I’ve been trying to take Mark’s account—what Peter told Mark—in order this year.  Today, with our forty-day walk to Easter about to begin, I’m jumping ahead.  Today is Transfiguration Sunday.  I suppose we don’t absolutely have to dedicate a worship service each year to this event; it’s good that we do.  The Transfiguration has a lot to tell us about what is going to be happening, what must happen, just as it was telling those three stunned, stammering apostles.

I want to do some quick review with you, though, before we walk up that mountain to stand there with Peter, John, and James.  Just a few days before, Peter had made his confession, his profession of faith that Jesus, truly, was “the Messiah” (8:29), “the Son of the living God” (Mt 16:16).  I like to think the other eleven thought so, too, already, only none of them felt quite ready to say so, because Jesus as yet hadn’t quite measured up to—I might almost say hadn’t lived up to—their expectations for the Messiah.  Jesus was the unexpected expected Messiah, and that continued to be a problem for the apostles, right up to and even after Easter morning.

We’ve got to remember that Jesus rewards Peter’s most faithful, hopeful declaration by telling these closest followers, quite clearly, that Jesus would be betrayed, abused, condemned, and executed, but rise on the third day.  None of them knew what to make of that last part—some sort of code or metaphor?  They all knew what Jesus meant by everything up to that point, and they couldn’t have felt worse than if Jesus himself had punched each of them deep and hard in the gut.  In that moment of supreme disappointment, Peter sensed his occasion to rise and lead, so he scolded Jesus for being so discouraging: what sort of way is that for the Messiah to talk?!  Come on!  Be uplifting!  Be positive!  Optimism!  The power of positive thinking!

We remember how Jesus responded.  The way of discipleship was not argument, not scolding, not challenging God’s plan or criticizing God’s way—though all that does happen.  Discipleship was in accepting the discipline of God in Christ Jesus.  We continually need to be reminding ourselves that a disciple is a student, a learner, and discipline is instruction.  So, those twelve men, who had just begun to let themselves feel that God was going to bring the promised kingdom now, in their lifetime, just beginning to believe that God was going to set all things right in their day, after all—now, those twelve walked about with heads hanging low, wondering what it was all about, why their hopes had been dashed so decisively by their own leader, wondering what was the use.  What’s the use of following Jesus?  What’s the use of all this talk of love and faith and devotion?  All it’s going to get us is disappointment, defeat, and disaster.  Yay, team.

But Jesus is full of surprises, and has much yet to show us all.

“After six days Jesus took Peter, James and John with him and led them up a high mountain, where they were all alone.  There he was transfigured before them” (9:2).  I suppose most of us have heard this passage often enough, and maybe seen enough Jesus movies to have an idea of what “transfigured” is supposed to mean, but let’s also try to remember that we really don’t know what it means, because we weren’t there, and Peter, trying to describe all this for Mark years later, was still trying to understand just what the three of them had witnessed, that glorious day.  A German biblical scholar from long ago paraphrased the Greek verb this way: Jesus “assumed another form.”[1]

Vague enough, perhaps, but consider what Mark tells us of the different form Jesus assumed: “His clothes became dazzling white, whiter than anyone in the world could bleach them” (9:3).  Matthew and Luke also write of the face of Jesus shining “like the sun” (Mt 17:2, Lk 9:29).  Light as from another world, another existence, another life.  John also remembered it well, and wrote about it again and again as he attempted to relate to us the nature and meaning of Christ.  Light from light.  True God from true God.

It was not remarkably difficult for the disciples, and many others, to understand that Jesus was a truly remarkable, maybe even unique man.  They knew the color of Jesus’ eyes.  They knew the aroma of his clothes.  They saw the dust on his feet and the callouses on his hands.  They saw the condition of his teeth.  They knew where he came from and knew his family, even if his family there in Nazareth no longer wanted to know him.

What was remarkably difficult, even for those twelve, and what remains remarkably difficult for us and for every man, woman, and child who does not yet believe but who by grace may yet come to belief—what remains remarkably difficult is to understand that Jesus is also the eternal, infinite, holy Son of the eternal, infinite, holy Father, and that Father, and Son, and Spirit, are God, not all added together God—like each just one-third or so of God, but each truly, completely, fully God.  To walk with Jesus was to walk with God.  To see Jesus was to see God.  To know Jesus was to know God.  And if Jesus is truly God, and not just the most remarkable man who ever lived or only about one-third or so of God, then Jesus is invincible, because God is invincible.  Jesus is life itself, because God is, among other things, life itself.

There on the mountain, having assumed another form, Jesus was present to his disciples in his unshrouded divinity, the King of kings in his royal vesture, the crown of light upon him.  Oh, the cross was still there.  The cross was on the way.  The journey had always been a journey to Golgotha.  Jesus had told them, and would tell them again.  And they would see—oh, they would see!  And Jesus was showing them something else, something more, before all that.  The desperate man would soon cry out to Jesus: “I believe! Help me in my unbelief!!” (Mk 9:24).  Jesus helps us in our unbelief.  Let us cry out to him.

“And there appeared before them Elijah and Moses, who were talking with Jesus” (9:4).  I know how Elijah was there, could be there: he was taken up, alive, in a flaming chariot into heaven.  Elisha witnessed it.  Of Moses, we are told for a fact that he died in the wilderness, outside the Promised Land, and “to this day no one knows where his grave is” (Dt 34:6).  So the one who was dead is “mysteriously raised.”[2]  Resurrection.  There are many who are willing to concede that Jesus gives us truly compelling ethical teaching, among the best history has handed down, but don’t talk to them about resurrection.  Death is death, after all.  Death is it.  Death is all.  Death is king.  And Jesus tells those who would listen: they are all alive to God (Lk 20:38).

There on the mountain, just before he assumed another form, Jesus had been praying.  Oh, how often he prayed!  I wish I could pray like Jesus—yet I can: Jesus has taught us all how to pray.  Most commentators seem to be agreed that Jesus was almost certainly praying about all he is about to go through: from here on it just gets more difficult, sadder, more painful.  Want to come?  As we remind ourselves of the full and complete divinity of Jesus, let’s not lose touch with his full humanity.  What’s the greatest physical pain you’ve ever endured?  What’s the greatest betrayal you’ve ever had to experience?  The most heart-breaking abandonment?—if anyone has ever abandoned you.

If I told you for a fact that your remaining time on earth would be one extended drama of conflict and suffering, would you be eager to begin?  The prospect doesn’t exactly fill us with hope, joy, comfort, and peace.  Then again, if we didn’t know about pain, conflict, sorrow, and suffering, we wouldn’t so earnestly be seeking, searching for hope, joy, comfort, and peace.

We know suffering will happen in this life, in this world.  You don’t need any religious faith to know that.  What you need Jesus Christ to know is that the suffering—terrible as it is!—is temporary.  After, brilliance of eternal victory.  Christ came to be uplifting.  This is how he does it.  Delve that mystery, and you’ll be swimming in the heart of God.

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.

[1] Johann Albrecht Bengel (1687-1752), cited in W. Graham Scroggie.  Gospel of Mark.  Study Hour.  Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1976.  156.

[2] Scroggie 155.