Transfiguration Sunday

EXODUS 34:29-48: Before Jesus was transfigured, Moses was. Moses went up into the mountain to converse with God. When he came down from the mountain and met his brother Aaron and the other Israelites, "the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God" (34:29).

Moses' shining face perplexed his fellow Israelites. They were afraid to come near him. Moses appeared to be living in another sphere, the sphere of God himself. This new reality was so dazzling that Moses had to acknowledge it with a veil. When he spoke with his fellows, he put a veil on his face so that they would not be bedazzled by his shining countenance. When Moses spoke with God, he took off the veil so that he and God could speak face to face.

The context of this awesome light has to be recognized in order to grasp something of its force. Moses went up into the mountain to speak with God in order that he might receive again the commandments of the Almighty. He had brought these down the mountain side once before. When Moses returned to his fellow Israelites he found that they had already deserted the covenant God had made with them and were worshiping a golden calf of their own making. In anger and disgust, Moses had dashed the tablets of stone to the ground, and they had shattered. The covenant between God and the people lay broken in those shattered stones. Moses returned to the mountain and confronted the anger of God. God's anger was so great that God was about to destroy the people. Moses prayed for the people, that God would not destroy them. "Destroy me," he told God, "but remain faithful to the covenant that you have made with them." In the face of Moses' prayer and his willingness to sacrifice himself for the people, God relented of his anger. God made a second set of the tablets and instructed Moses to take them to the people. This Moses did. In doing so, his face shone with the glory of God.

For these few moments and in this one lifetime, the holiness of God shone through into human life. As we shall see in a moment in talking of the 99^th Psalm, God's glory takes two shapes. Glory is seen in the blinding light that portrays the transcendence of God. Glory is also seen in God's justice and mercy, God's demand for utter justice on our part and God's willingness to forgive when we fail to act justly.

But we cannot trivialize God's willingness to forgive. A friend said to me once, "I like sinning, and God likes forgiving sins. What could be neater than that?" I hope my friend was joking when he said that. Forgiveness requires suffering and anguish on the part of the one who forgives and on the part of the one who is forgiven. In order to forgive the sins of Israel, Moses in his whole person had to face the anger of God - imagine it! - and offer himself as a personal sacrifice for the sins of the many. Jesus of Nazareth had to do the same. For the sins of all, he had to offer himself on a cross, where the suffering of God and the suffering of the Son of God coalesced into an offer to forgive the sins of any. Reflecting on this, the Gospel of John said, "The glory of God is the cross of Jesus Christ." At the cross of the suffering Christ, God's demand for righteousness from his people and God's willingness to forgive the unrighteousness of his people merged into a single shining moment, and the dazzling light that arises from the cross transfigures all our days.

PSALM 99: This is a psalm that is filled with tension and ambiguity. There is the tension between the covenant of Sinai and the covenant of Jerusalem. There is the tension between justice and equity. There is the tension between God's forgiveness and God's punishment. Behind all is the tension between holiness as God's distance from us and God's presence with us. We shall begin with the last tension and move back to consider the others in order.

Holiness has two meanings. On the one hand, as J. Clinton McCann says in The New Interpreter's Bible (4:1075), "holiness designates the awesome presence of God that evoked fear and required human beings to keep their distance or to approach God only after making special preparations or taking special precautions." Verses 1 through 3 reflect this understanding. The presence of God causes people to "tremble" and the earth to "quake." By the time we come to verses 4 through 8, holiness is defined in other terms. Rather than keeping humans at a distance, God relates to them, doing justice and righteousness (v. 4), answering cries (vv. 6, 8), and both forgiving us and holding us accountable (v. 8). God is holy: God's majesty is seen in God's transcendence, and it evokes from us awe and fear. God is holy: God's majesty is found in justice and righteousness, and to respond to God's justice, we need to act accordingly.

