Oh! What A Glorious Sight

 

Prayer:

What an experience! I think back to my first airplane ride when I left my homeland, Ghana. When I was young boy, the airplane ride was just a dream, just the imagination of a youngster who watched the planes fly over his head. And then the mountain-top experience happened, my first plane ride. Wow, let’s stay up here as long as possible.

This is great! But, wait, we need to land, there is not enough fuel to stay up here forever. The disciples headed back down, just like my plane had to land. But I was changed forever, just as the disciples were changed forever. Jesus changed before their very eyes, but I venture to guess that these three disciples were also transfigured and would never again be the same!

Experiencing the glory of God, seeing Christ glorified changes us forever. And yes, we want to stay in God’s glory forever but like a plane ride, we must make a landing. But once we have landed life is never the same. Also once we experience Jesus life is never the same. 

What an experience it must have been for Peter, James, and John when they saw Jesus glowing in his divine glory, talking with Moses and Elijah. The disciples never forgot it. They wrote about it later.

John wrote in His gospel, "We have beheld His glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father." St. Peter wrote: "We were eyewitnesses of His majesty." It was there, on a mountain, in full view of his three closest disciples, that Jesus manifested his glory.

The glory that he is the only begotten Son of the Father - God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God. Jesus promised his disciples that some of them would not taste death until they had seen that the kingdom of God had come with power.

Six days later, Jesus led Peter, James, and John up to a high mountain. On the mountain Jesus was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun. His clothing became blinding, brilliant white, whiter than any bleach on earth could bleach them.

What was happening was that Jesus' divinity, his divine nature, was shining through his humanity. There is no other One quite like Jesus. The disciples saw Jesus' in his glory as God shining through his humanity.

The point is that Jesus always deals with us through his humanity. When we say that Jesus is present among us in the Liturgy - in His Word and in the Sacrament - we mean that He is present as the God-man, both His divine and human natures are present.

He is the God-man in the crib, on the mount of transfiguration, on the cross, at the right hand of the Father, and in the Word and the Sacrament. He touches our humanity and the Father's divinity, and he does it without dividing Himself.

 In Christ, a man shined with the glory of God on the mountain. In Christ, God hung dead on the cross. In Christ, a man reigns at the right hand of the Father. It wasn't simply the death of a good man and a great teacher, it was the death of God Himself, which is a big enough death to include you and me and every last person on earth without exception.

It also means when Jesus deals with us, He deals with us according to our humanity. He deals with us by the Word preached by human mouths into our ears, by the bread and wine put into our mouths, by the water poured on our heads. He deals with us in earthy and ordinary ways.  It is through the human flesh of Jesus that God has chosen to reveal himself to us, and we are to look nowhere else but the human flesh of Jesus.                                                 

In recent years the fascination with near death experiences led to flurry of books on out-of-body experiences, in which people have supposedly left their bodies and had some kind of encounter with God, usually in the form of a warm light.

Perhaps the most popular book of this kind is "Embraced by the Light" written by a Mormon lady who supposedly talked with Jesus. The book really ought to be entitled "Deceived by the Light," because that "light" she speaks about is anything but the crucified, risen, and reigning Jesus Christ who is taught in the Scriptures.

I am exactly not sure as to what the basis is for these kinds of out-of-body experiences. But I do personally believe such experiences do happen. A word of caution,  in some cases these experiences might be the deceptions of the devil, who, as the Scriptures remind us, masquerades as an angel of light to deceive the elect.

Remember that not every light at the end of a dark tunnel is good news. It could be an oncoming train. Not every warm, embracing light is from God. Satan is a deceiver and the father of lies. He appears as an angel of light instead of the demon of darkness that he is, in order to deceive and draw people away from the true Light, who is Jesus Christ.

The true Light that shines into the darkness of this world, that shines into the darkness of our death, that shines into the darkness of everything that we fear, is Jesus - the Jesus who was laid in a manger, who was carried in Simeon's arms in the temple, who was changed in appearance before His three disciples, who hung on the cross, who died and was buried, who was raised from the dead and now lives and reigns.

It's all one and the same Jesus, whether He is gloriously gleaming like the sun. That's the only Jesus we can count on, and we need look for no other one. If a shining Jesus weren't enough, Moses and Elijah appeared together with Jesus. Moses and Elijah are the key representatives of the Old Testament. Moses was the great covenant leader of Israel, and the one through whom the Torah, came.

