Citywide Baptist Church

A revelation of Jesus’ authority; this is my beloved Son… and relationship to the Father…

The great task in life, wrote the English Times newspaper in 15 April 1983, is to find reality and for our purpose this morning, it is to see reality.

It has been said that the Transfiguration story is a composite of the whole Gospel tradition. In it we hear echoes of the baptism of Jesus, of Jesus' predictions of his death, of Jesus' fulfilment of the Law and Prophets, of the resurrection of Jesus, and of his ascension and his future coming. The voice itself from the cloud serves to underscore the importance of what was happening throughout the ministry of Jesus. We also have Moses and Elijah and it is wise to seek for the meaning of the event than to guess the manner of it.With the disciples there on the mountain, the eternal dimension, that is “reality”, broke through and they saw who Jesus really was; they saw his glory.

The Transfiguration follows the confession of Peter at Caesarea Philippi where Peter came out with the declaration that Jesus was the very Messiah of God, the fulfilment of all Old Testament prophecy, the heir of the Old Testament promise, and the realisation of the Old Testament hope. There Jesus was dealing with one question, “Does anyone recognise me for whom I am?” Peter’s triumphant answer, "Thou are the Christ, the Son of the living God!" is what Jesus wanted to hear. But there were strings attached: the Son of Man must first suffer and die; his disciples must be ready to share in His divinely appointed destiny, and his suffering and their persecution must be seen against a background of ultimate and eternal glory. The Transfiguration was the heavenly ratification of his new teaching as given at Caesarea Philippi, the seal of God’s approval on Jesus’ interpretation of his Messianic calling.

There on the Transfiguration Mountain they saw a change coming over Jesus. He broke through the limitations of his humanity. The veil which lay over him was taken away and he was revealed as the heavenly Son of Man. His future dignity was for a moment revealed. Jesus temporarily exchanges the normal human form that he bore for that glorious form he was believed to possess after his exaltation to heaven. The "form of God" shone through the "form of the servant", "the appearance of his face became another" as it did shine like the sun. His clothes became "while as light" and they saw two men, Moses and Elijah. What was just a figure of speech In Psalm 2: "You are my son, today I have begotten you’" became a literal historical reality in Jesus! It is the dramatic portrayal of his mysterious uniqueness, a confirmation of his divinity. The line in this Psalm is quoted more times than any other Psalm in the New Testament. In fact it is used seven times in the New Testament and three of them are in these Gospel accounts of the transfiguration.

What we see in this incident is that somehow this Jesus is more than a man that what he does for us is what only God can do. We do not know how to put it into words, for there is no category of men into which He fits. While there is something about him which makes us want to say, "My Lord and my God;" there is more than that and so it is with us today. This specialness of Jesus is something that comes to us as we worship God in His name and so see that the words of Jesus, "I and the Father are one", are true.

I have already mentioned Caesarea Philippi where they heard of the public rejection and the crucifixion and that would have truly been a crushing disappointment. They must have been hurt and bewildered by the insistence of Jesus that He must go to Jerusalem to be humiliated, to be treated like a criminal, to suffer, to be crucified and to die.

To be crucified? How could the crucified Jesus be God's anointed, that is, Messiah? Peter must have brooded on this and Peter obviously got it wrong. The transfiguration was Peter’s solution of this problem. Surely out of this event they would see that the Cross was not all humiliation, it was somehow tinged with glory.

The Transfiguration taught all three that the Passion of the Messiah did not mean that the glory of the Kingdom would be lost; but that the glory would be not of earth, but of heaven.

As mentioned the incident speaks of Moses and Elijah. Moses was the great liberator who dared to go to Pharaoh and ask for the slaves’ liberty. In the end the people are freed and thus God was thus known as the liberating God. Moses revealed himself as a great “shepherd-like” leader, the servant prepared to die for the people, if only he can get them to the Promised Land which he would never live to see. There was a glory about Moses. In mentioning Moses the writer of the Gospel of Matthew would have been reminded of his transfiguration on Mount Sinai with its six days, a high mountain, apart, the cloud and the voice.

Then there is Elijah who was the first of the great prophets. The prophets read the signs of their own times. The prophet risked his neck for the right to keep that law against dictatorial tyranny.

It is as if the story of the Transfiguration is saying – Moses and Elijah represent the great liberators of old, now Jesus will take up their role, thus the disciples recognise the power of God the Father transforming the humanity of Jesus and drawing together the threads of biblical promise, from the covenant with Moses in the past to the eschatological future represented by Elijah. There on the Mountain the disciples began to glimpse that here in Jesus was the love and glory of God and was the living fulfilment of Moses and Elijah. Their greatness belonged to the old order and was giving place to a fuller and more adequate revelation of God’s character and purpose.

This Transfiguration incident is highly important in the Gospel narrative. It is one of the disclosure events when the relation of Jesus to God is revealed which means that although the Messiah was to be rejected by His own people, He was not rejected by God: He was still the Divine Son upon whom the Father declared Himself to be well pleased. Together with the Confession at Caesarea Philippi, the transfiguration emphasizes that the essence of Jesus' identity and work cannot be understood apart from the cross and resurrection. Only in their light do we ever understand the character of God and the significance of Jesus.