There is the tension between the covenant of Sinai and the covenant of Jerusalem. The psalm refers to God being in Jerusalem and God being in the pillar of cloud in the wilderness. At Sinai, God made covenant with the people. God said that they were God's people insofar as they lived by the stipulations set forth in the commandments. If as a people they abandoned these stipulations, God had every right to discard them and choose others as God's special people. On the other hand, the covenant formulated in Jerusalem insisted that the house of David would remain on the throne of God forever and that God would never abandon them, though from time to time he might chastize them as a parent chastises an errant child. In the psalm, Moses, Aaron, and Samuel represent the covenant in the wilderness. The cherubim, representing the temple and its worship, and Zion, representing the king and his rule, represent the covenant of Jerusalem.

There is the tensions between justice and equity. The Lord loves justice, and he requires justice from the people. The Lord also acts with equity. Tempering justice with equity is the most difficult task that confronts anyone who is concerned with justice.

There is the tension between God's forgiveness and God's punishment. When we sin against God, which will be God's response to us, forgiveness or punishment? The holiness of God demands that God punish sin. The holiness of God also demands that God forgive the sinner. How do we react to this in our lives and in the lives of nations?

The psalm does not resolve these tensions for us. It simply holds them before us. The people of God can never live by only one pole of each of these ambiguities. God requires that we hold them together in our own lives. God is king; let the people tremble. God is king; let the people extol the Lord. For holy is God's name.

SECOND CORINTHIANS 3:12-4:2: Picture Paul seated at his desk somewhere, perhaps in the city of Ephesus, pen in hand and about to write an apostolic letter to the Christian congregations of Corinth. He knows that the Christian community in Corinth is badly divided over many issues.

Some of the Christians are followers of James, the brother of the Lord, who hold to the Hebrew Bible as the most important writings that they have; the law and the glory of God that shines through that Hebrew Bible is fulfilled in Christ.

Some are followers of Apollos, Hellenists who have discarded much of the ritual of the Temple in Jerusalem as not only irrelevant to faith but as actually standing in the way of faith and who are enemies of the Jewish Christians who, they believe, incited the riots that resulted in the death of their leader Stephen and their own exile from Jerusalem.

Some are followers of Peter who holds a gospel not dissimilar to Paul's, but who had one advantage over Paul. He actually saw the Lord, followed him around Galilee and then on to Jerusalem, and personally witnessed not only Jesus' crucifixion but also his resurrection. Surely his credentials as a disciple of Jesus Christ are much better than Paul's.

Paul envisions his own congregations in Corinth. Many of them are relatively high-born Gentiles, free thinkers in the tradition of Greek philosophers, and they want to rid themselves of all the restrictions that Judaism, they believe, has attached to Christian faith.

Behind these Christian parties rises up the specter of the Jewish community in Corinth that is always trying to deny the claims of Jesus Christ. James, Peter, Apollos, his own followers, his Jewish opponents appear before him as Paul tries to answer the charges of his critics in this important letter that he will send to them from Ephesus to Corinth.

The first charge Paul recalls is this: The followers of Judaism are saying, "You put a veil over the Hebrew Bible, Paul, yet it contains the covenant between God and us, and it shows us the splendor that shone from the face of Moses when he brought the covenant to us." Paul replies: "Moses put a veil over his face so that the Israelites might not see the end of the fading splendor (of their covenant). But their minds were hardened; for to this day, when they read the old covenant, that same veil remains unlifted" (3:13-14). In other words, the veil was not to hide the face of Moses. It was to hide the fading splendor of Judaism, which is dimmed by the presence of Jesus Christ. But in their hardened minds the followers of Judaism continue to read the covenant in the same old way and miss the point of its fulfillment in Christ. The veil over the covenant remains to this day.

Paul looks at what he has written and decides to strengthen his argument. "Yes, to this day whenever Moses('s books are) read a veil lies over their minds" (3:15). He provides the remedy from his own faith. "Only through Christ is it taken away. When a man turns to the Lord the veil is removed" (3:15-16). Read the Hebrew Bible in the Spirit of Christ, and the veil that lies over it is removed.

The followers of James nod in agreement as Paul says this.