Elijah was Israel's foremost prophet and miracle worker. Moses and Elijah were "types" or prophetic pictures of Christ. Together they are the Law and the Prophets. Their lives prophetically pointed to Christ's coming. And now they appear together with Jesus on His mountain. The mountain was a little bit of heaven come down to earth.

Notice that everyone seems to know who they are, without any formal introductions or name tags or anything like that. The disciples had never seen Moses or Elijah, and yet Peter knew exactly who they were.

We get a brief glimpse of heaven as a place where everybody knows your name, and you don't need name tags or introductions. Which is something I especially am looking forward to since I have the worst time remembering names, though I am good with faces.

Another point worth noticing that is: Peter wanted to preserve the vision in some concrete way -  by building three tents to enshrine Jesus, Moses, and Elijah. We recognize this business of booth building as the attempt to bring God under our control. We do our share of booth building too, whenever we try to put Jesus in a box, locate him where we would like him to be instead of where he has promised to be for us.

We build our booths to privatize Jesus, to make personal faith into private faith. Just me and Jesus on a mountain. It's good Lord that we're here. The hell with everyone else. We build booths in our heads or in our hearts to enshrine our religious experiences and ecstasies instead of seeking Jesus in the preached Word and the Eucharist, and in Baptism in the gathered Church where Jesus has promised to be.

We are so much more impressed by a vision or a miracle than we are by the humble hearing of sins forgiven and the miracles of Baptism and the Lord's Supper.
Can you imagine what would happen if Jesus, Moses, and Elijah were suddenly to appear right here in this Sanctuary?

I bet we would people line up down the street just to get a look. We wouldn't want to leave. No one anyone would ever say church is boring if Moses and Elijah suddenly appeared with Jesus to preach about his death and resurrection?

And yet every Sunday we come into that same glorious presence of Jesus Christ together with all the company of heaven. Every Sunday, and every day we gather to hear God's Word, we are setting foot on a mountain with Jesus, we receive forgiveness, life, and salvation.

Every Sunday Christ comes to preach his Word of forgiveness to us and to feed us with His Body and Blood. Every Sunday something greater than the transfiguration takes place right here in this place. Jesus justifies sinners and calls them saints.

We cannot see it. We can hear and believe God's Word. That's the only difference. The same Jesus is here for us as he was for his disciples on the mountain. The only difference is we can't see Him.
          God comes hidden in humility. So hidden people pass him by without noticing. So hidden we sometimes forget that wherever the Church is gathered in His Name, even if it is only two or three, He is there, present in all his divinity and humanity.

Finally: the voice from the cloud draws our attention to one person. On Jesus Christ. "This is my beloved Son. Hear Him." As great as this vision of Moses, Elijah, and Jesus in his glory was, the center and focus is always Jesus alone.

The voice of the Father declares Him to be His beloved Son, just as He did at Jesus' Baptism. He directs our ears to Jesus' voice. "Hear Him." Hear Him because He alone has the words of eternal life.

Hear him because his words are Spirit and they are life. Hear him because he is God's word of undeserved kindness to us. In the former times God spoke by the prophets, by Moses and Elijah. But now in these last days, He has spoken to us by His Son Jesus Christ.                                                                                         

Where Jesus speaks, Moses and Elijah must be silent. The Father's voice having spoken from the cloud, Mark says, the disciples "no longer saw anyone with them but Jesus only." Only Jesus. That's what the Mount of Transfiguration is all about. That's what the divine service is all about. Only Jesus. Only Jesus is God's salvation to humanity.

Only Jesus shines with glory of God through our human flesh and blood. Only Jesus bore our sin in his own body nailed to the tree. Only Jesus rose bodily from the grave never to die again. Only Jesus sits at the right hand of God to pray for us, to forgive us, to give us life in His Name.

Only Jesus reveals the glory of God to save us and deliver us. St. Paul wrote: "We who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory." As Jesus' Baptism, His Word, and his Body have their way with us, we too are being transfigured, changed from glory to glory to be like him.

At this moment he is hidden under weakness. But on that Great Day when Jesus comes in glory, this time for all the world to see, He will change our bodies to be like his glorious body.

And what a Day of Transfiguration that will be!

Oh! What a glorious sight that will be.

Amen.