful advisors in the new order.

It’s a curious question, as we prepare soon to enter the Lenten Season again, whether the Church even today is willing really to listen to Jesus or whether we, too, get so often distracted by a welter of other dreams and visions as to who the Church is, could be, should be, or one day may become. In a day when some powerful evangelical leaders and pastors on the national stage can (and do) threaten politicians along the lines of “If you don’t come through for us, we’ll move our voting bloc elsewhere so behave or else!”—in a day like this, it’s well to ponder anew how well we are able to LISTEN to our Lord.

Do we LISTEN? Or are we, like Peter, more interested in bottling the razzle and dazzle of it all because we think it’s a better way to go?

Luke says that this epiphany on the mountaintop took place “eight days” after Peter’s famous confession of Jesus as the Christ. The other gospels suggest that this took place six days later. Either expression, as Stephen Farris points out in “The Lectionary Commentary,” could be the loose equivalent of saying “about a week later.” Yet, as Farris also suggests, in Luke’s context “the eighth day” could be a prefigurement of the resurrection as well. Luke is mindful of that eighth day significance, after all (he is the only evangelist to give us the Emmaus Road story, replete with Jesus’ being made known to the disciples “in the breaking of the bread”). So it is possible that this little detail on the timing of the Transfiguration could be a hint pointing toward Easter and the glory that awaited Jesus also then.

Frederick Buechner once mused that maybe the oddness of the Transfiguration is not so odd after all. It is interesting to note that although Luke tells us that Jesus’ garments shone as bright as a flash of lightning, we are not told that Jesus’ face shone, only that it “changed.” In the Greek this is literally that the EIDOS of his face changed, the image, the appearance, of his face was altered. How so? We’re not told, but it seems that maybe the true image of God, the image of the Son, the spittin’ image of the Son who was his Father all over again—maybe this is what shone through in a way the disciples managed to miss seeing most days. But then we all often miss seeing this in each other as often as not. Scripture assures us that we were all created in the image of God, but as we hustle past people in the malls, as we jostle next to them on the train, as we get annoyed with them when they crowd us in our airplane seat, we miss it. But as Buechner says, there are moments of transfiguration in all our lives. No, not exactly on a par with what happened to Jesus but still . . . Or as Buechner put it, “Even with us something like this happens once in a while. The face of the man walking with his child in the park, of a woman baking bread, of sometimes even the most unlikely person listen to a concert or standing barefoot in the sand watching the waves roll in, or just have a beer at a Saturday baseball game in July. Every once and so often, something so touching, so incandescent, so alive transfigures the human face that it’s almost beyond bearing.” (From “Beyond Words” by Frederick Buechner, Harper San Francisco 2004).

To understand the end of Exodus 34, you need to catch up on two things: the immediate context of this chapter in Exodus and also what happened in the first 9 verses of this 34^th chapter, the final effect of which you can read in the Lectionary selection of verses 29-35.

First of all, then, let's recall that the setting for Exodus 34 is the immediate aftermath of one of Israel's most glaring failures: worshiping the Golden Calf.   There are multiple layers of both absurdity and tragedy in that incident. Granted, Moses had been up on Mount Sinai for nearly six weeks. But for goodness sake, the smoke of God's presence and the flashes of divine lightning were still visible when the people told Aaron, "Moses must not be coming back so let's make a new god!"

Aaron complied with sickening swiftness. But the problem with a god you make with your own hands is that it will not challenge you. Have you ever noticed that? When people worship something other than the God of the Bible, this God is always so tolerant. When we make our own gods, they tend to turn out to be very friendly to how we think already anyway.

So not long after Aaron sculpted a golden calf, we are told that a kind of drunken orgy broke out. And that's another funny thing about false gods: the first commandment of most false gods seems to be, "Thou shalt party!" And party is just what the people did until the sound of their whooping and drunken laughter wafted clear up to Moses' ears and Yahweh's ears. Yahweh got so mad at what he termed "this stiff-necked people" that he threatened to wipe out every last one of them and just start over with Moses. Moses convinced God not to do that but he then got so mad he took the tablets containing the Ten Commandments and smashed them into a thousand pieces. It was all very ugly and angry.

But now in Exodus 34 the smoke has cleared, the dust has settled, and so Yahweh and Moses start all over with, literally, a clean slate. New tablets are chiseled, and God gives his law all over again. But not before the incredible lines we read in verses 6-7. God passes in front of Moses and says his holier than holy name, not once but twice, adding emphasis and letting us know that whatever God says next, it is going to be a decisive revelation of who God fundamentally is. "Yahweh, Yahweh, the compassionate One, the gracious One, the abundantly forgiving One, the One brimming with lovingkindness."

That last word, translated as "abounding love" is my all-time favorite Hebrew word chesed, which is the Old Testament equivalent of "grace" in the New Testament. It is also the central trait that the Israelites celebrated in God over and over and over. And in Exodus 34, because the name of Yahweh is thundered twice in a row, we see here the definitive declaration of God's most basic nature. Despite all the bluster and divine fury and punishment that had just happened in the wake of Israel's wanton idolatry, even still the very first thing God wants to make clear to Moses is that despite what had just happened, it is grace that will always set the tone of the divine heart.