Members of his own following step up with their own objection. "But, Paul," replies the free-thinking members of his own congregation, "Must we tie ourselves to this book, must we follow it word for word? Where is our freedom? Isn't your gospel still veiled?" To them Paul answers, "The Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. Even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled only to those who are perishing." "But, Paul," his people reply, "Even if we agree with you, you have to agree with us that your gospel is not making much headway in Corinthian society. Only the weak, the foolish, and the powerless in our city are responding to it." Paul's answer is snappish: "It is not the gospel of Jesus Christ that is fallacious and powerless. "In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the likeness of God" (4:4).

Peter's followers, perhaps joined by others, have another charge to lay against him. "Aren't you practicing cunning in the way you interpret the Scriptures and in the way you preach? We've heard your sermons, we've seen what you do. Isn't this disgraceful and underhanded?" Paul writes his answer: "We (This is the editorial "we." Paul is really making his own defense.), I, have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways; we, I, refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God's word, but by the open statement of the truth we, I, would commend ourselves to every one's conscience in the sight of God. Having this ministry by the mercy of God, we, I, do not lose heart" (4:2,1).

Having answered his critics to his own satisfaction, Paul goes on to speak of his message and what it means to those who hear it. "What we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake. And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit (4:5 and 3:18) "Changed into his likeness" is the exact word used in the gospels for the transfiguration of Jesus. Like Jesus, Paul insists, we all, every one of us who is open to the Spirit of Christ, are being changed from one degree of God's glory to another. For the Spirit of the Lord within us is effecting this transcendent change.

At the end Paul plays his trump card, he makes his grand summation: "For it is the God who said, "Let light shine out of darkness," who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ" (4:6). Moses met God face to face, and Moses' face shined. Jesus Christ meets us in his spirit, and the light of the glory of God in the face of Christ illumines our faces and shines through our lives. Speaking from his own experience with Christ Paul declares, Having such a hope makes us very bold (3:12) to carry out our ministries in the spirit of Christ.

I think some process such as this worked through the heart and mind of the Apostle Paul in the writing of this passage.

LUKE 9:28-36: If we had read only Luke's story of this event, we would not call it a "transfiguration." The word is not used by Luke. Luke simply said, "The appearance of Jesus' face was changed, and his clothes became dazzling white." The operative word in Luke is not so much "transfiguration," as it is "glory." At this moment Jesus shares the "glory" that God had bestowed upon Moses and Elijah in earlier times. In fact, the "glory" of God that comes upon Jesus Christ exceeds that which God had conferred on these men.

This is the story as Luke told it. After about eight days, Jesus took with him Peter and John and James, and Jesus went up the mountain to pray. As he was praying, the appearance of his face was altered. Two men talked with him, Moses and Elijah. Appearing in glory, they spoke of his 'exodus' which he was about to fulfill in Jerusalem. Peter and those with him saw Jesus' glory and that of the two men with him. And when Moses and Elijah parted from him, Jesus was found alone."

We have to go deep into the life of the people of Israel to see the context for this Luke's story. Twelve centuries before, Moses had taken one man, Joshua, and gone up into a mountain. That mountain had been covered by a cloud, the same cloud that had led God's people out from their slavery in Egypt and brought them into the wilderness of Sinai. On that mountain Moses had met God. Now Jesus takes Peter and James and John, as close to him as Joshua was to Moses, up into the mountain to meet God.

"Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to Jesus." Moses and Elijah -- the two greatest persons of Old Testament times -- were present and speaking with Jesus.

Moses -- it was he whom God chose to lead the Hebrew people from slavery into the land of promise. Born to a Hebrew woman, he was about to be killed as other male Hebrew boys were being killed by the ruling powers (and as Jesus was in jeopardy of being killed by Herod in Bethlehem). But his mother placed the infant Moses into a basket of reeds and floated it onto an eddy of the Nile River. There the child was found by the daughter of Pharaoh and raised in the great house where Pharaoh lived. As a young man, Moses was exiled into the mountainous wilderness to the east of Egypt, where one day God met him and called him to free his people. Confrontations with Pharaoh followed: plagues; the fearsome night of death in Egypt when the Hebrews slipped away from their captors; running to escape them and coming to the sea, which blocked their path, only to have a way through the waters opened to them; the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night; then into the wilderness where few people lived, there to be met by God and to be declared God's own people. "I am the Lord, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before me."

