In July of 2017, I was sitting beside my mother. She was lying in a hospital bed in the middle of the living room in the house I had grown up in, a table full of prescriptions nearby. I would give these to her according to a schedule; I would record what I gave her, how much, at what time, and, following the instructions I had been given, I would note, for the home healthcare nurse, my observations: was my mother calm or agitated, in discomfort or pain, or at ease? Was she drinking anything? Was she awake?

My mother was 71. She should have had ten more years. It was a long process of dying from kidney failure. In June 2015, I went to Portland, Oregon for my parents’ birthdays. I look at the pictures. My mother is as I remember her, just older, thinner, a bit more gray, but the smile is the smile I remember; the eyes are her eyes. Looking at pictures of Christmas 2015, I see a change. She was still smiling, and she must have known, felt, that something had changed.

A year and a half of wrestling with life and death, faith and fear. Some wrestle much longer, I know. What were my mother’s emotions during that time? We spoke by phone weekly until the last months, when she was no longer able to keep up a conversation and slept most of the time. She tried to hold back a lot of sadness—no one wants to be a downer! My mother could be a very expressive woman, yet (maybe it was the German peasant in her) there was much she kept inside, shut away, like so many of us, I suppose.

My mother, like many of us, kept the hard things, the unhappy things, the troubles, mostly to herself. What she did want to say, as often as she could in the time she still had, was how much she loved all of us. She knew we knew. It was her need to say it, to give it, share it in about the only way left to her, because the day was coming, soon, when she wouldn’t be able to say it anymore, when we would be left to say it to her gravestone.

Love. Love that transcends death. We’ve known it, we’ve had it, and in Christ we know it, we have it. A gift! A miracle! A promise! Love and faith are a powerful combination in the fight against fear. Can we ever fully tell another, do we ever really have words adequate to express the dimensions of love? Feelings weren’t made for words, as so many bad songs remind us. Feelings were made for feeling, for drawing us into the circle, for calling and directing us to hope, to joy, to God. When we say Jesus, how much we mean! The word, the name bursts open with feelings. We can never fully say them, yet we are called to speak.

What my dying mother did not want to do over the phone was cry. Tears take a toll, beloved, and not just on the one crying! There aren’t many of us who can be in the company of tears and not feel their tug. The heart has arms, beloved: here they are! But we can’t reach them through the phone. The words of love, the knowledge of love, the memories of love, and the feelings of love—all these must see us through to the end of our own journey.

My parents’ pastor visited. I know his visits were appreciated, even by my very private mother; I imagine he spoke with them about God’s love, the hope we have; the sympathy Jesus has for us, and the glory awaiting us. Such words are familiar. They are good words, yet how difficult to show the fullness of the meaning in these most meaningful words! How to speak the glory awaiting us? Poetry, figures of speech, fail. Faith must speak to faith, hope to hope; love must speak to love; apart from the Spirit, we are deaf; without Christ, we are blind.

We have faith, hope, and love for good reason: God gives us these to fight fear. Maybe we’ve lived too much of our lives afraid: afraid of failure; afraid of rejection; afraid of exposure; afraid of happiness; afraid of God. Fear is strong. Fear intimidates us and makes threats. Fear clobbers us. Faith sustains us. Bravery isn’t the absence of fear. How some will throw themselves into anything to prove they are not afraid: skydiving, bungee-jumping, rock-climbing—why are heights and falling so often involved with fear and with fighting fear?

We speak of the Fall of Adam and Eve. They plummeted from no mountaintop, yet fall they did, down from the glory God had given them, down into the pain and sorrow, down into the regret and bitterness, down into the anger and accusation that they freely willed. And they were afraid. What our first parents had to learn from God was love, true love, love for God: the only real foundation for true love for one another. When they left the garden, all they took with them was the fear they had birthed in their hearts. We have been struggling with fear, ever since. Only God can overcome it.

Each year, just before the forty days leading up to Easter, we have the opportunity to contemplate the Transfiguration. The real glory, the real miracle is Easter, right? Easter overshadows all that we do. Easter is our hope. Easter is our life: God at work beyond our comprehension or expectation, beyond our fear, God’s promise, an old, old promise, His plan from before the beginning. It’s love. It’s faith. It’s hope. Easter staggers and stuns us; it gives us joy—blessings! In the joy of Easter, our joy in God and in the power of God to raise the dead to life, the Transfiguration fades, pales. We don’t talk about the Transfiguration at Easter—why would we? Easter is victory, as we think. There with Peter, and John, and James on that mountain, victory is in the future, not yet. Before that there will come, must come, much darkness and sorrow and failure. Fear clobbers us, but faith sustains us.

When I arrived in Portland that July, sat down beside my mother, lying in that hospital bed in the middle of the living room as she had for most of a year, my sister had a chance to go home, to bathe, eat, sleep, to see her husband and young sons; she was bone tired, poured out. I don’t now remember whether it was soon or late after I sat down there that my mother became aware that I had come. She opened her eyes, saw me, said my name, closed her eyes, and smiled. That was the last word I heard her say before the long, silent hours.

