Last Sunday after the Epiphany, B, February 14, 2021, The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz.
Mark 9:2-10. He did not know what to say for they were terrified.
O God of Revelation, grant us the wisdom, the strength and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.
We have come to the end of the season of Epiphany, the season of celebrating sacred gifts and divine disclosures. In our Hebrew Bible lesson this morning we have the wonderful story from 2 Kings about how Elisha got the power and the authority to carry on Elijah’s work after Elijah was gone, after he was “taken up.” Elisha had been travelling with and learning from Elijah for many years. He had burned his farming equipment and slaughtered his oxen, thus destroying his means of income, his livelihood; he had left his home so that he could travel with the prophet Elijah (much more dramatic than leaving the boats and nets with Zebedee and his hired hands to follow Jesus).
When Elijah asked Elisha what he could do for him before he was taken away, Elisha asked for a double portion of Elijah’s spirit. According to biblical scholars, this is an allusion to the inheritance designated by law to go to the first born; the double portion actually means 2/3 of an estate. But in this case, Elisha is not Elijah’s son, and it’s not property that Elijah had or that Elisha wanted. It was Elijah’s spirit that Elisha was hoping to inherit. Elijah’s response was, “Oh, that’s a hard thing that you’re asking for.” Elijah knew that giving Elisha twice his spirit was going to mean Elisha’s life would be doubly challenging. Elisha did go on to perform twice as many wonderous deeds as his predecessor, and he is revered by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. The other day at a gathering of clergy, Bishop Harris asked us to reflect on this story and answer the question for ourselves, what spiritual gift would we ask for in double measure from a most-beloved mentor and friend or spiritual forebears so that we can carry on with whatever God is calling us to do? And I ask you to answer that question, too – as individuals and as a parish on this Annual Meeting Day, on this last Sunday of the Epiphany season.
You might remember that our Epiphany season began with the Gospel of Mark’s story of the baptism of Jesus, in which Jesus alone hears the voice of the Divine saying, “You are my son, the beloved. With you I am well pleased.” Our Epiphany season ends today with the Gospel of Mark’s story of the transfiguration of Jesus, in which Peter, James and John hear the voice of the Divine saying about Jesus, “This is my son, the beloved. Listen to him.” This second Godly admonition is, in fact, the exact center of the Gospel of Mark, and that is no coincidence. Mark, like other ancient writers, employed the literary device of chiasmus (or chiastic structure) to emphasize and highlight particular parts of the narrative, the most important being the innermost or center point; this scene is it. Oddly, though, Jesus doesn’t speak in this story; so one might ask the Divine voice, listen to what?
What did Jesus say just before this? Listen to him. He said, “Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the realm of God has come in power.” What does Jesus say just after this? Listen to him. He ordered Peter, James, and John to tell no one about what they had seen until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead. That’s a detail that should make us smile, because the Gospel of Mark was being written more than a full generation after that Son of Man had risen from the dead. So the instruction to the hearers of subsequent eras actually means, tell everyone. But surely the Holy One is not limiting the admonition to listen to what Jesus had said six days before, or what Jesus said on the way back down the mountain. No: what the voice of God is saying is, “Listen to Jesus. Listen to his actions. Listen to his healing. Listen to what you have seen. Listen to his life. Listen to your gut. Listen to his life in you. Listen to him.”
What had Peter, James, and John seen? They had seen people astonished at Jesus’ teaching in the synagogues and in the countryside. They had seen him healing people who were sick with various diseases and conditions and had seen him casting out many demons. They had seen Jesus dining with tax collectors and other sinners; they had seen crushing crowds of folks, who’d come from every direction searching for Jesus, trying to get close to him. They had seen him calm a storm and send pigs off a cliff into the sea. They had seen him send his followers out two by two, without money, food, or even a change of clothes, to spread the message of repentance and to try their own hands at healing people and exorcising demons. They had seen him feed thousands with a little bit of food. They believed he walked on water.