That was Moses. We may not know Elijah quite so well. He lived about three centuries after Moses, and it fell to Elijah to restore the people of Israel to the covenant God had made with them three hundred years before. Elijah's name indicated his loyalty. It could be translated "My God is Yahweh." "El" means God, "i" means my and "jah" means Yahweh, the Old Testament name for God. Or it could mean, "Yahweh is my God." Either way, it meant that this was a man who gave absolute loyalty to the God who had met Moses on the mountain and who had brought the people into their land of promise -- absolute loyalty to this God.

It was this absolute loyalty that brought Elijah into the troubles he had. First he met the priests of Baal, and what a contest he had with them. The priests built an altar, and Elijah built an altar, and the first God who destroyed the altar with fire would be declared God. The priests of Baal, the name given to Canaanite gods, howled and screamed and danced and cut themselves with knives, but no fire from baal in heaven came. So Elijah put water on his altar to make it less flammable and called on Yahweh to come in fire and destroy it, and Yahweh sent the fire that consumed the altar. Then Elijah had a confrontation with King Ahab. A drought hit the land for three, four, five years, and it stayed until Ahab gave his loyalty again to Yahweh, the God of Israel. Then Elijah prayed for rain, prostrated himself in his prayers, and soon a little cloud, smaller than a man's hand, appeared on the horizon, and it grew and grew until rain pelted down and refreshed all the earth -- Yahweh, God not only of the nation but of nature itself. There is more to Elijah's story, but this is enough. Elijah was the prototype prophet, whose God was Yahweh, and Elijah gave absolute loyalty to his God. These were the two seen talking with Jesus on that mountain, these greatest of all Israelites before Jesus.

"They appeared in glory, and they were speaking to Jesus about his exodus." (That is the Greek word behind the translation "departure.") "Glory" speaks of the presence of God with God's people. What are the antecedent to this idea? It could be that Jesus is being compared to the greatest rulers of his day; Jesus' garments were as white as those worn by great rulers on festive occasions of state. Even more, Jesus' garments were like the garments of angels, those beings that were exalted above the earth into a heavenly place. Even more, this glory was like the shining face of Moses when God had spoken to Moses face to face. Even more, it was like the sun shining over the Mount of Olives into the entrance of the Temple of Jerusalem and gleaming off the golden walls inside the sanctuary of the Temple. It did this just once a year, when the spring sun peeped for the first time over the crest of the mountain on the first day of spring, and for the first and only time in the year the glorious light occurred. It was so important to the Jewish people that they called it, "The Lord suddenly appearing in his temple." Rulers -- angels - Moses - the sun shining into the temple: these are the images that come to mind when we read of Jesus' appearance changing and his garments becoming dazzling bright.

This new experience, however, is greater than all its predecessors. For the light in Jesus does not come from the outside and reflect upon his figure, face, and garments. It comes from inside Jesus himself, as the glory within him shines forth upon Peter and James and John and into all the world.

"They spoke to Jesus of his exodus, which he was about to accomplish in Jerusalem." Jesus' whole ministry had been an "exodus." He was leading the people forward from the bondage into which they had fallen. They had fallen under political bondage. The Roman Empire ruled them, as represented by the Herods and by the procurator Pontius Pilate. They were under religious bondage to the priests of Jerusalem, the scribes and the Pharisees. They were under bondage to illness, epilepsy, blindness, lameness, and a thousand other diseases. They were in bondage to sin and the alienations that came with it. They were in bondage to the "strong one, Satan." But Jesus had led them forth from their bondage. Under him the dominance of all these dark powers was being broken. Now he was to go to Jerusalem, to his cross and his resurrection and his ascension. When that was accomplished, the "powers of this world" would be decisively defeated. This new exodus was like the exodus from Egypt which God had accomplished under Moses. In the first exodus God had liberated his people from slavery in Egypt. In this new exodus God was to liberate his people from the devastation of political and religious oppression, from the ravages of disease, from the power of sin and death.