But what makes that grace, that lovingkindness of God, truly luminous is precisely the fact that grace is not the same thing as moral laxity or softness. God does not and cannot merely shrug off the sin that marred his creation. If redemption and forgiveness come, then they come the hard way via a God who has done the cosmically difficult thing of looking everything that wounds him square in the face and still finding the ability to blot it out.

If God says he forgives you, it is never because to God it was no big deal anyway. No, grace is strong precisely because it co-exists with justice. Grace is lyrically beautiful exactly insofar as grace comes into play in just those places where something so serious has happened that a holy God recoils in horror. But if, despite your sin, you see on God's face a look of love and not horror, it's because God has done something miraculous: he has forgiven that which is at complete odds with his nature as a perfect divine Being.

That's what Moses saw. That's why in verse 9 he dares to speak the exact same phrase that two chapters earlier Yahweh had uttered: "a stiff-necked people." In chapter 32, Yahweh used that line as the reason why he was going to kill of the whole lot of Israel. But now in Exodus 34 Moses is able to call the people stiff-necked but he doesn't worry it will inflame Yahweh all over again. He's seen the lovingkindness of God up close and personal now and so he knows the truth of what we saw Paul write last Sunday morning in Romans 5: where sin abounds, grace hyper-abounds all the more!

It is finally no wonder that when Moses came down from the mountain this second time, his own face was glowing. It was the reflection of grace that the people saw. It actually frightened them at first. Grace can be a bit scary. We don't always realize that, but before grace is so beautiful as to make you weep, grace confronts you with your need for some serious forgiveness. Grace is fierce and it is strong and it penetrates right to the heart of each one of us. So if you end up finding that you want that grace, it is only because you know that right behind the grace is a galactic justice that would wipe you out were it not for the compassion of God that always rises to the top of the divine heart. If you receive God's forgiveness as it finally comes through Jesus, you are not only eternally grateful and joyful, you are mighty relieved, too. Because when you look into God's eyes, you see flickers of both his grand mercy but also of his uncompromising justice.

For obvious reasons, this Old Testament lection is paired on Transfiguration Sunday (Year C) with the Luke 9 account of Jesus’ transfiguration and the appearance of Moses and Elijah with him in that glory-filled spectacle on a mountaintop.   But there are other similarities between this portion of Exodus and that incident in Luke 9.  One thing that is common to both—but perhaps not as obvious to see—is the fact that in the midst of all the glory and holiness and glowing faces there is a serious engagement with sin and evil going on.   Moses and Elijah did not show up in Luke 9 to shoot the breeze with Jesus or have a casual chat about the weather.  No, Luke tells us (and Luke is along among the gospel writers to tell us this) that they were there very specifically to talk to Jesus about his impending death and all that this sacrifice would bring to final fulfillment.   In other words, in the middle of the glory there was darkness.  In the middle of all that seemed so highly unusual and other-worldly there was an engagement with something that is actually altogether too common and utterly mundane: human sin and our need for a Deliverer. 

Later in the Bible—in a highly curious passage in II Corinthians 3—the Apostle Paul will revisit this Exodus 34 incident and the radiance of Moses’ face, his need to cover it with a veil for the sake of the people, etc.  In essence Paul will claim that the radiance is the awful beauty of holiness in whose light the terrible truth of our sinfulness gets revealed.  But we don’t want to acknowledge that and so a veil separates us from the truth.   But in Christ that veil is removed.  We are able to see the glory of holiness and the way that bright light reveals our every wart and wrinkle and sin but we can do so with hope in our hearts knowing that in Christ and because of his sacrifice, we are forgiven even so.

In the Year C Lectionary, this passage serves as a pivot point as we get ready to turn back toward the Season of Lent.  As such, this passage—and its Luke 9 counterpart—do indeed focus us on the sin that will be the subject matter for Lent and for all that drove God’s only Son to a cross at the Place of the Skull.    We should not get distracted by the light and the glory of it all as though those spectacles exist for their own sake.  No, those are in service of the larger goal of getting us saved.  And salvation begins with a frank acknowledgment that we need saving precisely because of what the light of divine holiness reveals about each one of us.

In her book Speaking of Sin, Barbara Brown Taylor has a chapter that bears the rather startling title, "Sin Is Our Only Hope." It seems an oddly perverse title and yet Brown Taylor makes a good point. After all, if we look around us in life, we see so much that is painful. We see children abused and spouses cheated on. We see corporate greed and wanton pollution of God's beautiful earth. We see people who have fried their brains with cocaine and drunk drivers who run down children playing hopscotch on a sidewalk. We see suicide bombings that reduce precious human bodies, the very temple of God's Spirit, to so many severed limbs and organs.

If there is no such thing as sin--and what's more, if there is no God who can declare a definitive judgment on what is sinful--then there is no hope that anything can be salvaged. Sin is our only hope because if sin exists, then so does sin's opposite: namely, a moral goodness to which God can restore us. But if there is no sin, then there is nothing to hope for because there never was any better world from which we fell away in the first place. If there was once what John Milton called a "paradise lost," then there is the possibility that a gracious God can make possible a "paradise regained." But if there is no sin, there is no paradise to restore because life turns out to be just a booming, buzzing confusion with no right, no wrong, and no God to tell the difference.