Readings:
Sermon:
The Festival of the Transfiguration is on August 6th this year, but Matthew’s Gospel gives us a preview today. This is a strange story, one of the very strangest in the New Testament, and, a bit like happens at The Ascension, I suspect many of us wonder every year how to decode or to decipher the events going on. Yes, it’s a strange story.
Or, is it? I’m not so sure.
Peter will later write about it in his second letter, but he will refer to it in a matter-of-fact way; 2 Peter 1: 17-18 says this;
… he received honour and glory from God the Father when that voice was conveyed to him by the Majestic Glory, saying, ‘This is my Son, my Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.’ We ourselves heard this voice come from heaven, while we were with him on the holy mountain.’
The Transfiguration just happened, and I know, because I was there, says Peter, with no attempt to explain it. But does it need explaining? There are all sorts of fingerprints from other Jesus stories going on in today’s Gospel; these are, actually, familiar events.
But how so?
Well, let’s work backwards, from the end;
‘Tell no one about the vision until after the Son of Man has been raised from the dead,’ says Jesus.
He never has much luck with this request does he?
People are bursting to go and tell what they have seen, and have no idea of Jesus’s timescale; essentially they won’t believe the Easter story until they have eyewitness testimony, or until they can see for. So, good luck with that one Jesus – telling people to keep it under their hats until he’s ready to have it told hasn’t worked before and it’s not going to work now.
This happens a lot in Mark’s Gospel too, so much so that the ‘shhhhh! don’t tell anyone’ thing that Jesus has going on is known in academic circles as ‘Markan Secrecy.’ But it gets Jesus nowhere; the good news is spread, whatever he says. Is this secrecy then an elaborate double bluff – don’t tell, but DO tell? It might as well be for all the good it does. But this isn’t the first time its happened. It’s not new. We shouldn’t be surprised by it.
Moving further back, we hear ‘from the cloud a voice said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!’ Very similar words to those we hear at Jesus’ baptism in Matthew, Luke, and Mark; so, an event happens and all who witness it also witness an affirmation directly from God. Again, it’s all happened before, so we shouldn’t be surprised by it; it’s just the sort of thing that happens when you accompany a Messiah. Again, it’s not new, no need to decode it; it’s part of the furniture.
And then the really freaky bit; ‘he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly there appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him.’
Peter himself is so taken aback at this that he suggests a little extempore housebuilding, there and then, on the spot; perhaps hospitality is the name of his game. But in Matthew’s mind – and Matthew is thought of as the most Jewish of the Gospels – it again has all happened before; he here presents Jesus as the New Moses, a new mediator of salvation, in harmony with what has happened before, in the Hebrew Scriptures in Exodus 24 and 34. First, Moses on a mountain - and now Jesus on a mountain, both of them connecting God with his people, on Mount Tabor. Jesus, like Moses, is a link between heaven and earth.
Again, it’s nothing new; it’s all happened before.
So, what is now left to decode? All of it has happened before, all is part of Jesus’s story and of his heritage. Jesus just renews it, makes it live again in him, for those that follow him and or those that don’t, both then and now, on Mount Tabor and in our lives, as he does so often. That’s his free gift to us all.
Questions:
- How often do you decide that you don’t understand scriptures and then go looking for proof?
- Does Jesus change as you read and re-read the scriptures? Who’s being transfigured, Him or you?
- Which patterns do you make and return to in your discipleship?