Be willing to go with Jesus up the mountain

So what is the implication of the Transfiguration story for us apart from seeing who Jesus really is? The answer is that at times we - like Peter, James, and John - need to hear again the invitation of Jesus to come with him up to the mountain top, so that we might see his glory and remember that the same God who transfigured him is in the process of transforming us and our world.

God's work of transforming is going on in the world right now, but it's not your place or mine to just make a mental note of it or to hang a plaque on the wall to remember it, as Peter attempted to do with the three booths. It's our place instead to participate in that work by allowing our values and character to be moulded by it. The tragedy is that we too often become impatient with the slow process through which transforming occurs in us and in our world today, and therefore we fail to be part of it.

Yet in our changing world God is still at work in our communities, our schools, our families and our businesses. We see it in the struggle for human rights such as we saw it in the life and work of Martin Luther King who was an indication of God's unfolding plan for the future. For that reason we need to acknowledge the contributions of the dedicated people who consistently place the public good above personal gain, and through whom transformation becomes possible.

Don’t try to erect your own structures …

Peter was not sure how to respond. There on the mountain it was too mysterious and inexplicable. All he could do was to make a feeble suggestion: 'Lord', he says, 'why don't I construct three booths, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah?' The idea of the tabernacles was drawn from the story of Israel’s sojourn in the wilderness where the tabernacle had been the shrine of the Divine glory, and Peter was proposing to build the tabernacles for three such manifestations of God’s presence.

When we experience a high moment we can either live in them or we can live out of them. When we live in them we like Peter will want to erect structures. We hold the image, transfixed by its beauty, try to control it to make the high moment permanent. That was Peter’s talk of tents is all about. On the other hand, when we live out of the high moment – refusing to erect your own structures -we are not enslaved. We can move on to the next moment because of the hope that shone from the first. We erect structures when we say, “this is our tradition”, or “this is what we believe”, or this is who we are”, or “this is the way it has always been done” and then at such times we are danger of locking ourselves into ideas or patterns descended from the shining moment but which now might be outmoded or irrelevant. And so we miss the potential of the future.

More personally we can say, “I’ve been converted”, “I have been baptized”. But these are in the past. They mark like milestones, great moments when the living God confronted us. While they are milestones, we must not allow them to become tombstones as it were. That is, we can let them mark not our way forward, but our end. People who have had a religious experience, who have a religious past must also aspire to be as a fresh spring with waters gushing forth as a fountain. Peter vainly tried to hold on to the moment, to capture it and solidify it, but life is not so. What they had experienced had to be played out. There is a road yet to be travelled, and there is dust to gather, and there is betrayal, and arrest and humiliation. And there is cross and a tomb and there are abandoned grave-clothes.

Just think for the moment of what would have been the outcome if Peter had established three tents. We might still have the shrines of the hill today to pilgrimage to however Jesus, Moses and Elijah would have all moved on and so these shines would remain long-standing memorials to past actions well pst in history.

There is another aspect to building structures is that when a church gets to a certain size it can take on a life of its own, that is, “nothing that it proposes to do will now be impossible for it" – think of the story of Babel – and too bad what God wants. What of this church? Are we seeking the will of the Lord of history in our dealings or are we in fact taking on a life of our own – that is erecting our own structure; God forbid if it be in the later.

This is my beloved Son… listen to him…

The final words “hear him”, take us back to the promise of Moses in Deut 18.15: “The Lord your God will raise up for you a Prophet from the midst of you, from your brethren, like to me; to him you shall listen.” Jesus now bears an authority which will replace that of Moses. The voice from heaven tells them that they must listen: they are to hear from Him his secret sonship; they must walk the road of obedience, though never alone as Jesus was. But the question that confronts us in our day is: How are our lives as Christians affected by this event that happened so many centuries ago? And what does this event mean for the life of the world?

Because we as people of faith have now this morning have inquired into the deeper meaning of the Transfiguration incident we are now well placed to understand what God was trying to say through it, namely that “Jesus is the beloved Son.”

The problem is that it's all too easy for us to make this affirmation, that “Jesus is the beloved Son,” without pausing to ask what its implications are for our actions, which was the problem Peter seemed to have, too, as I have already mentioned.

How much can it be said that Jesus, the Lord of History, stands behind all this church here in Mornington and in Lenah Valley? How much can it be said that the decisions that we make as God's people are the decisions of God himself? It is His church after all.

And what of our own lives? How much can it be said that the big decisions we make as individuals are the decisions of God himself for us for we have listened to Jesus so that what we give our time to have the blessing of the Almighty God. We need to unstop our ears that they may hear the voice which declares, “This is my Son, the Beloved: listen to Him!” May it be so now and may we continue to do so.

Prayer:
God of light,
As we meet even now and glimpse new meaning
in old stories and familiar tales
turn the expected into the unexpected.
Let us see Jesus as your beloved son,
filled with your favour.
Give us grace to listen to him,
to hear his voice
and know it to be true
and Lord be in the process of transforming us