For her, the last year and a half were a time of pain—one of her medications was a strong pain killer that put her to sleep—a time of sorrow, self-pity, confusion, dejection, weakness, and failure. You or I might be able to wrestle with one or two of these, but all of them, ongoingly, for months? Is there anything that could sustain us, in that onslaught? And fear, prowling, probing, marshaling all its forces? I think of the apostles, all of whom betray Jesus in one way or another, all of whom run away, terrified, all of whom abandon Jesus, in the crisis.

When Peter hears the rooster crow the second time, he weeps bitter tears, but that barely expresses it. There is no language to express what he feels because what Peter feels is soul sorrow: sorrow at the root of his being. Peter not only recognized his own complete failure and betrayal of his Lord, his friend. He also remembered, clearly, that Jesus had told him all this would happen. Jesus already knew, had known all along. It was Peter who didn’t know, didn’t want to know, Peter who refused to know because knowing would be admitting he was not the man he wanted to be, not the man he thought he was. Peter never wanted to have to confess that he was the man he feared: ignorant, weak, and desperately in need. I like to think that, in that upheaval and catastrophe in his life, Peter remembered Jesus, transfigured—that strange word the Bible uses to name Jesus whose face had become bright as the sun, whose clothing had become more brilliant than any brilliance of this earth: pure, not reflecting light but alight.

This one has been with them, with us, all along. We didn’t know him before, but we know him now, and though we have not seen him with our eyes, we have seen him with our hearts, with the vision our hearts shape in our mind’s eye: Jesus atop the mountain, a man of flesh and God come among us, alongside us. And why? To be with us, to be our light on all this journey, not just at the end of it, as our loved one reaches up to one we do not see, and then dies.

The Transfiguration is holy hope for us, a sacred reminder long before all the darkness, long before the time of deep fear and deep sorrow. Jesus is with us already: brilliant, dazzling, glorious, God. Don’t just see him as a good man who says good things. See him as God with us, with us always and when we most need Him, when our own time of darkness, sorrow, pain, dejection comes, when fear seeks to overwhelm us. Not fear, but faith—God has come, come for us, for our sake, to claim us, to save us, to keep us for Himself.

The apostles fall on their faces, filled with dread. Fear comes so naturally to us! What does Jesus do? How does Jesus respond to this trembling paralysis? He goes to those he has called, goes to them. He stoops down; he touches them and says, “Get up [. . .] Don’t be afraid.” Rise—an Easter word, a resurrection word, a Word of life, a Word of power for living.

Resurrection hasn’t happened yet; we haven’t yet come to the end. The struggle continues, and fear remains, chipping away at us here and there, clobbering us now and again. God’s glory, power, and love do not come on Easter only. The blessings of His presence are always there: this is what the Transfiguration is saying without words, saying to us in a touch. Already there, always there, with us. We saw him but didn’t see. We heard him but didn’t hear. And he touched us, and we rose. Not fear, but faith. Jesus walks down from the mountain to go to die. None of us can avoid death. Some of you have been much closer to it than you ever imagined you would be, closer, much closer, than you ever wanted. Even in the face of death, even in the presence of death, we can have confidence because we have Christ who keeps us for His Father in heaven. Fear will knock us down, but faith will raise us.

Those July hours, curtains drawn, the fan whirring soft, were my mother’s last hours. Before I arrived, she had stopped eating. Not long after I arrived, she barely drank. I would dip a small, green sponge on a swab in water and put it in her mouth, to moisten her mouth and for her to drink, if she would. She didn’t.  We sat there; death sat there, too. And though we did not see Christ, and though we did not hear him, he was there, too: light from God, love that reaches across the dark chasm, for those here reaching out to him in faith, hope, and love.

I went to bed late; my sister stayed next to our mother. Sometime after midnight my sister called up the stairs to me. We sat on either side of my mother. She brought us into this world; we were the ones to see her out of this world. Oh, the finality of death. Oh, the finality of God’s Word. God made us for life, beloved, and we shall live; we only have to die. Not fear but faith, faith in the one already with us long before the time of darkness.

Over all those months, I had never sensed fear from my mother: sorrow, oh, yes, dejection, self-pity, but not fear. Why not? She was a woman of faith, and she came from a family of faith, for generations back. My mother took her last breaths in the darkness of the first hours of the new day. As we sat there beside her, I had the sense that she was released, she was relieved. The long battle was over; for her, the victory was won. It was won long ago, on a hill far away; and the assurance that this battle would be won for us, was already won, was already given, fully given, there on that mountain of Transfiguration, from the cloud, in the presence of that light of God, the light of the world, that power of God, that power of life: Jesus Christ.

Now to the One who by the power at work within us is able to do far more abundantly than all we can ask or imagine, to God be glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever.