Feast of the Transfiguration, Year C | Luke 9:28-36
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
August 7, 2022
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
To watch the full service, please visit this page.
Transfiguration Sunday marks the end of Epiphany each year, providing us with a glimpse of a transformative Jesus shortly before joining his march to Jerusalem that following Ash Wednesday. However, the formal observance of the Feast of the Transfiguration was actually yesterday, hence our texts this morning. Personally, I find the Transfiguration difficult to preach. It’s such a weird, fantastical story that it’s hard for me to figure out the “why” of it—what truth Luke might have been trying to get across beyond handing down this memory from the Early Church. Attempting to make sense of it millennia after it happened without explicit reasoning or an obvious application, I find the glowing people, anachronistic manifestation of two ancient prophets, and disembodied voice more confusing than insightful.
The context feels kind of random to me as well, with Luke having given us the feeding of the five thousand, Peter’s confession of Jesus as Messiah, and a short discussion about death and discipleship immediately before this account while following it up with the story of the possessed boy that the disciples couldn’t heal. If there is any pattern to the storytelling here, it seems to be something like two brief episodes exploring a miracle and/or Jesus’ popularity among the people followed by either a story of rejection or a discussion of his death—kind of an emotional two-steps-forward/one-step-back thing.
A lot of preachers use the Transfiguration as a jumping off point to talk about “mountain top” religious experiences, and that metaphor certainly works. We all have those times when something the Bible is talking about suddenly makes sense on a gut level or those moments where God feels intensely close. It’s natural to want to maintain that sort of high or clarity. Peter openly expresses the same kind of desire right here, hoping to stay where they are for as long as they can. Of course, those sermons always end with the warning that everyone eventually needs to return to reality, that the specialness of those miraculous moments are simply places to hang our memories and return to as points of confidence while we continue through the drudgery of the far more common valleys of life. Wanting to honor or memorialize a significant person or event isn’t a bad thing. However, when the voice responds to Peter’s suggestion with, “This is my son…listen to him,” it seems like the mountain-top thing isn’t quite what the Evangelist really want us to get from this.
Scholars also make much of this event, particularly in relation to the verse immediately preceding our passage, where Jesus says, “there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God.”[1] They then tells us that the Transfiguration is an immediate fulfillment of that statement as James, John, and Peter experience this physical revelation of Christ’s glory. But I also have questions about that interpretation, despite how engrained it is in Church culture and history. My first reason is that, even though he’s giving us a glimpse of something unusual, Luke never specifies that the apostles are seeing the Kingdom of God anywhere in this passage. He doesn’t even mention it for another thirty-plus verses. What he does give us is a limited vision with a limited audience happening over a relatively brief period of time. If he’s trying to describe God’s Kingdom, then it doesn’t really extend much beyond the physical Jesus himself. While you could definitely play with the theology that suggests, it doesn’t offer a whole lot of hope on a practical, reality-as-it-currently-is level.
Secondly, the “standing here” in Jesus’ statement could also be legitimately translated as “taking a stand there,” in which case the people “who will not taste death” aren’t necessarily the ones listening to him on that particular day in history but those who might be present someday at the coming of the Son of Man “in his glory and the glory of the Father and of the holy angels.”[2] So it might not have anything to do with his contemporary audience. He could be saying that some alive at the time of what we think of as the Second Coming won’t have to experience death. The wording doesn’t demand an either/or stance, but it does introduce enough of a question to make me wonder if it’s the text guiding our understanding and application of what Jesus was saying or if our theology and tradition might be driving the choices we’re making when translating his words instead.
However, none of this leaves me anywhere helpful. I’m still pretty much lost in regard to the point of the Transfiguration. Maybe it’s “just” a theophany, something designed to prop up our understanding of Jesus as God. Maybe it’s some sort of weird temporal distortion. Maybe Luke is trying to tell us that Jesus himself is the Kingdom of God.
Or maybe I’m looking at this way too hard, paying so much attention to the brush strokes and dabs of color that I forget what the entire painting looks like. Pulling back a bit, I settle into the question, what if the Transfiguration isn’t supposed to be a glimpse of God’s Kingdom? What if Luke hasn’t been attempting to show us a miniscule slice of Heaven breaking through to earth? There’s no question that this is a window into Jesus’ glory. And it’s certainly a strong image of Jesus as the hinge point of history and the representative or manifestation of God. But what if we’ve distracted ourselves with all the noise, the lights, and the spectacle? What if, when we imagine we’re looking at Jesus here, we’re actually getting lost in the dreams of glory, honor, and power we long to claim for ourselves?
Pulling back to the really big picture, the overall point of Luke’s Gospel is to get us to follow Jesus’ example. We look at everything happening to and around him, but if the ancient world determined your character, your core identity, based on your actions, then we should be training our attention on how Jesus is acting and responding. And when we look at that, we see surprisingly little. Jesus’ actions in this story all take place in the first one-and-a-half verses: he takes the three disciples, climbs a mountainside with them, and prays. Everything after that point involves the actions of other people: the apostles see; the prophets appear and talk to him; Peter askes about setting up shrines; and finally a cloud envelops and speaks to them. Jesus has done nothing during the course of this event—at least nothing we can emulate.
Maybe that’s why, on Transfiguration Sunday, this passage is paired with the following story of the possessed boy the other apostles couldn’t heal—because that’s when and where we finally see Jesus’ character in relation to this dazzling event, which, from what Luke tells us, he more or less ignores! The three apostles won’t open their mouths for years, and Jesus doesn’t ever appear to have mentioned it to anyone. So despite the experience, the awe and the wonder, the glory heaped upon him, he simply goes on. This amazing event happened, but it doesn’t really seem to alter who Jesus is. He doesn’t try to grasp that moment and carry its splendor with him. He doesn’t become any more authoritative or demanding than he already had been. He just goes back to everyday life, where we find him once again revealing the Kingdom of God not with lighting and thunder and explosive signs but by settling down to heal a child no one else had been able to help. He steps out of the appearance of “glory” and goes straight back to serving others, not to spread his own fame or because the parents and child proved themselves to be particularly deserving but because that’s simply who Jesus is and what he does: Jesus comes down.
He comes down as the bread of heaven to feed us. He comes down as the living water, to sustain us. He comes down as the light of the world, to guide us. He comes down both with and as the presence of God. Because it turns out God isn’t found in the bombast and pageantry and self-aggrandizement that we all expect. God doesn’t demand accolades or expect parades or find their purpose in flattery and fawning. You’ll never find God in those things, no matter how hard you look, because God doesn’t lift themself up for all to wonder at or fear. God comes down. Glory, Power, and Command—all the things we think God would display by right—are more commonly traits of Empire, the antithesis of God’s Kingdom. But God—God is Love, the kind of love that manifests through and within action. Jesus didn’t obsess about or advertise his own significance, and neither does God. God exists in, among, and through us not through Transfiguration—not through grandeur and majesty and renown—but through quiet, common, everyday—and perfectly doable—acts of love.
[1] Luke 9:27b
[2] Luke 9:26c