Last Sunday of Epiphany, Year B, Feb. 19, 2012

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 centerpiece 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 pieces of information in 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 the Son of Man had risen from the dead. So the instruction to the hearers of any and every subsequent era 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 your gut. Listen to him.”

What had Peter and 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 just to get close to Jesus. They had seen him calm a storm and send pigs off of a cliff into the sea. They had seen him send his followers out two by two, without money or 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 had seen him walk 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 Nazareth, “the man they’d tramped many a dusty mile with, whose mother and brothers they knew, the one they’d seen as hungry, tired, and footsore as the rest of them”[1] was suddenly standing alongside of Moses and Elijah in glory, his holiness shining right through his clothing; and Peter and 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 and 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 and 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 which 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) [2] 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; and he did not know what to say or do.[3]

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 once and 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. Our own resident Bible scholar and parishioner, Derek Knox, often reminds me that we use words in scripture that are really not a part of our everyday speech, with the unfortunate effect of distancing scripture from our own experiences. (Although we’re moving closer with our use of the word Trans.) But that was not its original intent. 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 and at the same time, extremely dangerous.

Annie Dillard’s book Teaching a Stone to Talk talks about the dangers of discipleship this way: “On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does any-one 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.”[4]

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 imagined 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 now cite suffering as evidence that God doesn’t (or isn’t Love), or 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 absolute and fierce conviction that God does not exist. But this transfiguration or transformation story 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 can even 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 that we sometimes get to sustain us in the midst of suffering or helplessness. 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, centerpoint of sadness and pain and 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, and with his own extraordinary compassion. (The Greek word for compassion literally means gut-wrenching.) It’s not that Jesus thought suffering is desirable, just that it is inevitable in order to bring about healing and liberation, justice and peace. Listen to him.

Recently I read about a Rabbi of a synagogue who is known for responding whenever a congregant shares bad news, “how do you know that’s not going to turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to you?” (Somehow his congregation tolerates this because they know that when a congregant shares a piece of good news he will ask, “how do you know that it won’t turn out to be the worst thing that could happen to you?”) 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, reminded with the ritual of ashes on Wednesday of our own mortality. Think about that as we sing our last Epiphany alleluias. 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.” 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?