They thought they’d seen everything, but no; listen to him. Here is as strange a scene as there is anywhere in the Gospels: Jesus, the rabbi from little old Nazareth, suddenly standing alongside of Moses and Elijah in glory, his holiness shining right through his clothing; and Peter, James, and John were terrified. Peter often gets made fun of for his proposal to make three dwellings, as if he is happy about being there, wants to stay, and just doesn’t get it. I’m not sure about that. It’s possible to translate Peter’s initial response to seeing Elijah and Moses with Jesus as a question: “Is it good for us to be here?” (In other words, this is really scary, and maybe James, John, and I should get going.) “Or, if we’re going to stay, maybe you should meet apart from us, so we are shielded from the terrifying radiance. It’s not safe for the glory of God to be out in the open.” The word that gets translated dwelling, is literally a pitched tent. It’s interesting to me that the Gospel of John doesn’t contain the transfiguration story that appears in Mark, Matthew and Luke, but John’s prologue says, “And the word became flesh and pitched a tent among us.” It’s the same word, which in the Hebrew Bible (LXX) is used for the tent of meeting, where Moses regularly conversed with the Holy One, out of sight of the people, in order to protect the people, after which Moses had to veil his face because it was too shiny for anyone to look at. That’s clearly what’s going on here, and Peter could not bear it; he did not know what to say or do.
Frederick Buechner writes this about the transfiguration:
Even with us something like that happens once in a while. The face of a man walking his child in the park, of a woman picking peas in the garden, of sometimes even the unlikeliest person listening to a concert, say, or standing barefoot in the sand watching the waves roll in…every so often something so touching, so incandescent, so alive, transfigures the human face that it’s almost beyond bearing.
Transfiguration is kind of an odd word; the Greek word is metamorphosis; perhaps transformation would be a little better. It’s worth remembering, even if we don’t study Greek, that the writer of the Gospel of Mark was using regular and accessible language to tell the story about the Divine made manifest in the regular and accessible person of Jesus. Regular and accessible but at the same time, extremely dangerous.
I often think of Annie Dillard’s book Teaching a Stone to Talk, in which she talks about the dangers of Christian discipleship. Here’s the passage: [4]
On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.
And that is what’s going on here in Mark, which is why I think the more the disciples did listen to Jesus, the more confused and more afraid they got. Just as soon as Jesus’ friends started to imagine that he was the savior, the Messiah, the Christ of God, he began to teach them about suffering, preparing them not just for his suffering but for their own if they were going to follow him. You know, people in Mark’s time and people now cite suffering as evidence that God doesn’t (or isn’t) Love, that God is vengeful and punishing, or that God simply doesn’t exist. Some wonder why God would permit suffering, if God is so powerful. A month doesn’t go by without someone who is suffering deeply asking me why God is letting suffering happen, or where God is if God exists, or telling me of their fierce conviction that God does not exist. This
transfiguration/transformation story, however, is telling us that the most profound truths cannot be proven; they can only be revealed in mystical ways.
Mark’s Gospel story is that God is With Us (Emmanuel), right in the suffering. Indeed, listening deeply and responding to God will mean more suffering according to Mark. And this story of the transfiguration/transformation, in the middle of the material about how to prepare for suffering and how to live with and through suffering, is a story about the glimpses, the flashes, of Easter, which we sometimes get to sustain us in the midst of suffering. The suffering that Mark is most focused on is the suffering that we experience on behalf of others as we work to alleviate the suffering of others.
I think that’s what this story of the transfiguration/transformation is doing here in the middle of a Gospel focused on suffering. It’s a story Mark tells to reveal something of the greatness of God in Jesus Christ in the innermost, center point of sadness, pain, loss, and grief. It’s a story to help us remember the stories of those moments in our own lives, where in the midst of a mess of suffering we’ve gotten a glimpse of the power of transformation, of redemption, of pure grace, of Love, of God.
According to Mark, Jesus’ power, what made him the Messiah, was revealed in his response to suffering. Listen to him; he did not back away. Jesus responded to suffering (his own and others’) with the covenantal connectedness of Moses, with the prophetic clarity of Elijah, the eagerness of Elisha, and with his own extraordinary compassion. (The Greek word for compassion is literally gut-wrenching.) It’s not that Jesus thought suffering is desirable, just that it is inevitable in order to bring about healing, liberation, justice, and peace. Listen to him.
We never do know how and when our own suffering on behalf of another might be redeemed through the surprising grace of God. Think about that as we prepare to move into the season of Lent. For what double measure of spirit shall we pray? How might we listen better to Jesus and to our own lives? How might we listen more deeply for the covenantal connectedness, the prophetic clarity, and the extraordinary compassion shining on that holy mountain? Think about that as we sing our last Epiphany alleluias before Ash Wednesday. It reminds me of my favorite prayer in the burial service: “All of us go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia!”