Attention in the story then turns to the three disciples. At first, we are told, they were weighted down with sleep, just as they would later be in the Garden of Gethsemane, where they slept while Jesus prayed. Grabbing hold of themselves, they shook themselves out of their stupor. Fully awake now, they see the glory of Jesus and the two men who are speaking with him. They do not know what to make of it. Peter realizes that they are caught in a moment so awesome that to this point they have not seen its like. He says, "Let us make three booths." Booths pointed to the Feast of Tabernacles, centered around the booths built by the people of God, as they were trudging through the wilderness on the way to the Land of Promise. These booths celebrated that first exodus from Egypt. "Let us join again in that celebration," Peter was saying to them. "God is about to bring a new exodus for his people."

Almost before he had said this, "a cloud came and overshadowed them." The cloud was like the cloud of Sinai, the cloud that shadows the face of God, yet reminds us that God is present, here leading, here guiding, here providing what we need, the cloud of Sinai overshadowing all once more. A voice came out of the cloud and addressed the disciples. The voice identified Jesus for them. "This is my son, my chosen one." In the prophecy of Isaiah of Babylon (42:1), God had said, "Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations." Jesus is God's servant, God's chosen, the one in whom God's soul delights. The voice also gives Jesus his God-given task: to bring forth justice to the nations." Then God says to the disciples, "Listen to him." This command means more than the words themselves can bear. Throughout Deuteronomy, Jesus' favorite Biblical book, Moses speaking for God says, "Hear, O Israel, hear the statutes and ordinances I speak in your hearing this day, Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might." At this point, God says, "Hear Jesus, listen to him." Hear him, as you would hear the voice of God, listen to him, obey him, follow him. The voice of Jesus becomes the voice of God.

"And when the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone." Moses had come, the one who first forged the agreement between God and God's people, the agreement we call a covenant. Now Moses is gone and a greater than Moses is here. Elijah had returned, the one who was desperately loyal to the God of Moses' covenant, but now Elijah is gone. A greater than Elijah is here. The greatest persons of Israel's past had come, and they had conversed with Jesus. Now they have departed from sight, and Jesus stands alone. In this moment of his glory, the covenant of Moses and the loyalty of Elijah are fulfilled. No one stands between us and God but Jesus Christ alone.

This moment on the mount is fulfilled in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The glistening body of Jesus on the mount was the very body that Peter and James and John and the others would see when Jesus had been crucified and then raised from the dead. Because they had seen him in his glowing brightness, they were able to recognize him in his resurrection. Resurrection is different from anything else we can imagine. Resurrection is not resuscitation, a body that was dead given life once more, as in the stories we have heard so many times of return to life after apparent death. Resurrection is not re-incarnation, the person taking one body and then another body and then another body, until the person has been sufficiently purified to live with God. Resurrection is not immortality, even, the soul leaving the lifeless body behind to live with the immortal ones. Resurrection has to do with a body that has died and a soul that has died, the whole person dead, placed into its grave, decayed, no longer useful. But then, as God once created us a whole person through the life of our mothers and fathers, through the life of Jesus Christ God re-creates us into whole persons who can live forever with God, our souls and bodies reborn, transformed, as was the soul and body of Jesus Christ, a resurrected person.

The moment on the mount points backward to Jesus' baptism, when the same voice from heaven called him, "My son, my beloved." It points forward to his cross, his death, his resurrection, his ascension, his continued presence with us. The Apostle Paul stated it powerfully in Corinthians 15: "Some one will ask, 'How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?' You foolish man! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. . . . What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. . . . I tell you this, brethren: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, but the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. Then shall come to pass the saying that is written: "Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting?" But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." Jesus' resurrected body was a glorious body, a powerful body, an imperishable body, a spiritual body, and on the mountain Peter and John and James had seen Jesus' changed body displayed before them. This moment prepared his disciples for his resurrection. Those who saw Jesus when his appearance changed and his garments glistened could receive him when they saw him in the time of his resurrection.