Luke 9:28-36
Our Old Testament, New Testament and gospel readings for today all have something to do with our faces. Moses and Jesus on the mountain of Transfiguration.
And, according to Paul, all believers who, when with unveiled faces we see the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into that same, yet ever intensifying glory. For this comes from the Holy Spirit.
As I say quite often, I have the great privilege of seeing your faces when we worship together and as I have also mentioned, they are different at the end of the service than the beginning.
They are softer, more peaceful, and yes, more radiant. This is not my imagination. So if this is evident after a worship service; imagine what they would look like after a direct, one-on-one meeting this God.
I will get back to ‘faces’ later, but let’s look in detail at this event we call the Transfiguration.
Firstly, the biblical context. In all three accounts of the Transfiguration, Matthew, Mark and Luke, the transfiguration appears in the context of Jesus’ identity.
In today’s gospel from Luke, it occurs in the passage just after Peter has confessed that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah. The issue of identity is settled once and for all by God the Father who says, “This is my Son.”
Luke’s version has a different emphasis than Matthew and Mark. In Luke, revelation from God nearly always comes from prayer. Only a paragraph earlier, it was after Jesus and the disciples were praying that Peter confessed Christ as Lord.
The transfiguration itself happens during prayer; “As he was praying, the appearance of his face was changed, and his clothes became as bright as a flash of lightening” (v.29).
The form of his face was different, his identity has not changed, but this true and eternal identity is momentarily now in full visual display. Jesus was letting the disciples know this is what he really looks like.
So the lens through which we look at this amazing event is prayer and holiness, which here is manifested in the Glory of God himself in the person of Jesus.
So, Jesus was transfigured in front of them. He was changed, bathed in such a bright light that everything else would have seemed like darkness. When Luke records this story, the word he uses for ‘dazzling white’ is the Greek word that is used to describe flashes of lightning.
It must have been overwhelming to the three fisherman who had just come up a mountain to pray with Jesus, something they had done many times before.
And then, in v.30, “Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to him”. Here we have Jesus presented to the disciples in the line and heritage of all that had preceded him in the Old Testament.
Moses represents the Law of Israel and Elijah represents the Prophets of Israel – and here they are now, talking with Jesus. The one who fulfills all of the law and the prophets.
Peter makes a crazy suggestion to build three booths for Jesus, Moses and Elijah. Even the gospel says, “he didn’t know what he was saying.”
We can learn much from Peter, (we always do). Peter, James and John were having an incredible heavenly experience, something they had never anticipated possible. It was an experience of God that they felt may never happen again. And so Peter wants to bottle it – he wants to preserve it forever.
This is a temptation that we all face, I think. Many of us, probably, have had experiences of God, where we have felt uplifted and deeply blessed; moments of real transcendence where we have felt closer to God than ever before.
And in those moments of transcendent worship, we have wanted to bottle the experience.
But Peter, James, John, and all of us, from time to time receive from the Holy Spirit a profound and deep experiences of the risen Christ purely in order to go back down the mountain.
Not to persuade us to stay there. We will spend eternity in what this mountain-top experience is the merest foretaste. But for now the disciples and we are blessed with an experience of the glory of God to equip us for what the Lord would have us do back down on the plain.
It is on the plain, in the ordinariness of our lives, that all our work for the Lord is done. Jesus gives the sermon on the mount in Matthew, but in Luke it is the sermon on the plain. Our last couple of week’s gospel readings in fact from Luke 6.
The reality of Christian discipleship is that we are called not to bottle the incredible moments of deep intimacy with God. Instead, we are to find God and reflect his glory in the ordinary and in the everyday moments of life.
We can’t live in a permanent moment of a transfiguration experience. Instead we are to find God in the washing up and the commute to work along Drayton Rd at 8am in the morning, in the run of the mill routine of life, with all its joys and sorrow, excitement and ennui.
That is where we are to find God and do find God.
So what happens when Jesus and the disciples, pledged to silence until after the resurrection, descend the mountain? Well, in the very next verse after today’s reading, God put them to work in the healing of a boy suffering (what we may call) a series of very severe epileptic attacks.
The text says that the remaining disciples, those who hadn’t ascended the mountain with Jesus, could not heal the boy.
This is truly the stuff of everyday life: crowds of people, noise, sick children, demands on our time. That is the stuff of everyday life, isn’t it? We might wish that we could stay on the mountaintop and enjoy the incredible spectacle of a transfigured God speaking with the heroes of history.
But the reality is, we have ordinary responsibilities, ordinary tasks to complete – and we need to live in the ordinariness of life. Yet in this very ordinariness of life we, like the suffering boy and his loving dad, get to see the very work of God.
That is the message of this passage. The disciples were confused, the child’s father was anxious for his sick son, the crowd were anxious to see the boy healed, the disciples were feeling powerless to help and overwhelmed by the situation. But Jesus comes down from the mountain and meets them in their everyday need.
That was the example of Jesus here – and, of course, that is the example of Jesus on the cross; that God promises to meet us in this person of Jesus in the anxieties and difficulties of your everyday life.
The miracle of the Gospel is that the Word became flesh and has dwelt among us. God came into the everyday through the stable in Bethlehem and redeemed the everyday on a cross in Jerusalem and filled our everydayness with the glory of heaven through the Ascension.
So back to faces. It is mainly our faces I think, that show our emotions, thoughts and state of mind. Our personal histories are written in every line on our faces, and it is beautiful.
Paul tells us that we don’t need to veil our faces because the experience of the risen Lord in our faces is part of our witness. We are channels of God’s peace, love, and mercy, all of which will be evident in our transformed lives and our transfigured faces.
Paul tells us that we are ever being transformed into the same image as Jesus; from one degree of glory to another, by the power of the Holy Spirit.
So how do these things come to pass? Just as in today’s reading; through prayer and holiness. Ps. 24 begins, “Who may ascend the hill of the Lord? Those with clean hands and pure hearts.”
Set apart by God for the glory of God. Set apart to descend the mountain, knowing the power and glory of God are ever present in the every-dayness of our lives.
This theme of great hope through prayer and holiness will be our theme this Lent as we turn our faces toward Jerusalem and the cross of Jesus our Lord.