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This is an amazing story of a watershed moment in Jesus’
earthly ministry. He’d been trying to help His disciples understand
about the Cross and the concept of a suffering Messiah, but they weren’t
doing too well. Jesus knew it was coming soon and these disciples were going
to need something to hang onto if they were to survive the terrible days ahead.
They needed some perspective. So Jesus took His three closest disciples up
a high mountain for this astounding experience.
All the usual symbols of God’s glory are present in this
story: high mountain, shining garments, revered patriarchs, a cloud, a voice
from heaven. Words fail in the attempt to describe what these disciples saw
that day. In most of Mark’s Gospel Jesus is presented in His full humanity.
He’s moving, acting, teaching, rebuking, healing, eating, drinking,
praying, resting—things to which we can relate. But this is a mysterious
moment. There’s really no explaining it. In this amazing moment of grace,
the heavens were opened and these disciples saw Jesus as they’d never
seen Him before.
Even these otherwise slow-witted disciples got the point. Their
friend Jesus is indeed the holy one of God. Peter’s response to this
holy moment of revelation was to try and nail it down. He wanted to build
tents. He wanted to fix this moment and control it. He didn’t really
know what to do. He was probably talking out of his fear when he said, “Let’s
put up tents.” Mark’s commentary here is great. It’s like
he’s embarrassed by Peter’s suggestion and has to explain, “He
did not know what to say, they were so frightened” (v. 6).
Then God came to them in a beautifully gracious way. A cloud
enveloped them. They knew what that meant: it was the presence of God himself.
And the only instruction given was to stop talking and just listen. Good advice.
Often we approach worship kind of like Peter went to that mountain.
We want to lock it down, analyze it, and understand it, so we can control
it. As Richard Rohr says, “We want to put our religion all up in the
head.” Some of us think of the Christian life as something to be understood
and figured out. And certainly it is intellectual, but that’s not all
it is. There are times when worship should take us beyond our ability to articulate
and understand. We sometimes need to go to the mountaintop and see a new vision
of God in His glory and majesty.
So much of our faith is practiced in dialogue (or sometimes
monologue), in analyzing and thinking. Those are not bad things, of course,
but there also needs to be those spaces in our spiritual life when we are
silenced, humbled, and driven to our knees in the presence of a holy God.
As these disciples needed the special perspective of this mountaintop moment,
so we need the perspective of these awe-struck moments in the presence of
the holy Other.
God’s desire to reveal, to show himself to us, needs to
be met by our willingness to grow quiet, awestruck, and speechless. We need
to listen. The vision of the transfigured Jesus obviously made a huge impression
upon Peter’s mind. In the second letter that bears his name he wrote
to the church years later, “We were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For
he received honor and glory from God the Father when the voice came to him
from the majestic glory, saying, ‘This is my son, whom I love; with
him I am well pleased.’ We ourselves heard this voice that came from
heaven when we were with him on the sacred mountain” (2 Peter 1:16-18).
We are preparing this week to enter into the season of Lent.
This is a time when, for the seven weeks leading up to Easter, we have an
opportunity to go a little speechless in our journey with Jesus.
(For the full manuscript
of this sermon go to www.preachersmagazine.org and click on “Sermons.”)
I began this message by talking about the wonder of high places.
Whether a beautiful mountaintop or the observation deck of the Sears Tower
in Chicago, high places give us a way of seeing the world that is unusual
and important. The Scriptures speak regularly of mountains as places of revelation.
Abraham, Moses, Elijah and many others could speak about the wonder of meeting
God on the mountain.
But the critical feature of this text seems not only to reside
in its obvious intent to reveal Jesus as the divine Son of God but in the
response of these disciples. Even in a holy moment like this our temptation
is to nail it down as Peter tried to do. The call is to stop and listen. That’s
a good idea for this last Sunday prior to the beginning of Lent.
Lent is a time for repentance. Perhaps one of the most important kinds of
repentance for us would be to repent from the noise of sensory overload of
our culture. It’s a time for contemplation, taking stock, and going
deeper. A significant challenge of this sermon may be to call the people to
some special times and some regular times of shutting out the noise. Call
the people to wait in the presence of God.